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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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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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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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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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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Your host sucks
Your hosting company may be the main cause of your sloth like blog. If you’re on paid hosting and your blog is slow, the best thing to do is email them and ask them what the hell is going on. Be polite but straight to the point. If they tell you it’s a temporary glitch give them a week to sort it out. If that week is up and there’s no real change, tell them your going to move hosts. This has worked for me in the past. Hosting companies hate bad reviews and they don’t want to loose your $7 a month.

Free hosting may be attractive, but at the end of the day it’s free. Your free hosting company has no real obligation to provide you with 100% up time and turbo charged loading times. If you moan at a free host most of the time you’ll get told to shut up and to lump it or leave it. If you’re serious about your blog you really need to get your ass over to a paid host. Paid hosting isn’t that expensive, I pay $9.95 a month for another one of my sites which is on the middle of rage hosting package.

Java Script
A lot of widgets, ad banners, news readers etc use JavaScript. Having to many of these will slow down your blog. Some of them eat up a lot of resources, some are poorly coded and some just refuse to load. Think to yourself, do I really need to be displaying my local weather on my blog? I doubt anyone really pays any attention to it.

Flash
Blogs full of flash sometimes cause a persons CPU memory usage to shoot through the roof. You have to remember that not everyone on the internet has a twin turbo charged p.c with a 100mb broadband connection. Obviously, if you’re a flash games blog, you’re going to need to display lots of flash but there’s lots of things you can do to prevent flash lag. Google is your friend. Here’s one example. If you’re displaying games on your front page why not take a screen shot of the game and place it on the front page instead of the actual game? Then just make sure the screen shot is linked to the page where the actual flash game is displayed.

Audio/Video
A lot of people hate videos, nearly all hate audio on blogs. Do you really need to be playing music on your blog? Apart from slow loading times, videos and audio have scared the crap out of me many a time. If Audio and Video are essential for your blog, the least you can do is give the visitor the option to play it or not. Doing so will help loading times and it will save a lot of people from having to change their underwear. Never have them set to auto start.

Images
Images are only a problem if you haven’t reduced the file size and the image size. If you have a huge image, resize the thing, or display it as a thumbnail nail first and then display it on its own page. File size is also important, the larger the size of the file the slower it will load. I use photoshop for all of my image editing, when it’s time to save an image, I always make sure the preview is of medium quality. I never display the full high quality image on my front page.

These are just a few ideas, there are many many more. Just remember, if your blog looks and loads well for you it doesn’t neccessarily mean it’s going to be the same for your visitors. Always remember to test your blog on I.E and Firefox as well. But that’s only if the option is available to you.

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