Blog Income Life

Archive for September, 2009

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!

At the crossroads of Crisis and Desperation entrepreneurs are born. It’s true. Tough times bring out the latent entrepreneurial spirit in all of us. Whether that spirit moves us to successful entrepreneurship is up to you. It’s akin to leading a horse to water.

I believe there are two types of entrepreneurs. There is the A type of entrepreneur, the individual who may have tried the nine to five but couldn’t stomach the stifling atmosphere. Typically this type of person has an innate restlessness, an impatience for something bigger and better and quite honestly, does not make for a good employee. Such a person has a different agenda. You see such a person in the faces of Richard Branson, Warren Buffet and Phillip Knight.

Lesser known and flying under the radar of visibility is the entrepreneur who becomes one out of necessity, or, for want of a better term, the B type of entrepreneur. These are legion and account for a significant portion of multi-millionaires – not a bad place to be financially. Faced with economic uncertainty they actively cast about for opportunities and finding them take action. Today that opportunity is writ large on the internet and the entrepreneur born is often a blogger.

Blogging for money is the easiest introduction to making money online. Everyone can write, the cost is negligible and it is a user friendly introduction to cutting your teeth in the field of Internet Marketing. In fact knowing what I now know, after having taken several internet marketing courses, were I starting in Internet Marketing today, I would definitely start with blogging.

A word of caution though, you need to do more than just publish posts on your blog. If you want to make money blogging you need to treat it as a business. There are some basics that need considering:

1. Select a niche
2. Select the blogging platform
3. Monetize your site
4. Market, market, market.

Each of these basic to the bones steps form the foundation upon which you will build your business. That is why I wrote the e.book ABC’s of Blogging for Money which you can download in PDF format for free.

Once you get the basics down pat you can expand, bit by bit and eventually become a super blogger pulling in at the very least a mid-six figure annual income.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina Bellicova
Blogger for Money

Blogging is all about getting your own cheese.

Quick Lins:
ABC’s of Blogging for Money

Happy Labor Day everyone! Last days of summer barbeques and the wearing of white. Hmmm…I will continue to wear white.

Here in Vancouver the weather has decidedly cooled from just a few weeks ago when we were melting from the heat … yes, they were scraping us off the sidewalks then! I love working from my home office which looks out on a grove of oak trees. The leaves haven’t even got a hint of rust anywhere, they are green as green can be. It won’t be long though before the squirrels start coming to gather the acorns of which there will be plenty.

I always look at Labor day which usually is a bit earlier in September (I guess September 7th is as late as it can be)as the beginning of a new year. To me this is more of a new year than January. I guess it goes back to school. We always started a new grade or “year” in September and finished in June, with the summer off for fun. I still do that now with my business. I have noticed that this is also a time when people start new things – not make resolutions like they do on New Year’s Day, but things like signing up for a course on something they’ve always wanted to learn, or sign up for a new activity like fencing or aerobics.  Corporations typically ramp up their efforts in sales and marketing to finish the year strong … statistically October and November are the most productive months of the year, both in business and personal lives.

Ok… enough of the musing already.

Found a site today that publishes blog incomes of bloggers who, well, publish their incomes publicly. I wrote last week that I was going to try and compile such a list well Jeremia Froyland has done it. I noticed that the big earners were absent, Jeremia and I had a little bit of online conversation about that and agreed that when you start pulling in the really big bucks, a la John Chow, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak to name just a few (easily in the half mil a year league)then you stop publishing. Privacy and other things come into play. So the big guns are missing but it will be interesting to see the incomes of the current list members rise over time. Hmmmm….. gee, I’d like to be on that list soon … and then earn to the point where I will stop publishing.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

I guess acorns are like cheese for the squirrels

Quick Links:
Jeremia Froyland

As I was doing some research on the top bloggers blogging for money, I came across a posting by one of my “follow” bloggers, the author of The Digerati Life which is a whole year old but the thread of comments keeps lengthening. Here is the link to her post titled
Make Money Blogging: Top Bloggers And How Much They Earn

Of course the stats need updating, notably her own. Two years into blogging she was making 50% of her corporate income as an IT engineer in Silicon Valley. That can’t be too shabby. It is now three years. Is she at 75%?

This is the time of month that bloggers who publish their monthly results … well, err..publish. So I am putting together a list of my own, which will not be a complete list, but its one to start with.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS… today, blogging for cheese!

Quick Links
The Digerati Life
Make Money Blogging: Top Bloggers And How Much They Earn

August was a busy month. I have three distinct income streams and they all needed chunks of time. My internet marketing time chunks were devoted mostly to 30 Day Challenge. I thought that this blog would suffer. Looking at the graphs I’m actually quite pleased – 38% increase in visitors from July! The graph above is one that is a comparative between August and July. The green line being July and the blue August.

Considering that August is the slowest month for business whether it is on the internet or in the “real” world I am quite pleased that the numbers are up. This is the first month that not a single day passed by without a visitor – NO ZERO DAYS! That is a milestone for me. That spike up there for August 10 reflects the day that Google picked up one my postings and included it in its Google Alerts for the keyword phrase “Blogging for money.”

Search engine traffic is way down. Another encouraging factor. When the search engines begin to deliver the 8% – 12% traffic I have been receiving in the past few months then the visitor stats should increase.

Top three blog postings to date:
1. Yes Virginia, there is money in blogging
2. 30 Day Challenge More Like 30 Days of Christmas
3. Rock Stars at Frank Kern’s Mass Control

I am also encouraged by the increasing number of downloads for my ABC’s of Blogging for Money e.book.

Earnings were paltry. No affiliate sales. Adsense not even at $3! I came across a blog that posted the top 10 blog earners and I was going to put a link to that post here as I wanted you to see that there’s money in them thar blogs, but then I noticed that some of the top earners were not mentioned. It’s hard to come by hard data but maybe what I’ll do for next first of the month report is come up with my own top ten blog earners. This info is based on those bloggers who publish their monthly results.

Its time to move on. I have started the process of moving this blog to Wordpress. The shenanigans behind the scenes will take a while since I am doing this myself, so the new look won’t be up for a week or two, but I am both excited and looking at the exercise with trepidation: excited as I will be able to make immediate comparisons between the two platforms, trepidation: because it means more learning or at least perfecting the Wordpress Direct system which is quite different from that of Blogger.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS… What cheese?

Quick Links
ABC’s of Blogging for Money
There’s Money in Them Thar blogs
1. Yes Virginia, there is money in blogging
2. 30 Day Challenge More Like 30 Days of Christmas
3. Rock Stars at Frank Kern’s Mass Control

Ewen Chia is one of my favorite Internet Marketing Gurus … I have been receiving his newsletters for some time now, bought the book How I Made My First Million on the Internet and How You Can Too!: The Complete Insider’s Guide to Making Millions with Your Internet Business and his course.

What I really like about Ewen is the easy to follow, step by step instructions on how to do something. I mean it’s like learning ABC’s.  As mentioned many times here, anything techie and my spine stiffens (I am getting better). When I first started looking at Wordpress, I found it a bit of challenge. I downloaded several e.books/instructions on how to install, upload, download, FTP and all that stuff.  Frustration set in. Then I remembered it was part of Ewen’s course that I had (at the time this part of the course was beyond my capability, so I left it alone). I quickly went to my files, opened the videos, and voila! Easy as a cake walk! I now refer to them all the time.

Why am I telling you all this (and isn’t today the “statistics” day for August?

Yes … it is.

But the reason I am telling you this is because Ewen has just launched his Secret Affiliate Weapon 2.0. I knew it was being launched today so was watching my Inbox like a hawk as I wanted to grab a copy of it quickly.

Affiliate marketing is my next step in developing my internet marketing muscles and it should be yours too. It’s the natural progression to making money. I like Ewen’s easy to follow style. As I write this, I am busy downloading. All I can say is that if this is only half as easy/good as Ewen’s other stuff, it will take my internet marketing up a notch or two … or ten!

What hooked me on this is that this is an automated system. After doing the 30 Day Challenge I am on the lookout for anything that will save me time and help me generate a PASSIVE INCOME … Ewen says this is the same system that he uses to generate $18,291.75 per month from ONE affiliate product!

OK. I’m game. But I was SHOCKED at the price … you will be too! I think the boy has lost his marbles or his brain has turned to mush. I am certain it will not last at this price for too long. I recommend, without reservation that you go and get your own copy of the Secret Affiliate Weapon 2.0

Happy Blogging … and Affiliate Marketing!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS. This is cheese is rare.

Quick Links

Secret Affiliate Weapon 2.0

How I Made My First Million