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If you're looking for specific advice, here's some quick links to help:
nichepursuits.com extramoneyblog.com smartpassiveincome.com entrepreneurs-journey.com problogger.net moz.com/blog entrepreneurboost.com paidtoexist.com chrisguillebeau.com On to the beginner's guide... Everybody and their grandmother's cat has a blog, why should I bother? Despite the explosive popularity of blogging, most people are not making a living from it (or anything at all). This is because most people don't know the first thing about keyword research, search engine optimization, or even how to monetize a blog. With a little education, effort, and focus, you (yes you!) can still make money from blogging (or "niche websites"). The key is to find a profitable niche and dominate it. More on that later. There are many reasons I love blogging; here's just a few:
How to Make  Blogging:
So how do I pick the right keywords?  Picking your blog keyword(s) is probably the most important step of the process. Pick something with too much competition (like "video games") or too few searches and you're pretty much doomed from the start. First, think of something you might be interested in writing about. Then research related keywords to see if other people are actually searching and advertising for them. You'll want to pick a main keyword to target in all of your posts. You don't have to write like a spambot, but you need to get those key phrases in. Just write like you normally do, make it engaging for real readers, then come back and insert those keywords where they are needed for SEO.There are many different tools for keyword research, but most of them leverage Google Keyword Planner. The general advice is that you want keywords with at least 1,000 local monthly searches and an approximate CPC above $1. For more information on using Google's tool, check out this post by Kenny Rogers. There are several other popular keyword research tools: If you need more help picking a topic, here are a couple guides:
So how do you make money, anyway?  Advertising! That's really it in a nutshell. There are a number of different revenue channels, but they are just different forms of advertising. For the most part, blogging comes down to getting traffic that converts to ad clicks or product buys. Your content needs to be written for real people, but optimized for search engines (Google). Do your research before you write a single word or spend a single dollar, choose the right topic, and in time it will be easy to turn your blog into a money-maker. Revenue Channels  Pay Per Click (PPC) AdvertisingFrom the previous thread: Faceless Clock posted:The pay-per-click advertising is, basically, Google Adsense. There are some competitors to Adsense out there, but I haven’t found any that seemed to provide much of a reason not to use Adsense. Most companies are pretty annoying, in fact, and will spam your blog with ads by default. I use nothing but Adsense on one of my blogs, which happens to be dominating a set of keywords and so gets roughly 500 visits per day. If I'm lucky, 1% of that traffic actually clicks on an ad, giving me about 50 cents to a dollar per click. Now I can improve my results by getting more traffic, or getting higher paying ads, or finding another revenue stream with a higher conversion rate. But no matter which topic you pick, don't expect much higher than 1% of your traffic to convert to PPC income. Affiliate MarketingFrom the previous thread: Faceless Clock posted:This is the other major form of income generation and it comes in a million flavors. Some affiliate marketing opportunities are going to make you dedicate large parts of your blog to whatever you’re pimping. Others just let you place ads on your site and pay you’re a percentage of any revenue generated from them. Let’s say, for example, that you post about a video game and put in a link to Amazon.com where people can buy it. You’ll be given a cut of each sale. Sponsored Posts / Pay Per PostFrom the previous thread: Faceless Clock posted:Making money through pay-per-post requires that you sign up for an appropriate pay-per-post site. That site will then try to match you up with advertisers who want you to blog about a specific subject. You’ll have to link to a certain website in your post and say nice things about a product or service. Cost Per Mile/thousand impressions (CPM) AdvertisingI'm not very familiar with CPM, so if anyone would like to write a quick guide I will add it. In addition to using the above services, it can also be quite profitable to work out sponsored posts with individual advertisers. Look for sites selling products within your niche, either through your existing PPC or affiliate advertisers or by doing some research, and approach them directly to see if they're interested in sponsoring an editorial post about their product/service. The exact price you quote is a bit of guesswork, but try to base it what an average page on your blog earns over a month or two. How much will I actually make?There is no guaranty that you will make anything. But, if you do your research, pick a profitable, low competition niche, and put enough time in, you can make anywhere from $5 to $500+ a month per blog. I currently make $100/month from a blog that gets 50,000 page views. At this point, I only post one article per week. It took 3 months before it earned a single penny, but now that I have the ball rolling I find it easier to control my work/profit. Some other "testimonials": Omits-Bagels posted:I make like $50/month on my site. But, I also haven't updated my site since about March. I plan on starting to add more content and work on link building fairly soon. I also only get about 180-220 unique visitors a day so hopefully I can boost profits by increasing traffic. Supersonic posted:I make about $200-500 per month on one of my blogs via affiliate programs and banner ad sales. When I first started the blog, I put in about 40 hours before it started to pay off (writing unique content, configuring wordpress, etc). Since then, I add a new product review every month or so, and get a steady amount of traffic (100-160 uniques per day). Advertisers generally tend to contact me regarding purchasing monthly banner ads, and they started to do so about three months after I began running the blog. Rage Nage posted:Been monetizing exclusively through online sportsbook affiliate programs, probably made £300-£400 so far. Blogging is just a hobby for me  Time to get started!Okay, hopefully now you have a set of keywords to target, have picked the best revenue channels to monetize your blog, maybe even written a couple articles. All that's missing is an actual website. There are dozens of platforms you could build your blog on: Wordpress.com, Blogger, Drupal, Joomla, ExpressionEngine, etc. Ultimately the best and most recommended solution is a self-hosted Wordpress site. The benefits of Wordpress are many: 5 minute install, easy to use control panel, thousands of themes, plugins and tutorials. Trust me, unless you're an expert web developer, and even if you are, you'll be stepping into the wild if you build your blog on anything BUT Wordpress. If you try to take the easy route and setup a blog on a hosted service like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com, you will be limited in which plugins you can install and how much advertising you can have. Skip the regrets by learning how to setup your own domain and hosting. Okay, so, Wordpress. What now? 1. Get a domain, through something like Namecheap and get some hosting. There are lots of goon approved hosts with dirt cheap prices in the SA Mart. I personally like Lithium, but I've also used apis networks and they were fine. Whichever you pick, start with the lowest price and work your way up as you need more bandwidth. 2. Install Wordpress, theme, plugins, and setup your pages and initial posts. As far as plugins go, I wouldn't start a blog without Wordpress SEO by Yoast. There are tons of other useful plugins out there: here's a list to get you started. If you need more advice on Wordpress specifics, there's a great thread for that. 3. Setup Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, register your sitemap with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Camo Guitar posted:Google Analytics is brilliant at seeing what's working and what's not, especially in how people are reaching your blog and which words their using - refer to it often as you might be suprised at what's your most popular post or update and then you can use that to create more relevant content. What's the best theme? There is no best theme. There are literally thousands of very good choices and as long as you are in control of your sitemaps, your heading tags, and your URLs, it will be hard to go wrong. I would always suggest you pay for a theme from a reputable site like ThemeForest, Mojo Themes, or Woothemes and not by Googling "free Wordpress theme". Why? Because half the time (or more) those "free" themes have hidden backlinks or other malicious code. Not to mention the quality of the design will almost always be lower and your blog will look like a cookie cutter, spammy blog. A professional, well designed theme typically runs $35. I always count this cost as part of the required blog investment along with domain name and hosting. Don't skimp. Paying for Content Another good way to reinvest any money you make is to pay other writers to generate content for you. I've gotten quality articles for as low as $15/600 words that have easily made a return on that investment and will continue to generate income for a long time. Places to hire writers:
Strategies (aka I need me more traffic!!): Search Engine Optimization Moniker posted:You can do SEO stuff by yourself. It's just tedious. If you set up a schedule and stick to it, it makes it a whole lot easier to do by yourself. From the old thread (emphasis mine): Faceless Clock posted:Perhaps the most common way to generate track is through the creation of articles that are attractive to search engines. There is a lot of hocus-pocus about how to generate traffic through search engines, but here are my tips. This article is also a good starting point. Start an Email List Now I could go on and on about why having an email list is a gold mine, but I'll just link to this post. Social Media These are the big players: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and StumbleUpon. Beyond that, there are hundreds of other social media networks that you can draw upon to generate traffic. Go with what you're used to, but also what makes the most sense for the demographic of your visitors. For example, Reddit might be perfect for something more nerdy, whereas Facebook might be better for an older audience. Whether you try to create a following through these sites is up to you, but at the very least you should use AddThis or ShareThis bars to all of your posts. nous_ posted:For self-promotion, I'd definitely consider starting up free accounts on Reddit and Digg - if something you write resonates particularly well with the popular sentiment of the userbase, you'll get tons of free promotion and a ripple effect as the link gets spammed around the internet. I personally have found that building a Twitter and Facebook following is a cheap way to get an extra 100 hits or so per post. Twitter has also become an excellent source of article ideas for me. This segues nicely into networking... Networking and Guest Posts Connecting with the other blogs in your niche, or a related niche, can be a great way to build traffic. By commenting on other articles and promoting them through your own posts, or tweets, or whichever method you choose, creates good karma which will eventually lead to them linking back. If you're particularly aggressive, you can contact them directly about doing guest posts. This basically means you write a post about a topic that fits their blog and hopefully at the end you can promote your own site in a sentence or two. The Great Goon Blog Network Similar to what Faceless Clock did in the previous thread, I'll try to keep a list of active goon blogs going so that we can see some working examples and hopefully keep networking. If you'd like to add your link, post the name, link, and subject. Automotive Fiat 500 Abarth Blog Poster: sim Entertainment http://www.bestcartoonsever.com Poster: cartooncart http://www.aunonline.com Poster: FizzyJuffoWup http://britpopnews.com/ Poster: Mastercontrol Food http://ckitchenette.blogspot.com Poster: Agent 99 Snack Overload! Poster: The Scarlet Hot Dog http://www.browniebites.net Poster: Crunch Bucket General Interest Almigo's Adventures Poster: Camo Guitar Costing a Green Future Poster: Rocinate Awesome Robot! Poster: The Scarlet Hot Dog Investing/Money Management Fructivore Investments Poster: Hobologist Money Mythos Poster: Strict 9 3 Dollar Bicycle Poster: dreesemonkey Products http://www.snowplowr.com/snowblog Poster: EvilTwig http://panasonicpencilsharpeners.com/ Post: Dog Blogs Man Sports MexiFut: Mexican National Football Team Poster: Tortilla Maker Coupon Busters Poster: Rage Nage Travel Lithuania Information Poster: Dogs Blogs Man The Savvy Backpacker Poster: Omits-Bagels Ten Pound Backpack Poster: The Stu http://www.konnichiwhoa.com Poster: snagger (space travel, sort of) http://www.astronomyaggregator.com Poster: Zero Gravitas Other Detroit Weddings Poster: Moniker Roof Snow Removal Poster: Moniker sim fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Jun 20, 2015 |
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Nov 3, 2011 15:24
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I work for a transportation company here in Detroit on the side, and I've been thinking of setting up a blog which targets keywords for transportation searches which would hopefully result in getting business. I want to make the blog about the city, which is sort of in the shitter in the eye of the media. So I'd like to do Top 5 Italian Restaurants in the metro area, What's going on in the city? (Weekly), "Things to do with the kids." Things like that.. I would obviously be targeting lots of keywords in the post titles and posts, but I think it would be nice to 1) add content to the site and help with page range and 2) maybe generate some revenue from ads (which I honestly hadn't thought of). Maybe I will give it a go now that I read this thread!
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Nov 3, 2011 15:48
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Starting a blog is a great way to generate traffic for another business. Also, if you're going to be highlighting other local businesses like restaurants, you may want to consider approaching them directly about advertising and sponsored posts, once you've got some traffic at least. List type articles like you mentioned are an easy way to target keywords and get eyeballs on your page, so a site that focuses on those has a lot of potential.
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Nov 3, 2011 15:56
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sim posted:Starting a blog is a great way to generate traffic for another business. Also, if you're going to be highlighting other local businesses like restaurants, you may want to consider approaching them directly about advertising and sponsored posts, once you've got some traffic at least. List type articles like you mentioned are an easy way to target keywords and get eyeballs on your page, so a site that focuses on those has a lot of potential. Yeah I thought about pairing up with local business too. I'm a doorman (as my day job) the nicest hotel downtown and I consistently send people to the good restaurants so I'm sure they'd be more than willing to help out.
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Nov 3, 2011 16:06
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Yay, love these threads! Google Analytics is brilliant at seeing what's working and what's not, especially in how people are reaching your blog and which words their using - refer to it often as you might be suprised at what's your most popular post or update and then you can use that to create more relevant content. I wrote a humourous guide about who's who on Storage Wars on a whim at the start of the year and it's my number one post with 9,886 views so far. Number two is about Mazda engines in non mazdas and it's trailing behind...at 1,287 views. Sometimes it's the things you don't think will be as popular that end up being a big hit. The traffic sources section of Analytics can also be amusing when you find terms like 'Brandy Schultz Boob Size' somehow got someone to your page. (Also Sim, could you please change the name of my blog in your list from The Almigo Independant to 'Almigo's Adventures'. My site died a nasty death after it caught some rogue script that kept sending everyone to a Turkish site that sells Kayaks and I had to rebuild it, hence the new name. Cheers.)
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Nov 4, 2011 00:09
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Really happy to see this going again - I read through the last incarnation a good 3 or 4 times, and learned a lot from it. I've been (very casually) running a sports betting blog for the last year or so: Coupon Busters - https://www.couponbusters.net It's essentially advice for punters who like to place accumulator bets on the Saturday 3pm UK football games, I try to put up a recommendation once a week. Been monetizing exclusively through online sportsbook affiliate programs, probably made £300-£400 so far. Blogging is just a hobby for me, although my career is in affiliate management, so the experience has been useful too. Lately I've started working on a few more blogs, which I'll probably post up here once I've developed them more. If you want to add my site to the OP, that'd be good 
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Nov 4, 2011 01:54
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Updated the link list and added some of the above advice to the OP. Keep it coming! Also please let me know if you have any suggestions for the OP, I want to keep it relevant and useful.
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Nov 4, 2011 03:57
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I've been running a website on wordpress for awhile that was just a content website, but I've recently restarted the blog portion (just tonight actually), so I guess that makes it a blog. It's all about backpacking and backpacking gear, and is located at Ten Pound Backpack. The site is monetized via affiliate links. The main feature of the website is the gear lists, which are a useful tool for backpackers looking for the lightest 3 person, single wall tent, for instance. The lists are just really big sortable tables, and took a hell of a long time to build. Had to do it all manually. For October I made ~$350, which is about as much as I was making in some of the summer months. Traffic was ~5000 unique visitors for the month. The problem is no one does much camping or backpacking over the winter, so traffic goes way down. I've managed to keep things fairly steady by growing the website, which has compensated for the overall decline, and I'm expecting that once spring/summer roll back around and people start buying camping gear again the site will do quite well. I'm hoping that I will see some sort of boost over christmas, but I have no idea if people buy camping and backpacking gear as christmas presents as the site was only started last February. I definitely started the site because I really like backpacking, and didn't really realize the monetization potential until after it was built. So that was a bit of a lucky coincidence, but I'm hoping that one day I can pay most or all of the bills with this site.
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Nov 4, 2011 10:00
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Added your site to the list Stu. I think people definitely will be buying camping presents over the holidays, but I don't know if that will make up for the lack of campers buying their own gear. One of the things that was an epiphany to me recently, was hearing about a guy who has 200 blogs that make $50/month each. It would be very hard to build a site that made $10k or even $1k per month on its own, but it seems very easy to make a bunch of sites that average $50. Once you figure out how to work a particular niche, it seems easy to transition that system to any other niche. That's what I'm working on right now. My goal is to have 5 blogs going by next July. I've got 1 up now, 1 about the launch, and so I just need 3 more ideas.
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Nov 4, 2011 13:43
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Great thread. I am looking into getting into starting a few blogs as well. My question is, how important is it to register a domain name instead of using a free account from Wordpress.
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Nov 5, 2011 06:27
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As I mentioned in the OP, I highly recommend NOT getting a Wordpress.com account if you want to make money with your blog. Here's why:Wordpress.com posted:Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not allowed on free WordPress.com blogs... In addition to AdSense-type ads, please do not use the following services on your blog: sponsored / paid posts including PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and Smorty; affiliate / referral links to the following domains: usercash, clickbank, clickhop, cashrocks, payingcash; clicktrackers (and any similar) and any promotion of the “I made a million on the internet and so can you” type of advertising (i.e. MLM, network marketing, cash gifting, etc.). Paid or sponsored post content is also prohibited. They do offer an option to enable Adsense if your blog gets over 25k page views a month, but they also take 50% of the revenue. If you're just blogging for fun and don't plan to monetize, then a free Wordpress.com account is great. However if you're serious about making money, you'll need a self hosted version.
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Nov 5, 2011 13:13
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Very informative OP, thank you. I took the plunge last night and bought babby's first domain. I have NO idea what I'm doing and it took me about 4 hours to figure out how to get Wordpress on there. But I was very proud of myself when it finally worked! Still needs lots of work, I'll link it when I get it all ready.
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Nov 5, 2011 22:25
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ugachrisc posted:Great thread. I am looking into getting into starting a few blogs as well. My question is, how important is it to register a domain name instead of using a free account from Wordpress. I'd say very. It looks more professional and the domain is an asset of yours.
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Nov 5, 2011 22:43
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Niwrad posted:I'd say very. It looks more professional and the domain is an asset of yours. This is important because you may be able to sell the blog later, and a blog can be a useful reference that can help you get online writing work. You also have much more control over the site.
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Nov 6, 2011 22:57
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What do you do when you've got a lot of keywords with over 1,000 monthly searches and the CPC value is way above $1.00? I'm talking like $15 or more. And the competition for them is all low. Is there an upper limit on CPC value that you don't want to go over for some reason?
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Nov 7, 2011 00:49
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Sbull posted:What do you do when you've got a lot of keywords with over 1,000 monthly searches and the CPC value is way above $1.00? I'm talking like $15 or more. And the competition for them is all low. When you say competition is low, do you mean from what it says in Google Keyword Tool or did you type the keywords into Google.com and check the actual competition?
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Nov 7, 2011 01:12
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jabro posted:When you say competition is low, do you mean from what it says in Google Keyword Tool or did you type the keywords into Google.com and check the actual competition? Google tool. But what if it doesn't appear swamped even in a Google search?
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Nov 7, 2011 01:20
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Sbull posted:Google tool. But what if it doesn't appear swamped even in a Google search? It also depends on the PRs of the pages that show on Google for your keyword, too. If its a bunch of PR4 and up might as well forget getting on the first page anytime soon if at all. Download SEOQuake for Firefox. It shows pages PR when looking at Google.com. You can also use the free version of Traffic Travis to do some research on the competition for your keywords. Edit: I should also add there is more than just looking at PR but its the first thing to do to quickly get an idea what you are facing. jabro fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Nov 7, 2011 |
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Nov 7, 2011 02:51
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Sbull posted:Google tool. But what if it doesn't appear swamped even in a Google search? This is a half decent guide to analyzing the first page on Google for how good the competition is.
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Nov 7, 2011 07:08
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I can still see the keywords that visitors are using to find my site, but it seems like many internet marketers are concerned about losing access to keyword information in the near future because of Google's keyword encryption that started in October.
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Nov 7, 2011 09:24
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(not provided} is already 5th in my keyword rankings!
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Nov 7, 2011 14:16
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Yea 10-15% of my traffic is (not provided).
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Nov 8, 2011 10:04
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CPM advertising wasn't even included in your list of advertising? Do you not think that there is money to be made there or do you just not have the experience with it to write about it? Actually you know what, I edited this down to make it a little bit less incendiary. But you guys have to explain this to me, your business models and mine seem to differ enormously. It seems like the majority of the websites discussed in this thread generate very little of their own original content, while it might be a huge quantity of content the posts might be very short, otherwise the sites here seem to be aggregators. Some people in this thread even seem like they are building websites that just scrape other websites, anything they can do to get ranked on google. The thought of running 5 or 10 really mediocre websites doesn't make any sense to me. Sure you may feel like you are diversifying, and you can capture google users who are interested in shopping for a niche, but really whats to stop google from changing how they rank content light websites tomorrow and killing all of your blogs in an instant? And for that matter, whatever happened to the old OP's huge list of sites? I just don't get it, you are essentially turning yourselves into an arm of Google by playing a game of converting search traffic into clickthrough. Does anyone who makes a living off of affiliate marketing have a legitimate readership base, why would you click on the same amazon link the second time you visited the site? I'll be honest, my site is 65% stumbleupon, so I guess my model is: make quality content, pray it gets stumbled, and collect a few pennies every time someone loads my page, (I have CPM Advertising). That scares the poo poo out of me and I don't know if it makes me any more legitimate than the models discussed here. But I have ~1,000 direct visitors a day, and about 5,000 absolute unique weekly direct visitors. I guess my question to you is, are either of our models sustainable? Yours seems easily rocked by Google, mine Stumbleupon. Bobx66 fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Nov 8, 2011 |
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Nov 8, 2011 12:53
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I totally forgot to add CPM and I don't have any experience with it. If you'd be willing to write up a short guide I will definitely add it to the OP. To answer your questions...Bobx66 posted:whats to stop google from changing how they rank content light websites tomorrow and killing all of your blogs in an instant? Bobx66 posted:Does anyone who makes a living off of affiliate marketing have a legitimate readership base, why would you click on the same amazon link the second time you visited the site? Bobx66 posted:I guess my question to you is, are either of our models sustainable? Yours seems easily rocked by Google, mine Stumbleupon.
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Nov 8, 2011 14:40
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I think we must be working with two different definitions of content aggregator, because I looked through the entire list of sites and could not find one. As far as I know, content aggregators are sites that take content directly from other sites. Regarding readership, about 80% of my visitors are first time visits, so 20% is returning visitors. I have no idea how well that compares, but I doubt it's a terrible number. As for monetization strategies, I would be interested to hear some more concrete numbers on how much you make with CPM. I have another website other than the one in the OP that is more of a pure review / affiliate site. With ~100 uniques per day I make about ~$10, so with your 1000 visitors I could be making ~$100 a day from that one site. Versus your pennies per visit (say 3 cents per visit?) is .03 x 1000 (or however many page views you get) = $30 per day. I suppose it's entirely possible that you are getting 3 or 4 page views per visitor if your content is really good, which would bump that up to $90-$120.
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Nov 8, 2011 19:31
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Glad to see another blog thread - thanks, sim! I currently have 4 blogs. Two of them are not monetized and are used to promote different parts of my main business (photographer). The other two are monetized and consist of a personal blog about a smattering of different things (https://www.browniebites.net) and a brand new, painfully naked one with photography and photoshop tips (https://www.pixel-tips.com). Very interested to see what kind of info shows up in this thread, and I hope to continue to grow my traffic numbers. Don't we all have the same pipe dream of being able to blog for a living? Or is that just me? Oh, and my piddly stats: Brownie Bites - averages 200-250 hits a day, with spikes as high as 800-900. Currently using CPM advertising. Pixel Tips - no traffic stats yet as this one is literally only a few days old. Currently using Google Adsense and probably some affiliate marketing that will be implemented in the future Crunch Bucket fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Nov 9, 2011 |
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Nov 9, 2011 00:11
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Is anyone familiar with accounting for a very small business like a blog? I know a sole proprietorship doesn't really require much in the terms of setting up, but if you were running a review website could you take a tax deduction on items purchased?
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Nov 9, 2011 00:58
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As long as you treat it like a legit business, yes. If you don't make much money at it though the IRS is likely to call it a hobby and disregard those deductions. There's literally nothing to do to start be a sole prop you just start doing poo poo and file a schedule C at tax time. File quarterly once you need to.
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Nov 9, 2011 04:09
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The Stu posted:I think we must be working with two different definitions of content aggregator, because I looked through the entire list of sites and could not find one. As far as I know, content aggregators are sites that take content directly from other sites. With three above the fold ads I make $6 Net Effective CPM including my network's cut and unfulfilled inventory. Remnant advertising adds another ~$0.80 to that. According to Analytics I get 1.66 page views per visitor. Additionally we do sponsored content but I think we are going to start moving away from that.
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Nov 9, 2011 13:07
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This is a pretty informative thread. Just started working on a new blog this last weekend (http://angelfishfacts.info). I have made a few other blogs in the past that have failed, although I was using free domain names (co.cc) and sub domains which certainly wasn't the best thing to do. The website is obviously still a work in progress, hopefully by this weekend it will be more complete. I would appreciate some advice from people with experience using a static front page with the blog on another page? Another resource that I've learned from when it comes to blogging and ranking high in the search engines is http://challenge.co it's pretty much designed around creating a blog to get ranked high in Google.
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Nov 9, 2011 17:33
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Can someone dumb down the way to pick keywords to use in posts? I get the idea of not posting like a spam bot, but what exactly should I look to do in order to maximize traffic to the site? I'm not quite following.
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Nov 9, 2011 17:55
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I was looking through some of the blogs in the main post and it seems that quite a few people need to read Google's Adsense TOS (I know it's hard to actually read those things) which is found here https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182 The part that most people are missing is this quote:Google Advertising Cookies I know the English is pretty bad there, but Google wants you to have a privacy policy for your readers to disclose that Google Adsense is using cookies to track your users! You can get more information on what to actually put in the privacy policy from https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=100557 Google has been known to shut down Adsense accounts because of this! Similar to this there are rules by the FCC that you are supposed to disclose that you site has affiliate links!
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Nov 9, 2011 19:25
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:This is a pretty informative thread. Just started working on a new blog this last weekend (http://angelfishfacts.info). I have made a few other blogs in the past that have failed, although I was using free domain names (co.cc) and sub domains which certainly wasn't the best thing to do. I would suggest a picture, both because your theme does not have any color really and because search engines find it useful. Just be sure to make the image name / alt text the keyword that you are targeting. So in this case it would be 'angel fish facts'? Foter is a good source of royalty free images and they have a wordpress plugin too. Also you spelled diseases wrong (deseases) in the blog info. For picking keywords for posts, I go to the Google Keyword Tool, type in a broad word that my blog covers ('sleeping bags', for example), with [Exact] clicked under match type and 'Only show ideas closely related to my search terms' clicked as well (and the Location set to United States if you're like me and from somewhere else). This should give you a big long list of potential long tail topics. For the sleeping bag example a lot of it is stuff like 'princess sleeping bag', which isn't right for my blog, but just go through and filter out the bad stuff. You'll notice a lot of duplicates as well, like 'compact sleeping bag' and 'sleeping bag compact', and I usually just write the one that gets more views, unless I can make the two posts reasonably different. It depends on the niche, but for anything below 500 global searches or so, the competition is probably going to be low enough to warrant writing. Anything above that it might not hurt to just check the first page of Google and see. If you use the Google keyword tool you can go through and check the box next to every topic you want to cover. Then go to Download -> Selected and it will give you the option to export everything you clicked to a CSV for excel, which you can use to keep track of everything. I have a few such CSV files that I'm working through at the moment.
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Nov 9, 2011 19:37
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:I was looking through some of the blogs in the main post and it seems that quite a few people need to read Google's Adsense TOS (I know it's hard to actually read those things) which is found here https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182 Yes this is definitely something to everyone should do. Here is a good privacy policy generator. From what I understand it's also good to have an About page and a Contact page at a minimum.
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Nov 9, 2011 19:43
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The Stu posted:I would suggest a picture, both because your theme does not have any color really and because search engines find it useful. Just be sure to make the image name / alt text the keyword that you are targeting. So in this case it would be 'angel fish facts'? Foter is a good source of royalty free images and they have a wordpress plugin too. Yea, images are pretty much the next step, I never heard of foter before though, after giving a look through, seems like a pretty good site and has some pretty nice photos that I will be using!
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Nov 9, 2011 20:03
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I've been running a product blog ( http://www.snowplowr.com/snowblog ) since last year, and it does pretty well in the winter months. The front half of the site is run off a domain parking script and the meat of the site is all wordpress. I chose to do this because I already had the parking script and use it to publish localized subdomains and grab a bit of traffic to send to the blog.
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Nov 10, 2011 01:53
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Well lets talk about backlinks! For those just starting out, when other sites link to your sites, google thinks your site is pretty good and moves you up the rankings! Although not all backlinks are the same, high PR backlinks are great. Even better are links coming from .edu and .gov websites. Getting links from .edu websites just takes a little searching with google! Here's what I do. Do a google search for anything followed by inurl:forum site:.edu, then you just have to go through the results and find a .edu forum that will let you register and create a profile with your blogs link in it! The following 3 .edu forums will let you post register and post a link to your blog! http://clubs.db.erau.edu/dbslavic/forum-phpbb2/index.php http://itu.edu/forum/index.php http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/index.php
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Nov 13, 2011 23:38
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My Black Friday blog is picking up steam now. Last year I cracked $1k in a week and I'm hoping to do the same this year  I really enjoy working on seasonal blogs because I have such a short attention span, it's easier for me to really crank out some content for 2 or 3 weeks and get a big pop before working on the next site. I have a Superbowl related one as well that I'll be working on come January.
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Nov 14, 2011 20:17
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Okay, I've got mine all set up and have two posts so far. Can anyone check it out and let me know what what I'm doing right and wrong? http://blog.athensdetroit.com/ The main goal is just to drive hits to the actual business site, http://athensdetroit.com but if I start gaining traffic and get a little bit of income from ads that would be cool too.
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Nov 14, 2011 20:30
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I just stared an animation blog as a hobby (http://www.bestcartoonsever.com). My goal was initially to pair it up with a streaming cartoon site, but I gave up on the idea for many reasons. I've already started to do some social media stuff because it's easy. I just wanted to know what is the minimum amounts of updates I should aim for. I am currently posting at least once a week.
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Nov 14, 2011 21:33
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