Making Money Blogging – Blog Stew

There are many way to make money online.  Sure you can make money from Adsense and other ad networks, but what about selling services you can provide?  Take a hard look in the mirror and decide what you can and can’t do.  The beauty of selling your talents online is you past work acts as the qualifications.  You don’t need fancy degrees in this or that, you just need to know how to complete the work.

The hardest part can be forming a back catalogue of work, known as a portfolio.  If your just starting out then you have nothing to show, so people are less inclined to take you on.  You can either try and push through this phase or produce work for yourself to primarily act as portfolio content.  Once you have a developed portfolio of work you will need somewhere to show it all off.  This would be a good time to find a catchy domain name and develop a site to suit your services needs.

There are many components to making money online, simply putting all your effort into one sector can become boring and maybe not be as profitable as diversifying.

Finding work can also be tricky to begin with.  The best option would be to post on active webmaster forums announcing your services, showing your portfolio off.  You could then move on to job forums, people ask for specific jobs to be completed.  You tender for the job, giving a quote and hopefully given your good portfolio you get taken on by the client.  When I first started to look into offering services that I can provide myself, I was astonished at the sheer amount of money being thrown at things I could do!  It seemed silly to me to ignore this possible stream of income.

So my message is this, sell yourself online.  If you can design logos, code websites etc then look into the market and find a gap for you to fit in.  People want jobs doing all the time, and people pay.  They pay for knowledge and time, that’s ultimately what you are selling.  You’re selling yourself.

I want to move into graphic design, offering my services for logo and banner design.  I have no qualifications in design, no certificates to show I can use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, yet I have years of experience with both.  So I need to depend upon a solid portfolio of work.  From reading various forums I came across a quote similar to this:

Self taught people have confidence, they had no teacher to help them out during the hard times.

I know people that run small the medium size businesses here in the UK.  They have no degrees in business or anything like that.  They have the drive and focus to succeed.  Confidence is key in this world; you have to be confident in what you can do.  Then you need to get out there and do it!

Quick note,

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

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!