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.

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...