Make the Most of your Vacation

Christmas and New Year's vacation provide a great chance to create some content for your make money blogs and websites. Your real job takes a considerable amount of time, and time is a commodity you need most if you want to make money on the Internet.

Once vacation starts, you suddenly have tons of time on your hands. In addition, if you travel to new and exotic locations, you can dig up plenty of new ideas to help populate your site. Be sure to bring along a notebook, or small computer that will allow you to jot down a few ideas as you travel.

Make Money with Search Engines

Keep posting! The search engines will eventually find you. Your blog post will have a better chance of getting a higher page rank if you keep the posts in line with the overall content on your blog. Make money bloggers usually write about every thing under the sun, and there site ranking suffers. It is bust to concentrate on one topic and stay on track. Once you get 100 posts or so under your belt you will start to see some search engine traffic.

How do you know if you are getting search engine traffic? That's easy, sign up for Google Analytics! Once your account is set up, you will need to install a small piece of code as a widget on your blog. It is an easy process. Google Analytics will create daily reports of who is visiting your blog, and where they are coming from. After a while, you will start to see trends in the data. For example, the most popular keywords that are used for searches will begin to pop out.

I have noticed that even though this little make money blog has just a few posts, it is starting to see a little bit of search engine traffic. All with less then 30 posts! Not too shabby. It is not easy being a penny blogger! For now, this penny blogging site is not really my main money maker. I actually have more visitors coming to some of my other sites that cover topics that have nothing to do with making money on the Internet

When I I started out, I had a ton if different blogs, covering all kinds of topics. I had a hard time keeping them up to date. I have cut down the number of sites I maintain dramatically, and devote my time to just a few posts per week to a few sites. The sites center on more current events, so most of what ends up there, will show up in a search engine or two.

Holiday Drop in Traffic

Holiday traffic is something we all have to deal with when want to go out and get Christmas gifts for our loved ones. Cars cutting each other off, angry words and shaking fists. Ahh, the joys of Christmas.

Traffic is also something we have to deal with as Christmas approaches if we want to make money on the Internet. As Christmas approaches there is a definite drop in Internet traffic. This is because the online shopping is done. No time ship, so instead of online shopping, most people are hitting the pavement to actual stores to do their shopping to fill in any last minute Christmas requests.

If you are suddenly noticing a drop in traffic to your site, take it in stride. It is most likely because most people are not shopping online and are using the search engines much less. This is especially true during the evening hours. I have observed a modest drop in traffic to my sites over the last week. This was quite different from the weekend after Thanksgiving when my traffic stats went sky high (well at least for me!)

I suspect that traffic will pick up once again when the holidays are over.

There are a couple of things you can do to get around the traffic loss during the holidays. If you still have the writing bug, go ahead and write away! If you focus on current news events to drive traffic to your site, then the hits will certainly take a hit. It may not be worth your time to try to catch the latest Google Trends.

Look to write about content that will last through the ages. Focus on writing what is called "Evergreen" topics. These are things that are popular throughout the year. You can hone your craft by taking the time to learn about something new and focus in on that topic.

Interact with your fanbase

Social networking within your blog comments section is a big part of making money with blogs. If you write interesting content, and readers begin to actually believe some of what you say, then you will start to develop what I call a "blog fan base."

What is a "blog fan base?" Well, its return customers. People who subscribe to your newsfeeds, leave comments, leave you threatening e-mails, or praises, etc.

People may love what you say, or they may hate it. It really does not matter. If they are visiting your site, then they are making you money. The best way to make money online is to write about controversial topics, or take an adversarial role. People will be bound to leave comments. If you do find yourself getting comments, be sure to respond to them! You want to keep it going, because all it does it get you more hits.

Some the best money making websites out there are forums that deal with specific topics. If you get your blog to be a sounding board for topics, then you are in business.

The Magic 100 Post Threshold

I run a couple of blogs that are centered on specific content. These are all located on blogger.com, so I do not pay a penny for them, other than the time that I spend posting on them. Hence the name of this blog, penny blogging.

I chose a specific topic are that I am interested in, or interested in learning more about, and use the research that I use to create blog posts the gain more knowledge about the topic area.

Or, if you are fan of a particular celebrity, you can use that person as a platform to spout your views on his or her behavior in the limelight. I myself am not particularly fond of that method, since I do not wish to take advantage of other peoples fortunes or mis-fortune. But it one of the easiest ways to build traffic, especially if you watch google trends to develop your content.

If you want to increase your google page rank (If you are reading THIS blog, then YOU ARE!), it is important to use labels and link back to content that is located within your site to the targeted content. I do not practice this a whole lot here, but if you want to make money online, then you should put this into practice. See, I just did it!

There are also other ways, like getting links from high rated sights. Some MMO bloggers make you pay for the link backs from there higher rated sites to help boost your sites rankiongs. I will not waste my money paying for a link, but if someone were to make an offer, I certainly would take the money ;). On the whole, the whole link back method that MMO bloggers use is a pretty big pyramid scheme, on a grand scale, and on the Internet.

The best way to get page rank, is content. You need at least 100 good quality posts, that contains useful information. This takes time, but can easily be done of you sit down and jot a few notes centered around a specific topic. Then develop a list of titles for your topical posts and just write them down. Title 1, Title 2, Title 3, etc. Then create a series of articles of about 100 to 200 words each.

The great thing about most blogging software like wordpress and blogger.com is that you can write all your articles on a Saturday afternoon, and then schedule their release over the next week or two. This way it looks like you are an active blogger. Your blog newsfeed is kept up to date and your readers will keep coming back for more throughout the week.

Before you know it, you hit 100 posts. Once you hit that 100 post threshold, you will start to see your daily hit count go up!

Making Money Online

Well this 'ol blog is still kicking. I am going to resurrect it and give it a new name to expand it out to not only include penny blogging, but also mention some posts about making money online.

Get rich schemes do not work and it really is a waste of time to try to scam the system. I will see if there is anything that works with only time as an investment, and them post the results here.

I have several other blogs as well as an account at Associated Content. They pulled in a couple of hundred bucks in advertising revenue over the past year. There were times when I put a lot of effort in the sites. A few times I took a couple of months off. It is really hard to gauge if it was worth the effort.

Like Most Make Money Bloggers...

I guess I am like most make money bloggers... when the bucks don't roll in, you quit after a couple of months. It really is silly to think that there are actually people out there that make money writing crappy blog posts. Well, I have been pulling in about $2 or $3 dollars a month, even with this crappy blog, a website, and a few other blogs that I have paid absolutely zero attention to. The website has been totally on the back burner, but it still gets 30 or forty hits a day. The other blogs do as well.

So, I guess with a little bit of attention, you can pull in a few more bucks.

Cash report for February and up through Mid-March

Adsense cash flow was pretty steady for the month of February, with income at around $3.85. Not too bad, considering there has been zero marketing done with any of my blog sites, other than an occasional Entrecard plug. It is certainly not great either. For these sites, I have been relying solely on search engine hits. So far for the month of March, I am on track to make about the same amount as February's result.

Last month, I did devote considerable more time to writing for Associated Content. I made about $70 of of 20 or so articles. The cash return for Associated Content is not bad considering you do not have to spend any time at all marketing your site. The visitor's just come and you get paid.

Making Money Process is Slow

I have put off make money blogging this month and cut down the number of posts I have made this month to all of my make money blogging sites. It is not that I have given up. It just because I started looking at other ways to make a few bucks online. Most "make money bloggers" last about 2 months and then close up shop after they fail to pull in the big bucks.

I am not really looking to make big bucks, but have a much more realistic approach, looking to make some pennies. So far my income for February on my "penny-blogs" is about on the same track as it was back in January, despite cutting the number of posts drastically.

So what distracted me? Well, I started writing a few more articles for Associated Content, and have looked to them as a revenue source. AC is a content driven site that pays its users to post articles, videos, audio, and pictures. AC then takes your content and places their own advertising and pays you a part of their revenue stream.

For pre-paid articles, you can be paid up to $1 to $8 bucks, based on their keyword content and then get a continuing performance pay of $1.50 per 1000 page views. The key to success is to write content that is optimized for search engines, and will get high advertising income. So far I have made about $100 bucks by posting various articles.

AC is a quicker way to make money then penny blogging, and I will keep at it and keep you posted.

January Numbers

I took a short break from blogging. To be honest, I have not stopped searching for ways to make money blogging, just trying a few different things. One was through trying Associated Content. This sort of a pay for blogging site that concentrates a little more on the news side of things. I'll have more on that in a later post.

I have been a little discouraged by the numbers (aka Money!) coming in via Adsense. I know it has only been a few months, and I always talk about persevering and setting goals, but it has been tough to keep motivated.

I guess I am at the point where all make money bloggers reach, and quit! However, I do not plan on quitting just yet. I made numerous posts through the first half of January to my various blog sites. However, my numbers consider to decline in terms of money with Google Adsense.

My hits have also declined a bit as well. Not sure why this may be happening, but I will get back in track and keep at it.

By the way, here is the money I made for January: $3.62

Down a bit from the $4.00 I made in December. I made tons more money on Associated Content. More on that later.

A Project Wonderful Experiment

The other day I decided to take a little plunge and advertise one of my blogs on the highest rated traffic site on Project Wonderful. This is Friendster Layouts, and they sport well over 1 million unique hits per day. I was able to advertise for just a dollar! Imagine, advertising to 1 million viewers over a day for just one dollar.

Sure it is untargeted marking, like putting a billboard out on the information superhighway. But a million views is a million views. Actually, after my total one dollar expenditure I ended up with about 1.3 million surfers seeing the ad. Project Wonderful takes care of those statistics for you.

A total of about 130 unique people clicked through my add visited my blog. That came out to about half a penny a click through. Not too shabby at all. I seemed to have picked a a few new readers that have subscribed to my feed as well. I guess it was worth the dollar.

Maybe I will try this with one of my other blogs sometime down the road. It may be a little while since I am rather cheap when it comes to advertising!

Return Traffic

Traffic is the most important aspect for any blog that you wish to monetize. A blog is basically a searchable database that is indexed by Google or Yahoo, and your goal is to populate that database with as much juicy information as you possible can. You want your content to rank higher than others so it is important to center your "data" around a few popular terms that will get noticed. There are certain techniques that you can use to get your rankings higher, that may be covered in a later post.

There is another aspect to getting traffic that cannot be ignored. That is the idea of return traffic. To get return traffic, then your "data" must be presented in a coherent form that the reader will understand. If you sprinkle in the right kind of humor into your post, then they just may bookmark your site, subscribe to your feed, or subscribe to an email from your site. This is probably the toughest part for theblog publisher. The writing part takes a lot of practice.

Also, do not be bashful about asking people to subscribe to your feed, or email updates! So here goes, if you like what you read here, go ahead and sign up for my feed here, or subscribe for automatic email updates! Thanks.

Overcome Writers Block - Use Google News

Basically, all bloggers are freelance writers. If you want to make money blogging, then you must be ready to put a lot the things down on paper, and do so in an understandable manner. There are some make money bloggers out there there are actually pretty good writers and they have put together some pretty informative blogs. Do I consider myself a good writer? Who knows! Maybe, but then again maybe not. You can be the judge of that. One thing is for sure, I am going to keep trying, and posting about the different subject areas that I have selected to base my blogs around.

Sometimes I get it right, and write the perfect post with the right keywords that has hundreds of hits per month. But most of the time, I just post what's on my mind, and do not get the best hits. The key is to at least remember to sprinkle a keyword or two into the post to keep your SEO up.

So, what do I do when I can not think of anything to write? The first place I visit is Google News. Google News is a service that is slightly different than the standard Google search. Google News monitors over 4500 news outlets for the most current material and breaking news. I visit this sight and look for breaking news by searching with one of the keywords that I have a blog set up for.

For example, If I have a blog about Ford Mustangs, but can not thing I anything to write about, I try this search. The results returned will provide that latest and greatest out there on the web. I look for twists in the news, perhaps offering my perspective on certain new items and weave a blog post out of it. You can search just about anything on Google News and at least find something to write about.

Penny Blogging and Google Page Rank

The BlogSphere has been abuzz about the recent Google Page Rank update. The Google Page Rank occurs several times a year, usually about every quarter. Your Google Page Ranks affects how your blog pages appear in search result and generally runs on a scale from 1 to 10. There are several websites where you can go and check your results.

After the recent update I went out and check several of my blogs. Most are too young to even appear in the results. They came up as N/A, including this penny-blogging site. I do have a couple of blogs that are a little older, and did not notice any change in their numeric value.

One of my more established blogs (well not really established) has a rank of 1 and its value remained unchanged. However, even though the value has not changed, I have noticed that the number of searches that I get from Google on this site has dropped precipitously. This is not a good omen. I still am getting pretty good traffic on this site due to RSS feed readership.

Not sure if blogs in general have just got an overall downgrade in rank from Google perspective, and I would be interested in any comments. Therefore, there is a little poll for you on the sidebar.

Waiting for Blogs to "Mature"

For new blogs, you are going to see a limited income. In other words, you are probably not going to make squat the first couple of months. You need to build links, posts, and traffic .

Most affiliate services will turn your blog applications down since you lack Google page rank, and have a limited presence on the web. I have set up a bunch of different blogs that are focusing on certain keywords, and I am going to try to make a little money. So far, I have one pretty well established blog, and the others are slowly coming along. Some have made more progress than others. Since they focus on a variety of different topics, I have only found certain time that I have been interested in posting to them.

Waiting for sites to mature can be a long agonizing process, because you are not seeing any fruits of your labor. This is why it is important to stay focused and remain positive. Another key is to remember your goal, and keep posting.

In addition, the time will come to start to market your site. So far, I have done very little, other than adding the sites to Entrcard.

Income Reports for November and December

I have set up about 7 blogger type blogs, and also have my own hosted website that I have placed Adsense and Project Wonderful advertising on. I also have a couple of more blogs set up that are getting ready to be monetized once I have a few more posts, and they have aged a bit.

At the start of the month, I was on fire, posting nearly every day on the blogs, but have tailed off a little towards the end of the month. Holidays. They mess everything up. But supposedly the News Years Resolution is supposed to correct all of that. Right.

I think that the holidays may also have lead to less net surfing, as everyone was out buying their last minute gifts. I have noticed that Internet traffic to my sites are on the decline, despite my efforts to add more content. Revenue is down, and the earnings per visit are also down.

Another possibility could be that this is a sure sign that the economy is taking a downturn. Less money is being spent on advertising. It it tough to gauge whether my measly income that I earn from these blogs would be a good indicator of advertising dollars spent, but I take it as sort of a bad sign.

I made $5.84 in November on Adsense, and in December this value dropped down to $4.60. On ProjectWonderful I got about the same numbers. I earned about $0.10 in November, but this value has dropped down to around $0.05 per day. It seems that there is something going on, and I will keep an eye on this trend.

I am hoping that it is just a holiday blip and things will move upwards from here as I continue to add content and think of more ways to generate income.

Still have not decided if I will try PayPerPost or Smorty yet. I may go for it on a couple of sites once they have reached maturity. They generally need 20 posts and need to be greater than 90 days old, and I have not reached that criteria yet on any of my blogs except for one, and I would like to keep that one PPP free, as it gets good search results.