Making Money Blogging – Blog Stew

Finally made it, its taken 2 months but I’ve finally hit the magic $100 on Adsense!

Ok so lets look at how I actually managed it.

Sites displaying Adsense:

• 2 blogs, this one and another on a popular mmorpg pc game.
• 2 content driven sites.
• 21 web proxies.

The main bulk of the income has come directly from Adsense which is displayed on the main page of the proxies.  The very nature of proxy advertising is to get burst traffic, generally over time the revenue generated from proxies tends to drop, that’s why setting up new fresh proxies as often as possible is the way forward.

My current Adsense total = $102.12 that’s as of 2nd March 2009 (date of this post)

My goal was to try and break the magical $100 mark in February, but I think I can let myself off for missing the mark by 2 days!

The question is, what to do now?  Well more of the same really.  I’ll be looking into updating my content sites along with adding more.  Creating more web proxies and focusing on services I can provide.

My latest project is www.corelogo.com which has taken off really well.  I’m happy with the design of the site and I’ve just started to advertise the services CoreLogo offers around webmaster forums.  Its nice to have something different to do, its all very well staring at text for hours on end but that can soon become a drain and off putting to some extent.  There’s nothing better than whipping out Illustrator and Photoshop to get the old creative juices flowing!

The winners for the Net Builders Best Post Contest have just been announced, I’m pleased to report my article entitled Kritical Keywords – Think Outside the Box came in at first place!  Below you can read the article in full.

Kritical Keywords – Think Outside the Box

See what I did there with the title?! K for Keywords, C/K = Krit…yeah you get it!

I’ve spent the last few days producing content for a number of my newer sites.  Its been pretty fun to my surprise.  The sites involve topics that I have interest  in.  This has helped to no end with content production.  One of my newer sites revolves around the Apple iPhone.  Owning one myself for the last 4 months I’m finding it very easy and enjoyable to produce the original content required.  This only further cements the fact that starting sites in niches you have interest in make the whole process faster, more productive and easier overall.

Then I moved on to the mind numbing task of adding a few sites into and endless list of web directories.  I know the value of these links is fairly low in 90% of cases (I’m talking free directories here) but its still worth spending time I would other wise be wasting, adding to them.  After a while it does become quite relaxing!

Anyway, back to the submission…

Joining webmaster forums has been the most significant thing I’ve done to date.  The sheer amount of information that is all of a sudden available to me is astonishing.  My understanding of how to run websites has exponentially increased over the last few days.

Before joining these webmaster community forums my knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization) was limited at best.  I understood that quality back links were key and that having a few quality links had a much greater impact on SERPS (search engine results pages) than having many low quality links.  Quality > Quantity.

Read more…

Quick note,

Added more sites to the link building page, enjoy people!

I spent most of the last 2 days attempting to come up with a good amount of new site ideas which I can work on in the coming week.  The idea is to look for sites that you can easily set-up with good quality content, which require the least amount of time to update and maintain.

Making money online is not complicated.  It just takes time to get a site established and earning money with whatever advertiser you decide to use.  First of all you need to decide what your new site is going to do.  You can’t just throw up new domains, plaster Adsense on them and expect them to earn.  It won’t happen, never.

OK, back to what I’m trying to do with the latest round of site idea’s I have.  I want the sites to make money that’s basically it.  However I’ll also provide a service to anyone who comes across the sites.  Basic services here, such as information which is readily available on the net just repackaged.  The game is to try and rank on the first page of Googles results for as many relevant keywords as possible then simply rinse and repeat.

Below I’ll outline the process I go through with most ideas I come up with.

Hit Read More!

Read more…

Google Adsense

Google Adsense can be daunting for people new to the advertising format.  This post will outline what Google says for first time Adsense users.  I’ll also give some opinions on what they say.  Again please understand this is aimed at people newish to Adsense, that’s not to say it might contain some things people who are more familiar with the format can take away and learn from.

So lets get stuck in, I’ll list the guidelines in bullet points then break them down.

Basic Adsense user guidelines

• Use text and image ads.

Text ads have more ads per ad block.  So you might lean towards thinking ‘there’s more ads so more chance of people clicking on them right?’  This is not entirely the case.  People find images a lot easier to look at, also they may be animated giving the eye more incentive to look in there direction.

• Use wider ad units.

Bigger ads.  The bigger they are the more chance people have of seeing them.  But remember not to go overboard, people are still going to visit your site looking for quality content, not an ad fest.

• Use channels to monitor ad performance.

Make sure you use these, its easy for first time or new users to ignore this.  They will allow you to monitor the exact amount of turnover each add is producing.  Naturally from that data you can then begin to fiddle with your ad design and placement.

• Ensure your site is Google policy compliant.

If its not then expect to get banned!  Or thrown so deep into the google black hole (sandbox) you’ll never come back!

• Good quality site content.

This is what will make people keep coming back!  As I’ve said before, sites that I’m interested in writing for tend to do better performance wise.

• Original content.

Copy and pasting jobs can be good for some sites, however its generally better to produce your own stuff, then with some luck you will get well known for it!

Keep reading on after the split….

Read more…

My little red notebook is full of information relating to generating search traffic.  It mainly relates to Google they are the big daddy after all so it makes sense to work to their guidelines!  I want to speak about how Google says you can increase traffic to your new sites.  Most of this will be common sense, but still this will I hope make a good basic reference guide.

Web Master Guidelines

• Pages are listed in Google as a direct result of their relevance and importance.
• Search result rank is based on links – Quality links are better than quantity!
• Produce unique quality relevant original content to increase rank.
• Violations in web master conduct will result in page ranks dropping (note I’m speaking about the SERP here – Search Engine Results Page).
• Think like your users would when they view the site, then adapt your site as needed – This is also a good point to get another person to go over your sites and give their opinions.
• Make sure all outgoing links still work – Ensure your not linking to any dead pages!
• Use Google web master central – Its free after all, and we damn like free!!
• Register sites on Google web master tools – Goes without saying.
• Submit .XML Sitemaps to Google.
• Report spam sites or other sites ripping your content off to Google, again using the web master tools they provide.
• Use web master help groups.
• Google Analytics provides accurate stats for your sites.
• Use Google alerts to monitor when people start speaking about your site! – You can set this up to look for other things, but I find it rather interesting to see some random music DJ site is talking about BlogStew!

As you can see Google provides many tools that can make your life as a web master a whole lot easier.  I use all of these tools myself, its simply stupid not to.  If you follow these basic guidelines you should be able to produce websites which will make some money from AdSense.

Going from my personal experiences, sites which I’m actually interested in producing content for make more AdSense/advertising money.  I currently have 3 sites running (soon to be 4 tomorrow) which I actively produce content for, in the past I tried to set-up sites with the single intention of making money from AdSense among other advertisers…it hardly worked and sites would soon drop off into the depths of the net.  Also it helps to enjoy what you do, simply producing brain dead content to try and improve page ranks is hardly fun!

Life’s for living so try to enjoy as much of it as possible!

Well there you have it.  I’ve just spent the best part of 8 hours adding three sites to various blog directories.  It was brain numbing, but had to be done.  This is all part of the greater link building initiative for my network.  I can only hope that 90%+ of my submissions get authorised and my blogs/sites start falling into their databases.

The added exposure these sites should bring me will prove more and more invaluable as time moves on.  You can see under the ‘Badge’ section of the site (left hand site widget bar) a number of new badges have cropped up.  There would be a lot more if more databases offered badges as a retroactive link back to them.  I really can’t understand why they don’t bother.  More links for them = higher SEPR’s so it seems silly to miss out on the links!

If your interested in adding your sites to blog databases then use this link as a resource, its a very good compilation of most ‘good’ blog directories.

Blog Directories

Tomorrow I’ll be looking at adding what sites I have to web directories along with making my own links from free to host website services.  Think free Wordpress blogs and such!