Trying To Make Money Blogging

As I mentioned in my previous post, Funk13.com has been going backwards rather than forwards. I’m seeing blogs that are much younger than mine making money and pulling in decent traffic. A lot of bloggers will tell you to give up and find a new niche to blog in if after 3 months you’re still not generating any income from your make money online/blogging blog. I do agree with them, but that should only be applied if you’ve been working your ass off 24/7 and you’re still not getting anywhere. For about the last month and a half I’ve been working on other things. Funk13 has been relying on Organic traffic. I haven’t done any promoting, the same goes for advertising, I’ve done absolutely nothing to help this blog. I’m not lazy, far from it, the main problem was time. The lack of it. I am definitely cut out for the make money online world. If some guy can earn 30k a month for chatting bullshit why can’t I? O.k, 30k might be to optimistic, but still, it’s only the internet! It’s not like I’m planning a trip to mars is it?

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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A lot of bloggers will tell you that there just isn’t enough time in the day to do the things they want with their blogs. It’s even worse if you’re like me and you have lots of other little side projects on the go too. Lately, with this blog, I seem to be heading backwards rather than forwards. The biggest goal for me with Funk13 was to achieve a page rank, last week after 3+ months of blogging I finally struck gold and received a nice PR3. I’m guessing that achieving this would spur a lot of bloggers on? With me however, it hasn’t really changed anything. I’m still not really interested in Monetizing this blog, I’m still not really worried about the drop in traffic, and I’ve noticed that I’m not really interacting enough with the people who still do visit this blog.

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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Some blogs are big, some blogs are small, some make $10000’s and some weren’t created for making money at all. (I’m no poet) But when you think about it, they all have the two major things in common, blogs enable you to share your thoughts on a certain topic or a wide range of topics, and blogs give your visitors the chance to voice their opinions on what ever it is that’s been discussed. It’s a pretty simple formula really. Lets forget about making money, Increasing your traffic, getting backlinks and so on. I’m going back to the beginning with this post. I’m going to look at probably the most important thing to do with blogging, the blog itself.

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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