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

[jamestl2]

Ooooh, this thread is old.........
Still not making much money from site

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 .

[Meg]

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.

[TributeK]

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.

[westen30]

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

[jamestl2]

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.

[westen30]

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

[1000feet]

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.

[AndrewPavelski]

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

BTW>>>Interesting findings...

Originally Posted by jamestl2

Ooooh, this thread is old.........
Still not making much money from site

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 .