The Hard Work of Blogging

I've been having trouble with Blogger lately. For some reason I can’t view any blogs hosted by Blogspot, including my own. I don't know if anyone else is having the same problem, but it has been frustrating to say the least. I am not even sure that this entry will work.

I've been spending some time reading about blogging and other online business models. I'm still trying to figure out the best direction for me to take things. The blogging world is huge, but finding that niche that is just right for me is not easy. In truth it has been a bit discouraging.

But I am at the front end of this. I can't and don't expect it to happen without hard work. I am mostly frustrated with my own lack of direction and not being able to nail down the right blog and or internet business for me. I feel like I've missed the boat since I am getting into this late.

I am going to keep on working at it though and have learned a lot about SEO and how to monetize a website. I am not a computer novice, but I have very limited programming and website development skills. I plan to try to teach myself some of this and have already read some really good stuff online that has helped.

A bright spot for me has been the traffic increase I've received...granted I've gone from 0-2 views a day to 2-4. That's great percentage increase, though I'd like to have the #'s in the thousands, but I must admit to myself that my content isn't worthy of a thousand readers yet. Content is king.

How much I've made with AdSense

As of today I have made $6.32! I've had 557 page impressions on 3 blogs. That's since April 29th. I have done a few things to help promote my blogs. One of the quickest was to sign up with some blogging communities like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. I saw an immediate increase in traffic right after signing up with them. If you are tired of writing a blog and having no readers then I strongly suggest you start out by signing up with some communities. But I didn't stop there. I have visited the communities and visited several sites. I also left messages on blogs that I like and have a similar focus as mine. I also submitted my blogs to search engines using Web CEO's free software tools and as a result have begun making seeing an increase in my traffic. Now I hope to transfer that traffic into AdSense revenue or into affiliate sales.

But the most important thing is to provide good content. I'm finding that to be the most challenging part. It seems overwhelming at times. I've started thinking about a new blog that might be the One for me. I'll probably develop the others some more and keep them going, but the One might just be the ticket. We'll see. I'm still in the brainstorming phase on this new blog, but I will probably be ready to act on it soon.

I’ve also spent some time reading up on the blogging expert blogs to find ways I can improve my blogging experience. I have much to think on and implement. More on this in other posts!

Optimizing and Analyzing SEO with Web CEO

I just found and used a FREE program called Web CEO to submit my blogs to the search engines. I submitted them to 98 English speaking search engines! It only took a couple minutes once I had all the information inserted.

Web CEO is a unique Web Survival Kit. It is an easy and cost-effective software solution for search engine marketing, Web traffic analysis, Web site management, and maintenance. They market themselves as a tool that was developed for common people who want to enjoy uncommon results and expect more from their Web sites. So far I have been very pleased with the results.

Has anyone else used Web CEO? If so, what did you think?

BTW, this is NOT a paid review...It's just one happy customer providing good PR.

Blog Logs, ClickBank, and other things.

I received my first blog comment ever! It came as a result of a comment I left on a blog I liked about chocolate. The comment came on my Cocoa-Nut Blog. It was a good achievement for me.

The past couple days I've spent some time scouring the internet trying to find new ideas and to see what I can learn about starting a Blogging business. I've paid particular attention to how I can get my blog read. I noticed on several blogs some community membership in places like My Blog Log and Blog Catalog. I joined these two and immediately received emails and had people sign up to join my neighborhood or community! Not bad. I hope this will get bigger and will help promote my blog even more so that it will appear high up in search engine results.

I look at PRweb and some other sites and am in the process of joining these to help promote my blogs. I also looked at ClickBank and sign up for an account. I'm still not 100% sure how this works, but some of their products seem appropriate for some of my blogs.

If a reader has any tips to share, I am a humble guy and more than willing to listen to your advice! I'd be more than happy to trade links. I'm trying to read and educate myself as much as possible. I'm learning a lot. One thing that I'm learning about myself is that I am easily distracted. I heavily utilize tabbed browsing, so if a site takes to long to load, I'm off to look at another one. As a result I have a lot of ideas and processes going. It can be a bit confusing at times and Explorer has crashed a few times as a result as well, which is not cool at all since I lose the sites I was working on and then need to go through my history to find them again.

Keywords and Analytics

Today I took a first step to getting my blogs on the internet radar. I set up each of the domains that I purchased to forward traffic to each corresponding blog. I also added keywords and phrases to that domain name. This is important because this is one of the things search engines look for in their search. One thing I did that I hope will help is I included common misspellings of the keywords. I also add some phrases like 'what is a blog.' My hope is that when some one types 'affilliate marketing' in a search engine, my site will rank higher because my keywords include the misspelling.

I also sign up each of my blogs with Analyitics by Google. Analytics appears to be a very promising online application that will help me track my web traffic which will help me answer some significant marketing and demographics questions which will help me know my audience better thereby helping me server better content for that audience. I'll see how it works and let you know.

Securing more Blogs and learning about calling cards and Bidvertising

I spent part of the day yesterday securing two new blog names and learning about the calling card business.

But I spent most of that time learning about Bidvertiser. Bidvertiser is a Pay Per Click (PPC) competitor of Google's AdSense. I liked what I saw and found the customization features easier to use. I especially like that they provide a color palette while customizing your ad. With AdSense I had to type in all kinds of combinations of the color code (letters a-f and # 0-9). It was not user friendly. But Bidvertiser makes use of a pop up palette that makes finding the perfect color simple.

If you would like to make some money from your blog or website an easy way to begin is with a Pay Per Click advertising service like Bidvertiser. Once you are signed up and have the code in place, Bidvertiser will place relevant advertising on your site. If someone clicks on one of the advertisements, you make money! There are some people out there using Pay Per Click ads to make thousands of dollars every month, or even ever day!

In other news, I have made $5.86 with AdSense to date! I really need to work on getting my sites seen...

AdBrite and My New Calling Card Blog

I might be getting carried away, but I had an idea for a new blog and checked the address I wanted and it was available, so I started a new blog! This will be my 3rd. Technically I started a couple others but they are shadows of the main ones I started. I am focusing my efforts on these three at the moment. Who knows, maybe I'll start a fourth a few days. I already have an idea. It only took me a couple hours to get everything the way I want it on the new blog. Now that I have practice, I can set up a new blog pretty quickly.

The new blog is about calling cards. I got the idea by clicking an AdSense ad I saw on another site. Now I need to think about content for this new blog, as well as affiliates. I plan to run this blog a little differently than the others. We'll see how it works out.

Here is a banner ad from Cloncom, the site that got me interested in starting a calling card blog. Click the ad and buy a calling card! I'll receive a small commission.



Or if you are a publisher you can join their affiliate program as well by clicking this banner:



I also tried to get AdBrite again. They must not want my business! I was finally able to set up an account, but they have a pretty long process that is supposed to help match a publisher with the advertisers that are the best fit for their site. But after getting most of the way through THREE times their server had an error processing my info and I had to start all over again! After the 3rd time I gave up in frustration. I have better things to do with my time. Maybe in the future I'll try again...or maybe I'll discover another service that is easier to use.

Now I really need to focus some efforts on SEO and try to get my sites seen! More on my progress with this later.

Oh yeah, I checked my AdSense balance and it went down! Apparently the more hits on my site that I have that do not generate an AdSense click lower my percentage ratio. So as I have been refreshing my blogs after each adjustment I have hurt my ratio which caused my earnings to fall from $2.91 to $2.76. So I am going to be more careful in my refreshing. I anticipate this being a non issue once I have an audience, and once I have tweaked my blogs enough. Maybe I’m wrong on this…if a reader happens to stumble upon this post who understands AdSense better than I do would like to explain this further or correct me, please do so!

The Search for Content

Yesterday I spent a good bit of time searching the web and looking for content, both for this blog and my chocolate blog. I found some very interesting blogs on internet business that I subscribed to. I hope that further reading of these blogs will help educate me on the techniques of successful and profitable blogging.

I actually struggled a little with discouragement as I saw how many other sites are out there and how far ahead of me they are. It seems like I have a long way to go.

I found a competitor to Google AdSense called AdBrite. I tried to sign up, but every time I finished the application form and clicked submit, the server would time out. Frustrating! I'll go back and try it again...maybe today.

I'm still looking for some affiliate programs that would fit with this blog about my blogging business. I haven't given it much effort yet, but maybe I'll find something today. I also plan to read up on search engine optimization and attempt to get my blogs in the coveted top 10.

I decided to write my own review of a chocolate from Japan that I bought in Thailand. I currently live in Thailand but am moving back to the States in a couple months. I have loved it here, but one of the major draw backs for me is the lack of good chocolate!

I've noticed that there are a lot of get rich quick schemes out there on the internet. If you buy the guru's special report for $39.99 and follow his perfected system you will instantly with little effort become an internet millionaire. I see these sites and immediately my scam radar begins to beep furious warnings. I have better things to spend my money on...and I figure I can probably find all the information I need for free on the internet if I just take the effort to dig. There is no such thing as easy money. All rewards come from hard and wise work.

Adding AdSense

I just got finished doing some AdSense work on the blog. Instead of using Blogger's design help in the template elements I decided to go with code design at the AdSense site. This seemed to work better.

I am now running into a problem of saving and sorting all the scripts and passwords I'm accumulating. Right now I have a few encrypted Word files where I save all of my passwords, affiliate info and now HTML scripts. I can see this getting out of hand soon, so I think I may
put them in Excel and attempt to group and sort them. Does anyone have any suggestions?

My 1st Week Blogging

I have been blogging now for 6 days. I've learned a lot about the blogging world. Mostly what I've learned is how much I don't know.

I decided to blog on something I love and would love to learn more about. Chocolate. My goal is to provide content that my readers will enjoy and that will allow me to capitalize on my affiliate programs. I started out by coming up with a nice name (thanks to the wife for that) that was available. BTW - isn't it frustrating how so many names are taken and then not used. If people are going to take a good blogging name, they should use or free it up for others...unless they can sell it. Is that possible? hmmmm.... I also decided to buy the domain name of my site since it was available...I went to GoDaddy.com for this. I'm currently pointing all traffic to that domain to my chocolate blog, but maybe if things work out, I'll expand the blog into something more than a simple blog.

Anyway, once I had my name secured I began looking for content. My first post was about great chocolate recipe a friend gave me that I perfected. But after that, I perused the www for ideas. I'm not sure if the best approach should be writing all original content or a combo of original and garnered.

While looking for content, I found and signed up for affiliate programs. This process took a lot more time than I imagined. I am still waiting to hear back from some of the sites I contacted, but I have signed up with and been approved by about 10 companies.

Once I posted my first couple entries, I began playing with the layout and experimenting with the affiliate banners and buttons. I also signed up for AdSense. This was an easy decision.

One site that has surprised me is Amazon. They now sell much more than books! I like their products and banners. I'm focusing on their books first as well as a couple chocolate making products. For the chocolate, I'm going to the providers.

So far I have made $2.91 from my AdSense and nothing from my affiliates. The $2.91 no doubt came from my family as I shared with them what I was doing. I need to get visitors. I signed up with Google Analytics to help research my traffic, but have had virtually no traffic. So now I am exploring ways to get on the radar.

One thing I did last night that I hope will help get me on the radar is visit all the chocolate blogs I could and leave a comment. Then I posted a link to the best ones on my blog. We'll see if this helps any. I also went to a site, I can't remember which now, that registered my domain with the search engines. It was free so I figured it couldn't hurt.

Now I am toying with the idea of trying to start a new blog a week. I'm not sure if that is even possible...maybe until I get about 10 blogs going. Hopefully one or two will do well. I am changing careers and while I'm in between figure I might as well try some blogging!