Back To Basics: Part 1

Some blogs are big, some blogs are small, some make $10000’s and some weren’t created for making money at all. (I’m no poet) But when you think about it, they all have the two major things in common, blogs enable you to share your thoughts on a certain topic or a wide range of topics, and blogs give your visitors the chance to voice their opinions on what ever it is that’s been discussed. It’s a pretty simple formula really. Lets forget about making money, Increasing your traffic, getting backlinks and so on. I’m going back to the beginning with this post. I’m going to look at probably the most important thing to do with blogging, the blog itself.

1. The Look And The Feel

Making a good first impression is very important. When a person visits your blog they don’t pick up on content to start with, they pick up on the look and their first thoughts are probably going to be one of these two things. ”Hmmm, this blog looks nice” or sadly it could be something along the lines of ”Wow, my eyes are on fire” I’m not a Web Design Guru but I’m proud of the fact that I’ve had many people tell me that my blog looks nice. All I’ve done is keep my blog looking as clean as possible. If I don’t need something I wont use it. To many blogs nowadays remind me of websites, they’re crammed full other little things that draw the reader away from the most important thing, the content. If you’re not giving your content maximum exposure and making sure it’s the second thing a visitor picks up on, why bother using a blogging platform?

Even if you’re useless at Blog Design it shouldn’t stop you from improving the look of your blog. Nowadays people are more than happy to give you a helping hand. Yes, sometimes you will have to pay but if you look around forums and on web design blogs people are more than happy to do it for free. It helps them improve their skills and it’s something extra to add to their portfolios. If you’re adventurous? Google search is packed full of tutorials on blog design, I’ve used many and after a few attempts it pays off.

I’ve posted a little something here about how a slow loading or what I like to call ‘’sloth like” blog will scare aware visitors. It’s very important to keep your blog as user friendly as possible.

2. Stranger Friendly

If you’ve worked hard enough on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the traffic visiting your blog via search engines will most likely have searched for a subject relating to your blogs content. But every now and then you get what I like to call a stray. Someone who wasn’t searching for anything relating to your blog but found your blog anyway. As you can see in the image, some poor guy has searched for a way to get home and the results have brought up my blog. So, I have to think to myself, if this person stopped bye would they instantly close their browser? Or would they be a little curious and want to find out what my blog is about? As I mentioned in point 1, the first thing the ‘’stray” will pick up on is the look, I think the look is o.k so I probably don’t have to worry about that. The next thing is letting the lost boy know what kind of site he/she has discovered. This is an area I feel my blog fails badly in and is something I need to work on straight away.

You see, this blog offers blogging advice, tips for making money and I discuss my other online ventures, yet when you first visit funk13.com it’s very hard to notice any of these things straight away. You’re greeted with a big picture of five funny looking dudes, some crap about advertising and a link to a custom graphics section. It’s giving Mr can’t get home the wrong impression of my blog.

How Can I Improve My First Impression?

1. Change my header and make sure it relates to the subject of my blog.
2. Remove ”Advertise for free” and ”Custom Graphics” links from my nav bar and place them in the side bar. I should then replace them with something to do with making money or blogging.
3. I could bring my ”Recent Posts” section further up the page so the visitor can see what is actually going on here.
4. I could bring my ”Recent Comments” section further up the page too. This will show the visitor that my blog is active and it might also draw the visitor in to a discussion.

If you’re able to keep hold of new visitors and make them want to return to your blog then you’re definitely on to a winner. Being able to do this with a make money blog is even better. The more visitors, the more chance you stand of actually making money.

3. What Are You Trying To Acheive

If you aren’t quite sure about you goals, you need to have a good think about them. Not knowing what your blogging for is going to slow down the rate of your blogs progression. If you’re a personal blogger, your goal is provide people with stories of what has happened in your life today. A fairly simple goal and easily achievable. But when you move in to niche topics, sorting your goals can become a little more difficult. If you’re in the make money blogging area, which specific area of that niche are you targeting? Are you looking to make money of your visitors? Are you hear to simply offer advice on making money? Make money blogging is such a huge area, it would be very difficult to cater for all aspects of it. I feel it’s best to pick one area of make money and stick to it. I offer random tips and share my own experiences, I’ve tried making money from this blog but I just wasn’t cut out for it.

One thing you must always remember is what ever your goals are for your blog, your readers are the most important thing. You need to listen to them, interact with them but most importantly, give them something to come back for!

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Please Avoid

Make money blogging is probably the most difficult nice to actually make money in, why people decide to start make money blogs baffles me. But who am I to tell people what to do? Over the months I’ve come to realize that there are many different types of make money online blogger. Some I like, some I find annoying, some I appreciate, some I feel sorry for and some I find funny. Below I’ve sorted out the types of bloggers I’ve come across in to groups.

Ambition Killers
For the most part, I like these types of bloggers and they do provide good information, but it’s the way they deliver the information that annoys me. They swear that what they’re telling you is the only way you’re going to strike it rich. They mock other people for trying new ideas and new things. If you question their methods or tactics, you will most likely end up been on the front page of their blog with a discussion about how much you suck. But who cares? This gives you free publicity. Because I’m a big fan of experimenting I try to stay away from blogs like this. Yes, the information is very valuable but it’s very easy to loose your ambition reading these types of blog day in day out. A blog like this would be Blogger unleashed.

Billy Bullshitters
I find these types of bloggers funny and I also feel sorry for them. They lie about their stats, they fake their RSS subscriptions and/or they make out that their blog is going to be the next big thing. One question I often ask my self is why? Why on earth make yourself out to be something you’re not? You will always get found out. Jason from theuniversitykid.com discovered one of these fake ass bloggers. Read about it here. This proves it does go on. Don’t always beleive what people are telling you!

The Pointless Blogs
These types of bloggers provide you with absolutely no information on how to make money from blogging yet claim to be king of the niche. These bloggers are very clever though, I’ll give them that. They lure in their readers by showing them their income for the month. Everyone loves to read about how much money you’ve made. Once they have their readers, they start writing paid plugs for ad networks and other money making schemes. Their readers then sign up hoping that they too can cash in, all they’re really doing though is giving Mr ”Pointless Blog” a nice referral fee. A good example of this is JohnChow. Why people can’t see what’s going on beats me. You will never learn anything or make any money taking in what these people tell you.

Ass Bandits
These types of bloggers are the JohnChow, JohnCow fan boys. They actually believe in all the crap Mr ”Pointless Blog” dishes out. If you question Mr Pointless, these guys will attack you like a pack of dogs. Their blogs are basically carbon copies of the pointless blogs. They too try to get you to sign up for the latest ad networks. Through ignorance or plain stupidity, they haven’t yet realized that the promotions Mr Pointless sold to them are old and all of the money to be made from them got sucked up by Mr Pointless months ago. These definitely are the bloggers I feel sorry for.

These are my personal opinions, I’m sure everyone else has their own. I’m sure many people won’t agree with what I’ve said, but who cares. Some people may find the above blogs and bloggers very useful. If you’re one of these people? I’d love you to show me how exactly.

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Page Rank

Today I had a nice surprise, I returned from my holiday to find I had a pr 3. This was something I definitely wasn’t expecting, but I must admit, I have been working hard to improve my backlinks. I guess my hard work has paid off.

Page Rank?
A Google description:

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google. The scale for PageRank is logarithmic like the Richter Scale and roughly based upon quantity of inbound links as well as importance of the page providing the link.

The benefits of page rank

• Advertisers are willing to pay more to advertise on your site. As far as I’m aware, I’ve never charged people to advertise on this blog. Now I have page rank I think I might start to. The links that I already have on this blog will stay free of charge. Another benefit of page rank is I’m now able to go for higher paying pay per post jobs. I don’t do paid posts so this really doesn’t mean anything to me.

• Other sites with page rank may now want to do link exchanges with me. This means that I will be receiving even more backlinks of value.

• Google will crawl my blog more often. This is because of the number of incoming links I have. This should improve my SERPs because the more content Google indexes, the more keywords I can rank for.

I’m not a SEO expert so the information above may not be %100 accurate. I guess the biggest question now is how exactly did I achieve my page rank? Well unfortunately I don’t have the time to tell you how I achieved mine just yet. As I mentioned at the start of this post, I’ve just returned from a holiday and I still have lots of unpacking to do. In my next post I’ll explain in detail exactly what I’ve done.

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Taking a Gamble

One thing I’m finding with blogging is that with each week that passes the more time and effort I need in order to keep things going and progress. Some people are lucky, they are able to run endless projects, write quality content, promote and monetize there blogs all in the space of the spare 3 or 4 hours they have after they get home from work. The reason I’m finding it so hard is because of my awkward work hours. I spend a lot of time away from home working my butt off. So on weekends, all I want to do is go out and wind down in the pub.

I guess the biggest attraction of becoming a full time blogger is it gives you option of working from home and working the hours you want. Plus, there’s no one to moan at you or tell you what to do. You control everything. All very well, but what a lot of people don’t realize is working for yourself is a very, very risky. I’ve often imagined myself quitting my job just so I can give my projects and blogs my full attention. But when I look deeper in to the idea, I realize that becoming a full time blogger/online money maker just isn’t an option. The way things are at the moment it just isn’t possible to support my self with my blogs and projects. I’m not even making enough money with my online projects to cover my monthly food expenses. This leads me back to the risk factor. If you don’t work you don’t get paid. Even if you work your butt off there’s a chance you wont make enough money to support yourself.

I think the people who tell you that becoming a full time blogger/affiliate marketer/whatever are talking out of their back sides. Yeah, you might make a fortune one month, but what about the month after when you make peanuts? Just because your working online for yourself, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will lead a fantastic life and eventually you’ll make 30k a month from your blog. Stupidly, even with all of the doubts running through my mind, I still want to try and eventually give up my job and get out there and work full time on my blogs and other schemes. I’m going to set my target date, this time next year I hope to be working full time on the internet. This will mean I’m going to have to start saving money for rainy days, putting as much time as possible in to my work and I’m going to have to cut down on my social life. Bye Bye pub every weekend

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Life after Entrecard

Back in March I decided to slowly ween myself off Entrecard. I must admit, Entrecard was a brilliant way of getting traffic to my blog, but I was spending far to much time dropping cards and messing around in the EC forums. I started blogging in order to learn how to make money online, not chill out on a site which to me resembles MySpace. It’s now been over a month since I decided to stop playing an active part in Entrecard, so, what have effects been on my blog?

Well probably the most noticeable has been the drop in traffic. While dropping my 300 a day, I was getting between 100-200 unique visitors a day. Not bad considering my blog was and is still very new. Now I’m getting between 30-60 unique visits a day, I have no other form of advertising going on apart from a couple of link exchanges, so I’m very happy with my 30-60. The number of comments I receive has dropped slightly, but nothing to drastic. This proves the point that the majority of EC’ers are only on your blog to drop. Nothing else. It’s nice to know my traffic is here to read my blog, not drop their cards. A stat I rarely keep track of but noticed an increase in is my RSS subscription. I logged into my feedburner account on Saturday to find I have 31 subscribers. I can’t really put that down to pulling out of Entrecard dropping though. The two stats I’m most happy with though, are my ”Bounce Rate” and my ” Avg. Time on Site”. for the first time in months they seem to be heading in the rite direction.

What have I been doing then?
As Entrecard isn’t eating up all of the time I have to spend on the internet, I’ve actually had to time to concentrate on ”Make money online” and ”Make money blogging. I recently registered a whole lot of Domain Names. One domain name now has a fully developed site which more or less runs itself. And no, it isn’t a spam blog or a blog that uses other peoples posts. I’ve also set up a couple of Niche blogs, one focuses on iPod accessories and the other is an educational resource. I intend to use these two to make money using Google Adsense. People say Google Adsense is dead, I can assure you it isn’t.

With the domains I can’t find a use for just yet, I’ve discovered domain parking. You change the name servers of your domains to which ever parking service you use, then you receive a percentage of the revenue generated from the ads placed upon your domain names. So far in April, I’ve earned $25 from domain parking. I’m currently using Sedo to park my domains, as far as I’m aware we split the ad revenue 50/50, so really I’ve earned $50. I’ve heard there are better companies out there offering a better revenue split. I really need to start looking in to it.

I’ve also started working on referrals. If you don’t no what this is? Where have you been? Basically, I receive x-amount of $ if somebody signs up for a service or purchases something via a link I’ve placed on one of my blogs. The 125×125 orange FlashDen ad banner you see in my sidebar is starting to finally generate some revenue. By placing it on my CMSNerd site, I’ve improved my click through rate and people are starting to actually purchase credits to spend on FlashDen. This means I earn a commission fee. The obvious reason why the FlashDen referral scheme is working so well on CMSNerd is because it’s targeting the rite audience, CMSNerd is a site aimed at web designers. Flashden is a web designers paradise. Now I need to find some referral schemes that I think will work well with Funk13.

I’ve discovered there are endless ways to make money online, I love reading about them and trying them out. Now I’m actually starting to make money online myself, I can afford to try bigger and better schemes. I just have to try and stay within my limits, but still have the balls to experiment. As I’ve learned with most things I’ve tried, practice makes perfect. If something fails the first time, pick yourself and try again.

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