What I've learned since creating the "making money blogging" thread
 

Ooooh, this thread is old.........
http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/b...oney-site.html

Anyone that's curious for an update, I'm passed the $50 mark on adsense, but that's because I've been working on my new blog, lightningshock.

Other than what I wrote in the article Andreas posted there, to offer a quick summary of what I have learned since creating the thread:

Alexa, PageRank, rank checking, etc. is a useless practice. You should focus on the real people that visit your site, and write for them, not computers.

Link Exchanges, schemes, etc. are useless. See the post about it I wrote:
Top 10 Reasons Link Exchanges Aren't Important

Thinking about various writing techniques: write about something no one else has written before, write something controversial, write in a style that will attract the traffic to your site. Put yourself in your visitors shoes: Would you be willing to stay and read everything you wrote? Or if you were visiting that blog would you be likely to subscribe to its feed? So basically, try to STAND OUT from the rest as much as you can.

Don't try to rely heavily on SE Traffic, it's a free source of traffic and you should look at other ways.

Also, Do NOT look at Social Media sites for reliable traffic, a VERY small amount of it actually converts into sales and clicks, their purpose leads to my next point....

Networking, Networking, Networking, I'll say it again, Networking is what's important. When your pages are marked on sites like stumbleupon, the actual link is not what you should be focusing on, it doesn't do much in the terms of search engines, algorithms, etc. The people who SEE the link is what really counts, and other social networkers will be more likely to link to your site organically, which drive the best kind of visitors to your site, targeted traffic.

I like to think of making money from a website as "icing on the cake". Once you have the core ingredients (Great content, links you didn't even have to ask for) is when the real benefits will come in.

One final note, I've written a few posts on my lightningshock blog explaining in more greater detail about everything I've learned so far, in case anyone was curious about it :).

And commenting on other blogs is traffic too, plus readers!

I've made $18 in 3-4 days with Adsense (I've had it for about a week now). The only social media thing I'm with is Technorati. My baby-blog (haha, that's what I'm calling it now. My blog is still a baby) already has has an authority of 2 in such a short amount of time, and the only advertising I've done for my site is commenting and link in my signatures.

[Edit] As far as page rank goes, I have a Google PageRank of -1. Haha. I guess Google doesn't like me much. At least I'm not John Chow when it comes to Google.

Excellent. It's good to see that you have learned so much during this period of time. I will enjoy taking what you have learned from your experiences and applying it to my own site. Writing about something controversial is something that I have thought of before, but never really went forward with it. I guess it's because I've always been afraid of making people angry? I really gave it some thought after reading this post and it makes sense. Write about something that many people have strong opinions about, and they will be more prone to respond. Thanks for the advice.

In my experience any source of traffic is worth considering ofcourse content is king but without visitors good content counts for nothing. If you have engaging content then no matter what the source of traffic you will get readers. You mention link exchanges as being a waste of time, some of my most frequent readers have come via mutually beneficial link exchanges between myself and blogs with similar content. Never dismiss any source of traffic or technique that can increase your search engine rankings, my blog regularly appears on the first page of a google search for money making keywords, and thats because I tried lots of different methods of generating traffic and getting links to my blog. It can take a long time to happen though, for the first 6 months of blogging I only made about $40 with adsense and then I stopped blogging altogether for almost year and in that time I earnt almost $400 without writing a single post. I think this was because all the effort I had put in in the beginning was only then starting to pay off, if I had continued posting through that time I could probably made a lot more.

Excellent work though on making that first $50 it can only go up from there, just keep writing quality posts and promoting your blog where ever you can and that figure will just keep on increasing.

Good luck with the future of your blog I hope you make loads of money.
Martin

Link Exchanges are NOT good for increasing your SERPs, and Google even frowns upon them:
Link schemes

While some choose to do keyword research, link building, etc. I don't believe it is a wise time investment.

As I mentioned before, networking is *the* most important aspect of internet marketing, IMO. Some do it through blog comments, as Meg mentioned above, others do it through forum posting, like here in the Pavlina Forums, for example, along with a combination of other ideas and these.

Sorry James, I wasn't advocating link exchange schemes that involved exchangeing links with anyone and anything, but an exchange of links between 2 blogs on a similar subject can be very useful and bring in good quality traffic. I agree with you that networking is very important, but I also believe that any method that can increase the visibility of your blog should be considered.

Cheers
Martin

You have some good points - people are more important than search engines, and you need good content but you have to promote it. Things like commenting and trackbacks get you some traffic if you do them on big blogs, but if you look at blogs closer to your size as well it's easier to make a personal connection with other bloggers and be noticed. If you get another blogger to subscribe to your blog and they like it, you increase your chances of getting a direct link from a post.

My most popular article so far was a response to one on a slightly large blog with a trackback; since the blog wasn't too big lots of people followed the link. A lot of my referrals have come from comments on blogs or forums like this, but the most popular ones are when I write a longer comment that adds to the discussion or presents a new idea.

Hey James!

Congrats on site.

Just wanted to add though that I disagree with about 50% of what you posted.

WTG on posting controversial topics though! The 8 secrets is funny.

But I think you really discount linking. There's a difference in linking for major topics and long-tail results. Care to share what you show up on Google as for various keywords?

Networking will always provide a good base. I would suggest looking to make long-tail SEOs in your posts though.

IE trying to compete with SEO is like a needle in the haystack. But like the SEO wannabe could end up going ok.

Also wow congrats on the posting frequency it looks frequent.

Read the article. But I think you're taking one of those yay or nay stances. Optiziming for keywords doesn't mean writing your articles specifically for them. It means looking at what value you want your article to convey. Then choosing the right words.

Just my 2 cents though

Thanks for all the positive feedback so far everyone :)

Not quite sure why you state that. Where do I "discount linking"? I'm against partaking in link exchanges, schemes, etc., not organic linking.

As I stated before, rank checking is a useless practice, Google has thousands of datacenters it uses to calculate rankings. You could be on the first page of Google one day, then drop down to page 50 the next. I don't worry about it.

If you want to go ahead and "check my rankings" or something to see how *well* I'm doing, feel more than welcome to :).

Because?

And then I should hire a so-called "SEO Expert" because?

What do you mean by "one of those yay or nay stances"?

You could spend hours, even days, *researching keywords for Search Engines* or you could focus on writing a quality post with lots of thought put into it and giving useful info to your visitors.

IMO if you are a good writer / blogger, thinking about so-called "keywords" is an afterthought.

Here
I understand you can get high SE ranking without lots of inbound quotes on certain areas. But if you look to do it on any highly contested keywords. Yes I said it again lol. It's not going to happen without inbound links. It's just a part of the game. And if you do start to rank high it will bring you good traffic.

You can also do directory listings, albeit a majority of directories suck but there a handful worth going after.

Or why do so many website still focus on SEO because it's useless?


I couldn't care less. That's up to you.


Because it's an easier arena to compete in that you can get ranked well for and can bring in extra traffic.



This you took the wannabe out of context I think, rofl. I meant that your article SEO wannabe may be able to get ranked well because of it's name. But again I haven't looked into the SEO value of it.


Exactly what you said. It's an afterthought instead of part of the process to you.

I'm not saying oh yea let me keep looking up words that have a lot of SEO value.

What I'm proposing is think up what you want your article to be about. Outline it. Then spend some time looking up what keywords you may include in place of other words. Then write your article.

For instance what if no one search for SEO when you use it. Would your article lose any value by spelling out Search Engine Optimization? Or if you used Search Engine Friendly when people are really searching for SEF?

But in all honestly I don't care. Was just trying to give some food for thought. Take it as you will.

-OJ

Thanks for your some of your clarifications, OJ :)

If you have a website with Great Content, then you don't really need to focus on SEO. Just let the SE's do their job, IMO.

Most of them (if not all) do suck. None I ever submitted to (way back when I was first starting out) have ever helped me out in a serious way.

Then why'd you ask for them?

Easier than what?


I can understand that SE traffic may bring returning visitors (I discovered Steve's Blog through Google, for example. But I don't know how much SEO he did for it.)

Overall, my point here is that it's better to "create value" for your audience and network with others rather than focusing on tactics that try to game the search engines (which won't survive in the long-term).

I'd agree that "creating value" is of greater long term benefit to a website than simply adapting it to be seo friendly. While seo will help get people to find your website, it is ultimately the value you provide which dictates whether people read it and come back or not.

Unfortunately my blog (Total Wellbeing) is still to young to really say that it is personally the case for me, but i'd like to think that I create valuable articles and that in the long-term I will benefit for focussing on value over seo.

Samuel, I don't believe a blog is ever too young for this to be the case. From the time you start putting links where others will see them (hopefully next to more well-written ideas) people will start to see your blog. If you already have a few recent articles that are interesting you might get early subscribers; if you're more focused on search engines you'll probably have people clicking on the links, reading a few paragraphs, and leaving. From the time the first real person other than you sees your blog you need something good to keep their attention; since the entire point of search engines is to bring people to your blog that should come first.

You might think that search engines are a much faster way to build traffic but for any terms that have a lot of searches it will take a while to be visible in the results.

I'd have to agree that Alexa is bologna...

BTW>>>Interesting findings...

I used the words 'focus on SEO' once and I didn't mean that I was advocating only focusing on SEO. I said:

And there was more with quote. I meant are all the sites wrong that do try to optimize?

Other than that nowhere have I said focus on SEO. I have stated using SEO as part of the tools available to you.

A poor analogy would be if you knew people respond, or you could get more people to view with the font color 'Yellow' compared to the color 'Green'. Would you be doing a disservice writing in Yellow?

I clarified what I wrote by saying most do suck. Again here's what I said:

I added bolding for this post.

Because you're knocking Search Engines without offering anything of substance, except what you made from adsense. And that wasn't explained as to whether total, or monthly or what.


Then short-tail searching.

It's easier to get ranked IE for - 'SEO for the blog owner writer'
Then ranking for - 'SEO'

How long ago did you discover the site by chance?

And where have I said that it's better to focus on SEO than on creating valuable content? Except noted above.

I said to use SEO as part of the tools in your toolbox.

Specifically:

Please don't add words into my mouth, like 'game the search engines' which I never once mentioned. I get my foot stuck in my mouth, easy enough by myself. If you're going to say something to a different affect, quote me.

I call shenanigans :rolleyes:

What I bolded is part of SEO. It's called inbound links unless there is a <nofollow> tag. So from the beginning you should have some thoughts on relevant blogs to post your links on and any other sites/forums. Though again many may be using <nofollow> at this point and it may make the value of those links null other than people clicking on them(which can still be substantial).

But why keep discounting what search engines can offer? And why not write semantically(not saying the person doesn't already) for how people do search? Doesn't it offer more value to get readers who search looking to find topics you've written about. By learning and studying how people search.

Than to say screw you SE I don't care cause I'm doing it better???

-OJ

Nooooo..........
that's their choice if they want to do SEO or not.

I'm not *exactly* sure what you're saying here. Are you talking about this being a poor analogy of SEO?

I was agreeing with you that most suck, then I was making my own point that directory submissions are for the most part, useless.

You're putting words in my mouth, I have never "knocked the search engines" in this post, so I don't know what you're talking about.

The number I mentioned in my first post was the total amount of money I've made so far, from all my sites.

Steve's Blog?
It was around Fall of '06 or so, can't be exactly sure. I join the forums in April of '07.

Again, I never mentioned *you* said this, I was making my own point with my own opinion on the matter.

Wow, I've never seen to many small quotations before!

Everything can be a tool. Obviously, you can be the most-networked person in the world, but if your Blog software or CMS doesn't support trackbacks or comments, this will severely limit your growth rate. Conversely, if you have the most advanced SEO Wordpress template in existence but know no one, you won't have any traffic to speak of.

It's all balance. Content, Networking, Technology

And let's remember to be grateful that this technology exists and that most of these tools are free in the first place. Like Steve, I haven't shelled out a nickel on advertising, blogging software, or blog template. What a wonderful culture the internet fosters when so manny of these tools are freely available!

We are all content producers now. Historically, this is unprecedented, and it probably has certain higher ups a little freaked out. :D

I didn't know this! I thought things like Digg, SU, and such would turn into sales and clicks, due to the high volume of users wandering towards your site once a post gets picked up. :p Ah, oh well, it's an interesting side note nonetheless.

But these social networking sites did translate to permanent traffic level for me.

What's your traffic conversion rate from the SN sites? I imagine it can't very high.


Sites like Stumbleupon give traffic rate numbers like these (per day):
3 Hits
8 Hits
5 Hits
10 Hits
800 Hits
20 Hits

The traffic not only slows down your server during its peak, the traffic *rarely* converts, AND it goes away, nothing very "permanent" about it.

Quality traffic only comes from well-organized marketing campaigns, and of course, a useful product.

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I agree that networking and writing original content are the key to making your blog successful. In particuoar if you write good original articles other people will link to the article, or quote you in their blog posts. You get quite a bit of traffic from recommendations like that.

SE Traffic is very powerful when it comes to conversion but it's true that we shouldn't rely on it. SE traffic is pretty unstable but it's a still a good source of traffic.

Another good source of traffic is adwords. It is not easy but it will be very good once marketers are trained well in conversion with free traffic.

Word of mouth is another best traffic that is not easy to build but come with very high conversion.

Thanks a lot for this interesting topic