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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Domains I will try to make a profit on.

I’ve been searching for things to watch out for in 2008/2009. Gadgets, software, phones etc. After reading ”geek” reviews on everything I found, I then decide on which item I would take a gamble on. The gamble is registering a domain name related to that product. I’ve noticed a few HD ipod video converters are to be released this spring and summer. So I’ve registered a few domain names relating to those types of products. One of them is xdockhd.com. xdockhd is an actual name of a product, so I might be able to make some money through referrals or someone might want to take that domain of my hands. I probably wont make any money from it, but there’s always a chance. It’s better than smoking my life away.

Domains I might try to develop.

These are domains that I’ve registered with the intention of developing them in to actual websites within 1-2 years. I’ve registered quite a few of these and my favorite one at the moment is cmsnerd.com. (Content management system) cmsgeek.com had already been registered. I’ll probably try and develop some type of cms theme or review site with that domain name. It will take time, but remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Names for the Hell of it

Sometimes I purchase a domain name just for the hell of. Weird names or just stupid names. My favorite one here is fatlol.com. Yes I’m immature, but I have nothing against fat people, I just like stupid things. Anyway, If I don’t make any money at all from this little venture, I won’t be to bothered. It’s fun looking for names to register and you also get to meet some very nice people along the way. It’s a shame that wasn’t the case on my Freelance Adventure.

If you’re interested, I’ve been registering my domain names over at name.com. $5.99 1yr with Google Apps. Be careful though, to renew this domain after your year is up, it will cost you $7.99. I don’t plan on keeping most of domain names for over a year, so I’m not to worried.

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O.k, that was easy. Pay per post it is. It’s not because of the money though, it’s entirely down to my own principals. Why should I let Google tell me what I can and can’t publish on my blog? Sometimes I’m convinced Google are trying to take over the world! Anyway, lets look at what I’m going to be missing out on, now that I’ve crossed over to the dark side.

Benefits of PageRank?

I’ve been searching Google for at least 10 minutes looking for reasons why I should hold on to the chance of getting a page rank. It’s not looking good for Google, because I haven’t found any yet. Actually, I did find one reason. It says my search engine results will be affected. But I know this isn’t true. I know of a couple of blogs who use pay per post networks, have no PR and yet they are on page one of Google and they’re using highly competitive keywords such as money and blog. So, there’s no need to worry about that. Ah, there’s actually 1 more reason PR might be good. Lets say I wanted to sell Funk13, the higher my PR is the higher the price would be. But I’m never going to sell Funk13! So there’s no need to worry about that one either.

Benefits of Pay Per Post?

Well this is a much easier question to answer. If I’m accepted, I might actually start earning a little bit of money. I did mention in a previous post, money wasn’t my main objective, but when you think about it, writing reviews is part of the blogging lifestyle. Some people are lucky enough to be able to cut out the middle man, Cow and Chow for example. Maybe sometime in the future people will come to me directly for a review? who knows? Anyway, any money that I do make will go towards a few blog improvements. I need a few tweaks made to this theme, I need a new host and I’ll probably use some for contests.

Lets hope I get accepted now.

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Because I didn’t really want to flood Funk13 with off topic posts, I was put off by the whole ppp thing. But then I thought to myself, why don’t I create another blog to use for paid posting. Fair enough, creating a new blog is fairly easy, but I’m sure most of you agree, running two blogs is a little harder. So, an idea I’ve come up with is this.

I’ve created a blog where I can post reviews about everyday, items, gadgets and products. http://funkreviews.com/ I’m quite lucky, because my working day consists mostly of testing out new gizmo’s for faults and writing reports on them. I’m pretty confident I’ll never fall short of things to review. As long as the men and women at google are indexing my posts, and I can grab a few visits from Entrecard, I should hopefully get accepted by many of the ppp networks out there.

I’ll also be posting other non make money blogging topics. Nothing to big, I’m not trying to compete with anyone because getting Funk13 established is my main goal. All I’m doing is experimenting, I think experimenting is the best thing to do in the make money online world. I just need a solid base to give this ppp thing a try and see if it’s possible to make money with it.

At the moment http://funkreviews.com/ is full of reviews I wrote for a consumer review site last year. I’m probably breeching copyright even though I wrote the reviews. They’re all out of date now anyway, so who cares? Anyway, I don’t really want to stick with the tech side of things. It gets a bit boring. So, my plan is to write about absolutely anything I want. I’ll probably fill it full of blog reviews or something. I like reviewing blogs. I have about 30 days before I can start applying to the ppp sites. So, if you want anything reviewed, let me know.

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What is bloggernoob.com?
Bloggernoob.com is a blog about making money online. It’s updated daily by someone who calls himself the noob. The noob claims to be a total novice in the world of making money online and blogging. At first I was a little sceptical of his claims, for such a new blogger, how was this guy pulling in such fantastic amounts of revenue each month? I was totally convinced that, ”The noob” was in fact a pro blogger. And I felt, ”The noob” was just a masquerade that this pro blogger was using to draw attention to his blog.

After further inspection of bloggernoob.com, (reading nearly all of The noobs blog posts) my scepticism started to disappear. His blog is one big experiment. He not only tells you his own methods of making money online, he shows you his results, what to do and encourages you to try the same. Surely a pro blogger would be a little more selective in passing out such valuable information?

What can The noob do for me?

A simple answer to that question is Lots. Bloggernoob.com plays host to over 500 blog posts about making money online or related subjects. O.k, some of the posts you may not find interesting, but I’m sure somebody else will. That’s one of the great things about bloggernoob, it caters for all. Bloggernoob also gives you an A+ example on how to interact with your visitors. If someone leaves a comment it wont take long before The noob comments back. You’re never left waiting for a response like on the bigger blogs. The noob is also very happy to help you out if you have a more direct question to ask.

Not so long ago I sent bloggernoob.com an email, I wanted to know about advertising programs. It wasn’t long before I got my response. A very helpful response too! Try sending an email to the Cow or Chow, you’re not going to get any respone back for a while, probably never. At the moment, I really can’t find any faults with helpfulness and information on bloggernoob.com. I sincerely hope ”blog fame” doesn’t ruin bloggernoob.com. And, I hope The noob will still be as friendly and helpful this time next year. If you’re the kind of person who loves to interact with other blogs? I highly recommend bloggernoob to you.

The Look and Feel

The bloggernoob.com empire is housed inside a 3 column WordPress theme. The first thing you will notice on this blog is ”The noobs” header logo. The logo is a mildly blurred image of a baby with a finger in its mouth sitting at a computer. Very different, but very clever. Noob = baby. The next thing you’re going to notice are the 11 125×125 ad banners on the blog. They take up pretty much all of the top right side of blog. O.k, banners may bring in precious revenue, but I feel bloggernoob.com needs to spread the banners over the site a little more. When the site first loads, you eyes are drawn away from the content and you find yourself staring at the nice colourful banner ads. This can cause problems. A visitor might be drawn in to clicking one of the ads, this then causes Bloggernoob to loose a visitor.

I’d suggest bringing some of the brilliantly titled ”popular posts” to the top of the right side, and drop some of the non profitable or cheaper ads below that. Exposing at least some of the blog content straight away to a new visitor should benefit the blog. Another thing I might consider doing on this blog, is introducing a section displaying users who have commented the most. Bloggernoob seems to have a decent enough amount of visitors to pull this off. It might encourage people to post even more comments. Remember, If this feature starts to encourage one word comments it only takes 2 seconds to remove.

I will give the blog design a 7/10. The blog is simple enough to navigate and isn’t over populated with pointless widgets and information. I feel in order for bloggernoob.com to progress a bit further, The noob might want to consider paying someone to add that finishing touch to the blog. A better blog title design wouldn’t do any harm and a tidy up of the footer would be wise. Then again, having an average blog looking blog title and leaving areas slightly messy, might be part of the noob effect?

How is bloggernoob.com different from other blogs in the same niche?

Bloggernoob doesn’t provide you with any ground breaking money making tactics. I’m sure you will find the same sort of content plastered on 1000’s of other blogs out there. But what sets bloggernoob apart from the others for me is the way he delivers that information. When talking about advertising or building traffic, The noob makes every thing so simple. He cuts out all the jargon and boring stuff and gives you the vitals. If you have any questions about a topic, you’re 100% guaranteed a quick and intelligent response. Try getting a question answered on one of the bigger blogs out there.

Amongst the make money topics on this blog, you will sometimes come across a ”paid post”. A post where bloggernoob is paid to review a product or service. I feel if your going to do paid posts you should only really review things that are related to your blog. Most of bloggernoobs paid posts are off topic. I know this doesn’t really matter, but a new visitor might stop buy, read two posts about face cream and loose interest in the blog. Other visitors might feel they’re are being used, more traffic, higher rates for paid blog posts. I can assure you now though, that isn’t what bloggernoob is about.

Bloggernoob.com also hosts contests. Lots of contests. Some might say that The noob is straying away from the whole make money blogging game. Contests are great for attracting visitors, but with all the contests going on, is the quality of the main content suffering? Only time will tell.

Conclusion

Bloogernoob.com is a fantastic blog. It’s run by a hard working blogger who likes to help newer bloggers get in to the ”make money online” niche. At bloogernoob, you’re never going to have referral links or scam projects pushed in your face, the information your getting is mostly tried and tested by The noob and there’s a great community atmosphere. It’s very clear to see that this self proclaimed noob, is slowly turning in to a online money making master!

What more could your ask for!?

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