WooHoo! Finally did it! Moved this blog from Blogger to Wordpress Direct!
First things first – I have changed the title of the blog from Blog Along With Me to Blog Income Life. This is the third reincarnation of this blog, and here are the reasons for the change of title, and for that matter, the domain name.
Now that I have Market Samurai software and increasing familiarity with its use and application, it is so easy to do research. Ideally the research is done BEFORE setting up the blog but it can also be of benefit after the fact as you can then fine tune or, for that matter, drop your site/niche if it is neither profitable nor likely to be.
Its all about keywords. Having gone through the Thirty Day Challenge this summer I have developed a whole new level of respect for these little tidbits. Keywords is what the internet spiders or “bots” dine out on and they are eventually what drives traffic to your site. I have learned that these little critters like it when the main keyword shows up in your domain name – and be sure to sprinkle the word(s) liberally in the introduction section of your blog. You get points for these little details and the reward is a higher position in the search engine’s rankings.
The keywords we choose to fight for should have a combination of daily searches, traffic to sites, competition and an estimated dollar value according to Google adwords/adsense. If the daily searches are high and there is a lot of competition, then it will be a long time before your site earns a top spot in the search engines’ rankings. This is cause for frustration at the least and no earnings at the worst.
So lets take a look at my previous title:
Blog Along With Me.
What attracted me to the title in the first place was the invitation for visitors to, well, blog along with me, do what I do, build a blog and make a dollar or two and hopefully more. It was an experiment in putting to use that which I had learned up to then. I had a secondary agenda and that was to organize what I had learned and to fill in the holes along the way. It did that. It also prompted me to publish my first e.book, ABC’s of Blogging for Money.
Parsing the phrase, “Blog” is the main keyword. According to the statistics that Market Samurai dug up for me there are more than two million daily searches for the word, and over two billion web pages globally that mention the word. Top spots are held by Blogger, Wordpress and other entrenched sites. No hope of ever getting top billing for that word.
The phrase itself referred to in IM language as the “long tail” was at polar opposites, in other words abysmal. Most searches had to do with sing along with me.
Now lets compare some of the options I was looking at:
I could have gone with ABC’s of Blogging for Money, or just plain ABC’s of Blogging as I own both domains but I already have these for my e.book for which I have a second career in mind.
Here are some numbers for Blog Income:
Blog Income is already a crowded playing field as I expected it to be. Needless to say Blog Income was not available as a domain so I added the word “life”. The profitability from an Adsense point of view is nothing to write home about. I think I will experiment and see if the results will be any better than they have been in the past – if not, Adsense will be removed from this blog.
The numbers go against the grain of what I have been taught: start as a big fish in a small pond and you stand a better chance of a healthy krill diet – read that as dollars or income. I knew from the outset that I was up against some giants in the game, but that is the game I want to play, so be that as it may. I visit with the giants and pick up from them. They are my role models.
After crunching numbers, keywords and using some of the other features of Market Samurai I realize why it has been such an uphill battle to grow the traffic to my blog. Look at the former site as if it was straddling two bodies of water – one was the Atlantic Ocean and I but a minnow, the other was a mere puddle in the road searched for by no one!
Armed with research the following steps have been taken or are in progress:
1. Decided to fight for top billing with search engines for the keywords Blog Income
2. Found a domain name that has the keywords at the front end
3. I will continue to inject other important keywords, such as blogging for money in my postings with the thought that eventually I will receive a ranking for both.
Will I lose the traffic that is currently going to Blog Along with Me? NO. I will redirect that domain to point to the new one so that anyone looking for my old site will be redirected here. Stats will continue. Everything will go along as before.
It is a good life!
Happy Blogging!
Valentina
PS… yes, the cheese rolls on!
and his course.
