Now this might sound strange. Why would I want to create another blog in a niche that I’m temporarily not enjoying? Well, I discovered that it wasn’t the niche that was getting me down, it was my post research and writing style that I sometimes got tired off. Funk13 is more of a facts and ideas kind of blog, I give advice and tips but rarely share my thoughts and opinions on issues in the make money blogging world. My new blog however enabled my to create a more relaxed kind of blog, a blog that’s more orientated towards my personality. I found that expressing my opinions on one blog and giving advice on another has really helped take a way the repetitive nature of make money blogging. If I can’t find anything to post about on Funk13, I go ahead and post on Funk13’s evil twin. After writing my evil post, I usually find that I can write a more practical post on here.

Running two blogs isn’t as hard as you might think. It’s even easier because they are both in the same niche. If I write a post on here I can easily go ahead and write a more light hearted version on my other blog. Try it, you’ll see what I mean. Having two different style blogs in the same niche also introduces you to the different types of blogger, bloggers who come here would probably hate my ”evil” blog and vice versa. A great things is, I now have a make money blog that can I try and monetize to death. It’s a place where I can try out different make money plans on. I haven’t started to monetize this place properly yet. But when that time comes, because I’ve tried things over at Mr.Evil, I’ll have a better understanding of what might just work.

I’m not saying that this is going to be the end of all of your blogging troubles, you might think it’s a terrible idea. The most important thing is though, it’s helped me almost completely eliminate the blogging blues which can only benefit my main make money online blog, Funk13.com

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Now I’m a bit of SERP’s (search engine results pages) geek, I’m constantly checking where my blogs rank for different keywords and phrases. Over the last month I noticed that Funk13 was falling down the list the the phrase ”make money blogging”. Page 5,10,20, eventually I was getting to page 30 and still not finding my blog. My first thought was maybe my recent PR update had caused this, I’ve read about people loosing traffic after receiving a page rank. Baffled by what was going on I decided to post about my problem on the Google webmaster tools forum, luckily before I went ahead with my rant, I installed a new plugin. It was in the plugin section I realised the the best plugin on the planet, All in One SEO was deactivated. I quickly gave myself a slap round the face. (Just joking I’m not a self harmer.) and reactivated it.

This goes to show the importance of your homepage keywords, the way your blogs page titles are set up, meta keywords and noindex sections. Now, if you’ve been living in a cave for the last 10 years? You might not have heard of theAll in One SEO plugin. This plugin is a God send for WordPress blogs. It basically makes your blog super search engine freindly. If you haven’t installed this beauty yet, forget about reading this and go and download it now!

Now that I’ve reactivated the plugin, I’m hoping I will start climbing back up the ladder and I’ll be getting a decent amount of search engine traffic again. Do yourselves a favor and make sure you check your plugin pages regularly. Don’t be a dumb shit like me

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The big downside will be people leaving stupid comments just to gain a backlink. If I was to remove ‘nofollow’ I’d have to be make sure people weren’t just taking advantage of me. I could use a plugin that will only give you a backlink when you’ve posted 10 comments. Of course, all of the comments will have to be relevant to the topic, offering genuine ideas and thoughts. Like I said, removing ‘nofollow’ will be a nice reward to all the people who regularly visit my blog and share their opinions on my posts. Before I remove it, I’ll be doing a bit of research and I’ll be contacting other blog owners who have it removed. I want to see if it will actually benefit my make money blogging blog.

Have you removed it? Has it improved your readership?

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Choosing my domain
Finding a new domain can be a pain in the ass. The domains you want are all taken and you usually end up with something you don’t really like. Rather than having to waste my time trying to get PR, Google links, Yahoo links etc. I went and bought a domain with most of this already done for me. You might think this is going to be expensive, trust me, it isn’t. Head over to Freshdrop.net. here are thousands of domains you can get your hands on. Some are 10 years old, some have PR, some are listed in the DMOZ directory and it also tells you the number of Google search results and Yahoo backlinks. Make sure you are searching in the Closeouts section and in the search settings set fake to No. Once you’ve found your domain name it will cost you $5 and then you have to pay the GoDaddy yearly registration fee which is $10. You now have a domain with a lot of annoying work already done for you.

The Design
All of my blogs use WordPress so finding a theme for my new blog was easy. Firstly, I worked out my blogs main goal. Make money with Adsense. So off I went and found a decent WordPress theme designed to maximize my Adsense earnings. Now, most Adsense themes are crap and make your blog look like a spam blog. You must improve the look of your Adsense theme to keep the reader interested. I spent about 15 minutes improving the graphics on the blog and removing sneaky backlinks to crappy sites.

More Link Love
Now I went on a mission to get myself some more backlinks and Improve my search engine rankings a little bit more. Rather than paying for links I went and found blogs with Do Follow enabled. On these blogs I posted useful, well written comments. If I’d posted crap, the blog owner probably wouldn’t have approved my comment. Below you will find links to blogs that do follow. Do follow blogs will give you an all important back link for free.

D-List
Dot Com Mogul

Getting People To Review Me
The domain I purchased came with a PR 3. I went and found other blogs in the same niche as mine and asked for a review exchange. I review their blog if they review mine. I made sure the blogs I asked had a heap load of traffic. I also asked to review exchange with blogs with no PR but had a decent amount of traffic. Hopefully the fact that I have a PR3 will lure the no PR, high traffic site in to reviewing me. Paying people $100 plus to review your blog is a waste. If you’re clever enough you can think of lots of ways to get free reviews. As you can see, I used my page rank.

Forums
I headed over to digital point and added my new blog to my signature. Digital point is probably the biggest forum for people in the website/blog world. I found topics with questions in that related to my niche, WordPress and Adsense. I used Google search to find a clever answer to the question, I then made some changes to the answer so it looked like my own and so people wouldn’t suspect that I’ve simply used copy and paste. I then posted my clever answer. Hopefully making myself look clever will give people the impression that I know what I’m talking about. This might attract them over to my blogs. I know it’s cheating, but I don’t care! I want to make money.

Digg and StumbleUpon
Another great little traffic boost was submitting my posts to Digg and StumbleUpon. 1 Digg and 1 Stumble isn’t going to do much so I went and found a place where people will Digg and Stumble you if you do the same for them. Here’s one such place. Piqqus.com. If you search Google you can find plenty of sign up invites.

So that’s a basic run down of how I’ve got my blog up and running in one day. It’s all very basic but it’s all very effective too. The most important thing is though, most of it was free. The only expense was buying the domain. Next I plan to start an Google Adwords campaign. If it’s successful I’ll give you a run down of what exactly I did.

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Long and Informative
Yeah, these types of posts may make you sound clever, but half the time the people writing them haven’t got a clue what they’re on about. If I’m lucky and do find a post where the author does know what he’s talking about, I’ll often fall asleep half way through because the author fails to keep my interest or it’s flooded with big words or subjects I don’t understand. You’ve got to have a flair for writing, know your stuff and have a sense of humor if you want to pull these types of posts off.

Lists
Lists! Arghhh, I hate them! (hmm, this post is kind of a list) I guess they’re good if you haven’t got anything to say, but man, use your brain and think of something to say. Actually I’ll take some of that back. Lists are good if you’re listing the biggest dickheads in the make money online world.

Reviews
Unless you’re reviewing something good I tend not to bother wasting my time with these types of posts. There are to many blogs out there now flooded with paid reviews! Yeah, it’s nice to make money but your blog just turns to crap! People will eventually tire of your blog and quit coming back. If you’re posting lots of reviews, then make sure you double your relevant content to even things out. This doesn’t apply to review blogs of course.

Voicing Your Opinion
If you’re going to voice your opinion try and make it interesting, most people probably aren’t interested in how you found some money and handed it in to the police station. If I see someone writing their opinion on how much somebody sucks, Bam! I’m straight in there, I’ll read everything the person has to say and I’ll leave a comment. The problem of writing posts like this all the time is kind of the same the same problem as writing reviews all the time. Instead of tiring of your crappy reviews, people will tire of hearing your big mouth all day.

Interviews
Interviews can be fun to read if the person been interviewed is interesting. Interviews with the guy who created the latest money scam bore me to death. This is mainly becasue the same questions are asked over and over again ”how long did it take” ”what you did before” Boring! Now if you were to ask ”Do you care that this program is just a scam and people wont make money at all” I’d definitely be interested.

Ass Bandits (Part 2)
Basically were you blog about others just for the sake of getting noticed by the blog you’re blogging about. Pfff, load of crap! Don’t do it unless you want the reputation of been a chow bum boy.

Guest Posting
This has it’s benefits, it will get you noticed by a whole new audience and expose your talents. I tend not to do it though because why on earth should I feed another blogs content just for the sake of 5 minutes of fame. Some people say its good to guest post and others agree with me. It’s up to you decide on this one.

Well I’ve looked at the most popular methods of posting, and I’m still undecided. One thing I have noticed though is that all of the methods seem to have more bad points than good. Maybe it’s just the way I look at things. I seek out the negatives rather than the positives. Strange thing is, it’s the total opposite of how I look at the real world. So, maybe if I start to think more positively towards the content I write, I might just start to create those killer posts.

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Bringing In The Boys
Because of my little time problem, I’m seriously considering hiring a blogger. Nothing major, I’ll just be looking to paying someone x amount a week to write 3-5 posts a week here or x amount a week to track down suitable websites and publish them over at CMSNerd. I don’t think my blogs, especially Funk13 are appealing enough yet to guest bloggers so it’s going to have to be paid help. But Before I start throwing my cash around, I need to work out the pros and cons of this idea. So, here they are.

Pros

• I could strike it lucky and hire a God like content creator or a person with amazing hunting skills. This superhuman! Should give my blogs what they need, that all important traffic boost.
• With another person on board I’ll be able to ask their opinions about new ideas I have for the blogs.
• Hopefully my new blogger will already have a fan base, so hopefully their readers will stop by and check out this place and the others.
• I’ll be giving myself what I need most. Time!
• Hopefully my new friend will be able to teach me a trick or two about blogging and traffic building.

Cons

• I’ll be loosing out on precious blogging experience. The hardest task on a blog is content creation, if I’m not doing that part my skills and knowledge won’t grow.
• Bloggers cost money. If I start asking for their opinions and advice too, they’re probably going to want more of it.
• Readers might be put off by the bloggers content or choice of websites, because I’ll be busy working away on other things, I might not realize this until it’s to late.
• The new guy could be a total ass and start flame wars with other bloggers I like.
• I don’t want to come across as something I’m not. I can’t really afford to be paying people to blog for me, hiring people might give people the impression that I’m trying to look like a blog making $100’s.

So that’s really all I can think of. I’m all for trying new things so I’ll probably give this thing a try. I’ll start of slowly see how it goes. If it works, great! If it doesn’t. You’re Fired!!

If you’re interested, drop me an email via the contant page. I’ll need examples of your work, whether you want to write for funk13 or CMSNerd and what your rates are.

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This is what I hate about MMO, to many people have negative attitudes. All I ever seem to read about is how you’ll never make $15k a month from your blog. Yeah, you probably won’t but Jesus, you’ve got to think positive. If you sit there constantly reading about how you’re going to fail, how you won’t make money online, how people won’t visit your blog then what is the point of blogging? And why on earth are the people who constantly tell you this still blogging? Ahhh, they’re here because they don’t care about making money, but I bet you they’re the ones who who try the hardest to make money.

Anyway, on to how am I starting to monetize this place. I’ve swapped the four 125×125 banners I had in my right side bar and replaced them with new ones. I did have a FlashDen.net, CMSNerd.com and two other banners linking to other blogs. The FlashDen banner is now on another site of mine and is bringing in roughly the same amount of revenue. The CMSNerd banner simply isn’t needed here anymore. The amount of traffic that CMSNerd receives via search engines doesn’t really require me to do any real advertising.

The replacement banners are all hopefully going to be provided by the ad network I just signed up for, BuySellAds.com I’ve set my price to $25 a month which is slightly high but I’m hoping to attract advertisers looking for blogs with PR. I’m trying to work out how to remove the rel=”nofollow” tag from that ad section, this should make advertising with me more appealing. BuySellAds.com is currently in private beta mode, so if you sign up now you might not be allowed to sell ad space just yet. But you can definitely start purchasing ads.

This is just the first step I’m taking to help start Funk13 start paying for itself.

Here’s my link if you fancy advertising here.

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Sorting out the problems
Over the weekend I had a little think about what I wanted to do in regards to blogging and making money online. I know that making money through blogging is extremely difficult and this blog will probably never make me anything. So I thought to myself, why don’t I just ditch this blog and sell the domain name for $30 somewhere. This would then free up the time to concentrate on projects such as my CMS Gallery. But then I realized how much I liked blogging and quitting this place would have made all of the advice I’ve given pointless. I now know why this place is in reverse, it’s because I’m absolutely useless when comes to time management, I waste far to many precious minutes messing around with pointless projects, writing endless draft posts that never get published and I’m not putting my own advice in to practice.

Back On Track
Last week I wrote this post about different types of bloggers. It took me about 10 minutes to write and in my opinion it wasn’t anything special. The strange thing was, other people thought it was great and it brought me in about and extra 300 unique visits. That post was basically me rambling on, it was my thoughts on a subject and not some pointless information on how to blog etc. From the feedback I got in comments and emails, this is what people like reading, so from now on I’m going to switching the way I blog. Rather than sounding like some kind of human tutorial, I’m just going to be plain old me. This is going to cut down the amount of time I spend writing posts and will give me lots more time to work on the traffic situation. I’m not turning this place into a personal blog, ohhh no! But I’m going to give a more personal view of make money online and blogging. It might work, it might fail. But who cares? I’m having fun.

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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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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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