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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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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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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Because I’m still a blogging noob, I only really get traffic that I generate myself. People are starting to come via Google and the other search engines, but my SE stats are nothing to write home about. Anyway, an example of traffic I generate myself would be, posting helpful advice on a forum and leaving a sneaky link to my blog. Commenting on lots and lots of blogs also brings in a few visits. Like I said though, I’m still a noob, loosing a lot of traffic makes me feel like I’m starting out again. Not good for morale. I think next time I decide to take a holiday, I’ll definitely have someone post for me or I’ll ask a friend to post a draft I’ve written. Game on!

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Happy easter all.

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• In the 5 days Analytics has been running I’ve been averaging 70 unique visits a day. But that comes with a 69% bounce rate.

• In my first week I’ve earned $2

• Funk13.com has an Alexa traffic rank of: 2,662,712 (Not the best)

• Funk13 doesn’t have a Google page rank yet

• I’m using 12.5 mb of space out of a possible 5000 (5 gig)

• I’ve used 271 mb of monthly bandwidth out of a possible 300,000 (300 gig)

• My Technorati authority is 1 and 1 person has added me to favorites

• It costs 83 ec’s to place an Entrecard as on my blog

That’s all the stats I can think of at the moment. Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of posting stats each week.

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With very little traffic coming in at the moment, I’m going to have to instantly impress visitors. And the only way I’m going to impress this early in the game is by having rock solid content. Writing a book for each post isn’t necessary. It’s about keeping the content fresh, informative and interesting. Over the next month I’m going to set a 5 post maximum a day limit and then reduce that to 3 for the next month. Hopefully this should give me a nice back log of content and a fuller looking site.

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