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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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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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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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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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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How I see Make Money Blogs
Make money blogs to me are blogs like JohnChow.com, DoshDosh.com, JohnCow.com, ShoeMoney.com. These sites are always banging on about:

• Advertising Programs
• Affiliate Programs
• Website Sponsors
• Paid Posting and Sponsored Reviews
• Ebooks
• Service’s

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with those blogs or their content. The blogs I mentioned are listed as make money online blogs and they’re feeding their readers the rite type of content. My blog however is in the same category but I very rarely talk about the above things. As I mentioned earlier, I mainly share with you my Online experiments. Some of the experiments are intended to make money and some of them aren’t.

I think I mentioned in this post that I was going to continue blogging about making money (which I don’t really do), WordPress, SEO etc. Well, from today I think I’m going to try and start to shake the make money online tag off of funk13. Take a look at my Google description.

Make Money Blogging. Tips on how to make money from your blog and generate new traffic.

I think people who find this site through search engines think that I’m going to be discussing Affiliate Networks and reviewing the latest ebooks. So, when Mr or Mrs whoever come to realize that none of my site description is true, they’re more than likely going to leave and there’s a chance that they might tell their friends not to bother visiting my blog. I could start to get a bad name. (I sound paranoid lol) I’m guessing the best way to start attracting visitors who might be interested in reading my blog is to actually use keywords that relate to my content. In the all in one SEO plugin, my homepage keywords are:

make money blogging, link building, page rank, increase traffic, blog, cash And my page title is: Trying To Make Money Blogging!

I’m a little unsure about getting rid of Make Money Blogging, I do discuss it every now and then and I guess a lot of my projects are about making money online. Domain name Crazy, CmsNerd Anyway, I rank between page 6-10 on Google for that phrase. Considering I was on page 90 a bout a month ago, I’m really enjoying watching Funk13 rising up the ranks. As for the other keywords, I will definitely be throwing Cash, Increase Traffic and Link building away. They’re subjects I very rarely post about. I’m hardly an expert in those areas either. Yes I can get a blog up and running and I can get visitors coming in, but I do it the same way as everyone else. I have no secret tips or tricks, so why bother telling the search engines I’m a traffic building site?

New Keywords And Target Audience
I haven’t really thought about the type audience I want to target properly yet, tomorrow I will start doing some research and hopefully my blog will have relevant keywords by the end of the day. This just might actually start bringing in some visitors looking for the things I write about.

As for blowing up my blog? When I come to think about it, it’s not like I’m re-branding because I wasn’t a brand in the first place. I’m pretty sure that with some hard work and lots of detective work, I will track down and change my details on sites I’m listed on and linked on. I think it’s time people started to realize that you don’t have to blog about money to make money blogging.

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What is TNX?
TNX is an ad network where you can buy and sell text links on individual web pages. As a webmaster or blog owner you can sell links on your pages from which you will receive TNX points. You can then use these points to advertise on other sites or you can very easily cash them in. As an advertiser, you can purchase TNX points and then go about setting up your advertising campaigns to help increase your search engine rankings.

The price of purchasing TNX points very reasonable. If you purchase $30 will get you roughly 20,000 TNX - Points.

- 20 000 different PR0 pages from different websites
- 400 different PR1 pages from different websites
- 200 different PR2 pages from different websites
- 100 different PR3 pages from different websites
- 40 different PR4 pages from different websites
- 20 different PR5 pages from different websites

Another great feature of TNX is you get to choose where your links will be displayed. There’s over 15,000 plus pages to advertise on with categories ranging from jobs and employment rite through to health and food. You will always be able to find pages to advertise on that relate to your blog or site. TNX also offer you a free tool to advertisers to make paid links look natural for Google.

Selling
If you’re going to be selling links, TNX offer some great features. You control who advertises on your site, you can ban certain advertisers from your pages and your credits are paid to you in advance. Getting your site ready to sell is easy. You ad your site, insert some code in to your pages and then you simply wait for the approval process. The price you will receive for each link is calculated automatically. It mostly depends on Google PageRank (PR) of each page, website category, link popularity, and number of outbound links.

Additional Information
Getting to No1 in Google
Are paid links Evil?

Interested? Go and check them out for yourself. TNX.net

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Advertising my site is easy and cost free. I’ve posted 3 messages in total on 3 different forums. All of the forums are CMS (content management system) sites. The people who use these forums are all my potential audience. It’s perfect direct advertising with out any cost. As a result of my advertising I received 98 visits on my first day resulting in 21 submissions.

Now, I’ve estimated that there’s about 200 popular CMSes out there listed under the following categories:

• Portals
• Blogs
• e-commerce
• Groupware
• Forums
• e-Learning
• Image Galleries

If I can promote my site on their forums and forums related to their CMS, I should start to bring in a decent amount of traffic. I know that not all of the visitors will be interested, but they’re still visiting.

If you’re looking for a new project to start, why don’t you try something similar? It’s so easy to get it up and running. First I went and found a new host with a decent amount of Disk Space. I eventually decided on using HostGator. The next thing you need to do is find yourself a gallery template, I can assure you there are lots out there. Remember, you don’t have to stick with WordPress. Next you will need to find a domain name. My site is about CMS and I’m a bit of a geek/nerd when it comes to CMS. So, the domain I registered was CMSNerd.com. I would have preferred geek but it was already taken. Once your site is up and running you now need to find your target audience. Content Management Systems was mine so I started promoting my site in that area. You don’t have to stick to CMS websites remember. You could go with Flash based websites or you could target a specific area. WordPress premium themes. I think there’s a few like that already though. Just research the area you want to showcase.

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