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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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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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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Page Rank?
A Google description:

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

The benefits of page rank

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

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

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

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

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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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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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As you probably know, if you’re serious about making money online, you need to be experimenting with lots of different things. Posting away on one blog everyday might bring in some pocket change, but it isn’t going to get you that big beach house in the Bahamas is it? Or is it? If you know the secret and have some evidence to back it up? I’ll happily take out a bank loan pay you a six figure sum of your choice.

Anyway, funk13 isn’t the only blog/project I’m working on. I have at least 5 projects on the go at the moment. The one I’m going to discuss here with you is the one that has failed.

The Master Plan
Not actually a master plan. More of a, lets try this and see how it works. I wanted to experiment with eBay and affiliates. I created a website intended to drive people to eBay and certain products/items. If someone purchased one of the products/items shown on my site, I would receive a commission fee. Sounds simple enough, but it isn’t. To make these types of websites work, you’ve really got to know your stuff. I thought reading a couple of eBooks on Google Adwords would make me a marketing mogul. How wrong was I? These so called eBooks that promise you endless riches are complete and utter crap. The techniques in these eBooks are old and overused. I wish I hadn’t been so naive.

Two more reasons why I failed are cost and knowledge. I was competing with guys who have been into marketing for many many years. They’ve made lots of money already. They have the funds and the the know how when it comes down to marketing an affiliate site. I think putting all my eggs in to one basket (Google) didn’t help either. I could have tried advertising on Yahoo as well.

What I’ve learned

• You must research the products you’re trying to sell. For a beginner, trying to sell something that’s hugely popular is very risky. It will probably end in failure.

• The affiliate site or product you’re working on really needs %100 of your attention. Trying to run a few blogs and an affiliate site wasn’t the best idea for a beginner.

• Never expect to succeed. Because if you fail, not only will you be a lot more disappointed, it might put you off trying again.

Final Thoughts
I will be most definitely be trying affiliate marketing again. Although I lost a few ££ promoting my products, I’ve gained a lot of valuable knowledge. I wont be writing my own eBook anytime soon, but on my next attempt, I might actually make a small amount of profit.

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If you look at my links (http://funk13.com/first-post.html) they look much better and are 100x more search engine friendly. To change your links go in to your WP admin area and click options and then click Permalinks. Under Common options click on Custom Structure. The custom structure I’m using is /%postname%.html I’ve done a little research on the best custom structure. I think the structure I’m using is the best. Others may not agree though, make sure you do your own research and find the best one for you.

There’s lots of sites giving advice on WP Permalinks. Instead of listing them all here’s the Google search term I used. Go research

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Do I need a site map ?

You may have heard people talking about site maps and be wondering if your website needs such a thing. This article discusses sitemaps and their uses.

What is a sitemap ?

A sitemap contains links to all of the pages on your website. For example my SiteMap contains links to all the major pages on our site.

Do I need a site map ?

This question is easy to answer, if you only have a small number of pages that are all linked from your home page or main navigation section then the answer is no.

All other websites should really have a sitemap, preferably linked to from their home page or navigation menu.

What use is a site map?

There are three main reasons for having a site map, the first and most important is the famed “3 click rule” that says that a good website design will allow a visitor to get from any page to any other page in 3 clicks or less. Think about it, you are on any page of your website, click on the site map (click 1) and then on the page you want to get to (click 2).

The second reason is if you use Java or Javascript for your navigation. Not every visitor will be able to use such navigation and even some search engines will never get past the first page. Having a site map allows you to put a hardcoded link on the page header/footer/navigation and lets people use the sitemap to find their way around your website.

The third reason that it helps the search engines find all the pages on your website much quicker - especially the page that is buried away with a link from a single page somewhere on your site.

How do I build a site map?

Depending on the size of your site it can be as easy as making a note of all the pages on the site and then creating a page with links to all of these pages on (preferably sorted into logical groups, for example all articles are put together in one section of the site map and all news items are in a seperate section.

Of course, if your website is getting large you might want to automate the building of the page, there are many tools available on the internet to allow you to build a site map and it’s just a matter of trying some until you find one that you like. A search on any of the major search engines will bring up plenty of choice.

What about the Google Sitemap scheme that I’ve read about ?

The Google sitemap project is planed to be an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. The idea is that you create a special file (preferably in XML format) that the Google spider reads and a way of keeping them informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.

Google claim that by using Google Sitemaps you get a better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages with fresher search results.

This article is ©2005 : John K Mitchell, more of John’s articles can be found at http://www.forestsoftware.co.uk

If you’re using WordPress like me. Heres a couple of links to some SiteMap tools.

Google SiteMap Tool
SiteMap Generator

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