As I mentioned before I had my short break away I have now been blogging for a full year. I have also reached a few conclusions about making money with free blogs.
Firstly, there is a lot of garbage written by some so called experts. They tell you, for instance, that it's necessary to have a proper domain name, a well designed website and that you have to spend money to succeed. They also spout lots of other rules about SEO, keywords and so on.
Okay some of these extras may be able to help you along the way but the reality is that you don't need all this - unless you particularly want to go down that route.
Like all 'experts' they like to mystify the subject they write about. It makes them sound all the more important when they use special abbreviations and dress up what they say in fancy words.
The truth about making money with blogging is in fact quite simple.
First it's about what you write. It doesn't have to be extra well written, it's just got to be either useful or entertaining. If you are lucky enough to be able to do both so much the better.
I was reading about Alice Cooper recently and, no, I'm not a fan! I am interested though in anyone who has been successful in any field. Anyway, Alice said that when he started out he was up against the likes of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Motown and so on. So he rehearsed. Nine-tenths of his time was devoted to songs and only one-tenth to his image.
In Cooper's words, "If you don't have good songs you're no more than a puppet show."
If you are talking about blogs you can substitute the word 'songs' for 'content'.
The right content solves nearly all of the problems that experts tell us that we'll have to overcome to make money with blogs. It really is that simple.
The other simple truth is: the more traffic you have the more money you'll make.
Yes, blogging is generally a numbers game. There are exceptions but I'll cover this another time.
When I was involved with network marketing I remember that when I joined Herbalife they told me: Talk to some people and you'll make some money, talk to lots of people and you'll make lots of money. I chose to make lots of money!
Dress things up however you want but making money is in relationship to the number of people you communicate with. With blogging these people are your traffic or hits.
The first two truths about making money blogging are therefore.
(1) You need useful or entertaining content and
(2) You need as much traffic as you can get.
11-Aug-2008Make Money With Lots Of Free BlogsFollowing my previous post I was asked: Isn't it better just to concentrate on one or two money making blogs than setting up lots of them? And how have you got the time to keep them all updated if you have lots?
I do concentrate mainly on a couple of blogs, for the biggest part of my blogging income, but I like to set up new blogs for fun, experiments and to make additional money. I must have well over thirty floating about in different places on the blogosphere.
If I can go back to yesterday's post and the example I gave of the new Helen Flanagan blog. What I will actually do, with this blog, is to try and keep it reasonably updated for about a month. I've so far done 28 posts in 22 days.
After a month, if everything has been done properly (keywords, images, titles etc), it should tick over virtually by itself. It will then only be necessary to do the occasional new post when there is some actual news about Helen - perhaps once a week or fortnight.
Now if you have several such blogs all ticking over, just being updated now and then, it's not a lot of work after the initial thrust of setting up the blog.
You wind them up and then let them go!
Some will perform better than others. Here's a couple of stat charts, for the last couple of weeks, showing the number of hits I've had on a couple of such blogs where I've followed this procedure.
Sometimes the blogs don't do this well. I've some that only get 10 or 20 hits a day. But, there again, some have done better.
If you have been reading Mike's Money Making Blog for a while you'll know that I believe, quite simply, that traffic = money.
And by this I mean any sort of traffic. I don't believe there is any bad traffic, just that some is better than others. Look at the major stores in town. What do most of them do? They run promotions to get people through their doors.
It's the same with blogging.
Going back to having lots of blogs. It's an accumulation thing: the total number of hits on all of the blogs combined. This is what makes money, providing they have been monetised properly.
You can work out the stats yourself. How many hits could you achieve with a number of blogs? Ask yourself if you think that the total traffic on these would outperform one blog. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but I know what works for me.
Good luck,
Mike.
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posted by Mike Perry at 12:47 PM 1 comments
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09-Aug-2008How To Get Search Engine Referrals With A New BlogI was asked: How long does it take before you are likely to get search engine referrals from Google on a new blog?
Answer: 5 days.
Well that's my experience when starting up a new blog.
However it all depends on several factors but these are what I consider to be the seven essential parts of my formula when starting a new money making blog:
(1) Subject matter (niche) of blog
As I keep saying you've got to give people what they want. If it's popular the subject will be searched for but if it's obscure it won't be. Follow the trends, things, subjects that are on the way up and don't plump for an already overcrowded market.
As an example, purely because I thought she could become popular and there weren't too many blogs already, I started a new blog on Helen Flanagan. She's a UK soap star that has just started to get noticed.
Just to clarify the blog was created purely to make money. I don't even watch the soap, Coronation Street, in which she plays the part of Rosie Webster.
I started the blog on the 19th of July and the first Google referrals were on the 23rd of July.
(2) Use of keywords
In the case of my example I used her name as keywords - obviously - and made sure this was in the title of each post and also in the first sentence.
I also used long tail keywords which I got from a Keywords suggestion Tool - see yesterday's post as an example.
(3) Use of images
As the niche was about a person this was quite easy. I made sure that the 'alt' description was always completed and included chosen keywords within this. It takes longer to get image referrals but, by including them within a post, it is building for future weeks.
(4) You must have inbound links
As I understand it, to get picked up by Google the blog has to have some inbound links. If you have more than one blog this is, of course, easy.
(5) Use Tags
Tags, or labels as Blogger calls them, are essential now when writing a post, some of which should be your chosen keywords.
(6) Write as many posts as possible in the first few days
Again this is something I've mentioned previously but the more you write the more keywords you'll have floating about.
If you have a lot of subject matter perhaps you can break this up into smaller segments (posts) instead of one whopper.
(7) Ping
I always ping every new post though some are done automatically, see Technorati for example. Also sites such as Ping-o-matic will ping several services on your behalf.
You can also add your URL to Google but I don't bother with this. I also don't use the websites that say they will submit your blogs etc to lots of search engines. I've tried these and frankly they are a waste of effort.
If you do the essentials blogs will get picked up by the search engines but Google is quickest off the mark. The Helen Flanagan blog has been up and running for 21 days and to date I've had 783 search engine referrals from Google plus 34 from Yahoo, 16 from AOL, 4 from AltaVista and 1 from Dogpile.
I'm sure that SEO experts may disagree with some of my 'seven essentials' but what I try to do, with Mike's Money Making Mission, is to write about what I've personally experienced and not theories.
I could have done better, with my newest blog, but my target was to get 1,500 hits in the first month. I've just checked and see I'm up to 1466 (2834 with reloads) in 21+ days so that's okay as far as I'm concerned
