Yesterday, at my monthly Smart Thinking Marketing Group meeting,  I met someone who did that in what?  SIX … 6 … MONTHS! YES!  This is 6, SIX, half a year!

Gustavo Garcia and his colleagues began their project this summer … so whether that was June, July or sometime earlier, is somewhat besides the point, the point is, in something like six months, they sold their online business for an undisclosed amount.  Sweet!

Gustavo  was our keynote speaker.  He told us how he had an idea that would improve efficiencies and the bottom line by the millions for the call center industry.  He tapped a few chosen former colleagues and  the Discreet Math Group was born.   What is so unique about this success story is that the marketing was entirely social media based.  They launched their product with a blog. As theirs was a business directed product, Gustavo relied heavily on LinkedIn which is the social media of choice for business and then went on to connect with Facebook and Twitter.  Here is the crazy figure that made my head swirl: in hard, actual, cash outlay, it cost them a total of $76.20!

I think that this is the penultimate in living the blog income life! Granted these gents weren’t exactly newbies.  They each pack some serious credentials behind them that go back some twenty years in internet marketing/technology, but you gotta love the speed of this success story.

Here is one other interesting fact.  Shane Morgan who owns and facilitates the Smart Thinking Marketing Group relied on social media searches to find Gustavo!

Time to head back to LinkedIn and polish up your profile and open accounts with Facebook and Twitter if you haven’t done so yet.

Here’s to your future headline:  “Sold!  For an Undisclosed Amount!”

Valentina
Lots of good cheese in social media!

We are a rag tag group.  Most everyone is in internet marketing.  There are people who are already successful with full blown companies and employ staff.  Others are employed  in IM or IT and moonlight on their own online businesses when not at the nine to five.  Then there are people like me – apprentices, and still others who have only just dipped their toes into this wonderful, mystical world.  For some IM is still very much a part time gig, for others their livelihood.  Everyone seems to have a blog or wants to get one started and develop a blog income business. We sit in as many chairs as can be crammed into the room, perch on anything that might give our bods some support or just lean against the wall. At some point in our lives we were all infected with the entrepreneur bug and now can’t shake the addiction – moreover, we don’t really want to.  Oh yeah, the venue is a beauty salon!

Those with credits of success and knowledge generously share their information with us.  Monday was Twitter night.  I added a new word to my vocabulary:  socialnomics. Did you know that Twitter is some four years old?  It hit the mainstream conscience a scant year ago and has been on an upward trajectory ever since.  Social media hasn’t been the easiest concept for me to embrace … I’ve got a Twitter account and a Facebook account and more that I don’t even remember opening accounts at, but largely they are ignored.  Periodically I will log on to one or the other to see if the seemingly senseless prater has gotten any better.  It hasn’t.  I leave without so much as a comment, tweet or whatever the appropriate verb is for the social site I am on.  There is a part of me that knows that I need to get with the program and learn how to socialize on these sites.  What I learned on Monday confirmed that.  More importantly I learned social media etiquette and how to have meaningful conversations which can drive traffic to your blog – now that is music to my ears

Related Twitter Posts:
Is Tweeting for Bucks the New Blogging for Money?
There’s a Whole Lotta Tweetin’ Going On

Here is the thing, mastermind groups are powerful.  If you don’t belong to one, I strongly urge you to find one or form one.  As an example, in the short time that my group has been getting together (my first attendance was mid-September) we have progressed from watching videos to setting up projects, the intent being that we will participate in one form or another in making money with these projects.

About a month ago members were asked to pitch the group on a project that they want to launch. The following week  some ten people gave us an elevator pitch (2 minutes).  We voted.  The person who was selected will get the collective support of the group which includes technical and marketing know how.  The time frame is 6 months.  At the end of the six month period there will be a new product on the market. Another project is at the incubator stage, is taking a different model of development but it too will be a product.  We engage, learn and gain financial profit.

I think it is important to find a mastermind group that meets “in person”.  There are plenty of online or teleconferenced mastermind groups, but from my perspective you just cannot get the juice online that you do from an offline group.  The in-person dynamics just can’t be beat.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

Mastermind groups are big cheese.

No. 1 = gold
No. 2 = silver
No. 3 = copper

Today, gold is trading at US$1176, silver at US$ 18.34 and copper at US$3.13. There is a chasm of a difference between number one gold and number two silver.  The same applies to the world of the internet and blog incomes.

I’m a note collector.  The notes would be better served if I also noted the source of those notes.  Recently I was going through my “ blog content” file and came across a sheet of notes.  At the top I had written “No. 2 Sucks!”

Looking at the numbers I immediately understood why.

The numbers addressed Google, but as a rule of thumb you can easily apply it to any sort of traffic driven income.  Under discussion was the income that the top ten ranked in Google would get as a percentage of total traffic for a keyword.  Number one position can expect to get 42%, number two 11.9%!  The drop off after that continues but is not as dramatic, by the time you get to number ten, you are looking at 3%.

Let’s just stay with positions one and two and ten for the time being.  Take an extremely competitive keyword phrase, but an extremely lucrative one such as internet marketing.

Daily searches:  73,647

No. 1 ranked receives 42% of traffic:  30,930
No. 2 ranked receives 11.9%  of traffic:  8,763
No. 10 ranked receives 3%  of traffic:  2,209

Here is how the potential income for the keyword phrase internet marketing looks like in rounded off numbers

No. 1  = $259K
No. 2  = $ 73K
No. 10 = $ 18K

Now granted $18K isn’t exactly chopped liver IF you can get to that page.  Considering that there are almost 7 million pages which mention “internet marketing” the jostling in the lineup starts long before page 1.

What if you have a niche market where the daily search is 217 and the total number of pages that the keyword appears on is only 40,000.  Say the total purse for your chosen keyword is only $316.00, then this is what the figures begin to look like:

No. 1  = $138
No. 2   =$37
No. 10 =$9

In both instances the biggest drop is between position no.1 and no. 2.  It’s like that in everything in life.  The brand new car driven off the show room has the biggest depreciation in value after year one.  The leading movie star gets millions, the co-star thousands.  The gold medal winner makes the money with lucrative sponsorships, the silver gets the second tier.

That reminds me of the time my accountant and I were discussing my income and tax strategies.  As an employee I had only the most basic of tax deductions available to me.  I fell into the highest income tax bracket and was crying the blues about how little of my hard earned money I got to keep.  No wonder it was tough meeting all my financial obligations, I blurted out, how can anyone live on that amount?

My accountant looked me straight in the eye, and after what seemed like an eternity of time, he broke the silence and told me that I was in the top 3% income earners of the country, of the COUNTRY!  I was aghast.  I had no idea I was in such an elevated percentage. Considering what I was making, I didn’t think that was all that impressive. I immediately asked what did the top 1% make?

“Aaah, that’s a different story” he said.  “The difference is huge.”

If you want to develop a blog income life, to drink fine wines, dine on epicurean delights, travel on exotic vacations and live in the house of your dreams, then you have to write a “different story” and leap the chasm.  Work smart, put in the time and get to position one or at the very least on page one.  That goes beyond Adsense.  The no. 1 affiliate for a product is light years ahead of no. 2.  The highest traffic generating blog asks for and gets the highest sponsored ad dollars.  Pick your battle and go win it.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

The Big Cheese is No. 1

Sundays are catch up mornings for me.  Typically it’s the time I spend catching up on the little things in my e.box, you know non blog income items flagged but not urgent, jokes, Facebook and Twitter announcements of new followers or invites to become friends – ok, the last two could be Blog Income items, but you get the idea, it’s not a blogging for money day.

I give myself two hours – what doesn’t get attended to suffers the fate of the delete key. I give myself another hour to go over my Google Reader and read up on items of interest that I may have I missed on my daily scan of this service.  After that it’s a day off.  Today, maybe dim sum in Richmond and then a walk by the bay – yes, even in the rain.

The first item that caught my eye this morning was a post by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.  I don’t know how I missed this earlier.  I am a raving fan of his.  It is an article on story posts on his blog.  His observation is that over the years the posts that told stories were the most popular. That is not surprising as stories engage the reader.  It is that rule we learned in sales:  facts tell stories sell.  You can read the full article here

The post got me thinking.  I prefer writing stories over technical reports and have enormous admiration for those who can present good, clear facts without much froufrou and still keep the reader engaged.  I had such a challenge this week.

Recently I was invited to author a chapter for an upcoming book.  It was on a subject I know well but the publisher asked for a slightly different twist on it.  For weeks I had the devil of a time trying to manipulate the information in such a way that it would mesh with the new angle.  Writer’s block loomed large as deadline date drew closer.  What to do.  What I had in my computer was dull and boring even to me.  How could I expect others to read it. How could I let the publisher down?

Then I had an idea.  What if I approached the angle from a storyline?  I phoned the publisher and told him what I had in mind.  I can tell you his response wasn’t exactly extatic.  “Sure” he said tentatively “send me a few paragraphs and the rest of the content in point format.  I did.

Suddenly my creative juices began to flow.  I finished the chapter in two days.  Had it reviewed by a friend who said she was galvanized every step of the way. Submitted it just under the wire.

Haven’t heard back from the publisher yet.  I think he’ll like it.  If not it’s not a bad piece of work and I can certainly put it to use in some other way.

Stories are easier to write, at least for me and for most people.  When you think about it blogs started with stories, that’s what a journal is, it is the daily story of something, often that of a personal experience.  The next time you are faced with writer’s block dig deep into your own experiences and fish out those that have a connection with the topic on which you write, guaranteed, your fingers will start flying over your keypad and you’ll be one step closer to an awesome blog income life!

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for some good cheese.

Why is goal setting important?

The most obvious reason is that it gives you something to work towards, a destination that you want to reach by the end of a certain time line and it must be committed on paper.

Why on paper?

One, the very act of writing something down has neurological implications.  There is a connect between the brain and the writing, a greater commitment and a message to the brain that this needs doing.  The goal is then accepted and submerged into the sub conscience.

Two classical studies underline this importance of writing down your goals.  The first dates back to the 1953 graduate class of Yale.  Armed with impressive degrees the graduates were eager to take on the world, to redefine the meaning of success.  Twenty years later the graduates were contacted as a matter of interest to measure their level of success.  While most were found to be doing well, a small group stood head and shoulders above others – a mere 3% had achieved enormous financial success, more than that of the 97% combined. When interviewed further one commonality was found amongst this elite 3% group: each one had written down their goals, something none of the others had done.

A subsequent study at Harvard had similar results.  The year 1964. Once again all graduates stated that they had lofty and clear goals to achieve.  Only 5% took the trouble to write down their goals.  A follow up twenty years later showed that of the 5% who wrote down their goals, 95% achieved their goals, while of those who did not write down their goals, a mere 5% did.

Goals can have different time lines:  lifetime, 10 years, 5 or maybe just one.  Daily factor in as well.  Goal experts recommend 5 year goals, with checkpoints along the way, usually at the 3 year mark and 1 year mark.  They can be complex or simple.  I like simple.

Set a goal for each area of your life for 2010.  Make it doable but not a gimme – it needs to be something that you have to stretch for.  Start with the current situation, and end the year with where you want that situation to be.

In terms of blogging my goal for Blog Income Life for this year was to be at a four figure income at the end of 2009.  I had nothing to base this on.  It was a figure I thought would be nice to achieve.  It’s not going to happen.  What I have achieved however is a stronger understanding of the business of blogging.  On review I know the mistakes I made, I know what works, I know what I need to concentrate on to make the desired income.  I now have a base from which to work for my 2010 goal.

Perhaps the biggest lesson learned is that an income goal is not the best to get started with, I would leave the income goal to a longer term.  Here are some benchmarks that may help you with your goal setting

-         frequency of posting:  3 times a week or more

-         first 100 visitors

-        first 1000 visitors per month

-         first 100 subscribers to your newsletter/email list

-         backlinks:  1000 backlinks

-         first $100 from adsense

-         first affiliate sale

-         first affiliate campaign

-         first 1000 Twitter followers

-         first e.book written

There are plenty more but the above should get you started.  Begin with where you are right now and determine where you want to be on December 31, 2010.  If your current situation on traffic is an average of 5 visitors per day, you may want to look at an average of 100 visitors per day.  Now make a plan for achieving that.

What will it take?  What do you already know on generating traffic?  What more will you need to learn?  Where can you get that information?  Is there a Traffic Generating course that you can buy?

I subscribe to The Goals Guy to plan the year ahead and to keep me on track with my goals.  When you draw up your plan for achieving your goals for 2010, make sure you set up review dates, I make mine quarterly.  It is a good practice to see what is working and what is not.  For that which is not working identify, correct and take action.

Here’s to great goals and great achievements!

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
The cheese is in the goal.

Glen’s online business drops a significant five figure income to his monthly bottom line.  It’s not surprising.  The man knows his stuff.

Viper Chill delivers content like no other blog on blogging that I know of – there is a freshness to it, a lot of punch, but most importantly, Glen mines his knowledge and presents information that is beyond the typical white bread content that proliferates the internet.  He dives deep into his own practices and shares them with his readership which is rising faster than a loaf of bread dough.

And talk about value!  Case in point is his latest post on his 24 point checklist that he implements with every new blog he starts.  Not only have I bookmarked that post, but I have actually hard copied it so that I can follow each step, point by point.  This is now in my internet marketing tool box and  I  will use this checklist for all future blogs as well as go through the list for all my current ones -  I already started on this one and found that there are many holes that need to be filled.  Watch for subtle and maybe not so subtle changes here to see what I mean.

What I find most interesting is that part of Glen’s blog flies in the face of “basics” – the domain name is absent of any hint of what the content may be.   Everything I have read and learned to date is that having the domain name congruent with content is an important factor and topic keyword is highly recommended.  Hey I like the domain name, it captures your imagination and is memorable but never in my wildest would I look at the domain of Viper Chill and say to myself that this is a blog I need to visit because it obviously holds a ton of content on blogging.  Nope.  This is branding at its best.  It just goes to show that in the hands of a master, a domain name bereft of topic/content keywords can fly with the best of them.  Before  you let your imagination take hold however,  the keyword here is “master” and it takes a master to develop a brand.

I encourage you to go read the article for yourself at Viper Chill and save a copy of it somewhere so that you can reference it on a regular basis.  It’s that good!

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

That is some potent cheese there in Viper Chill

Residual income, also known as passive income is a set it and leave it money machine.  This type of income is most often associated with music, movies and runaway best sellers.  Every time a blockbuster movie is played in theaters a whole lot of people get paid royalties which is yet another name for residual income.  Now wouldn’t you want to wake up every morning, check in with your computer and see that while you were asleep, your online business made you some money?  Absolutely!

Affiliate marketing is one such money machine and works best when powered on all three cylinders.  We already covered:

Digital affiliates

Physical affiliates

Now we add Residual Affiliate Marketing.  This is any program that has a continuity component built into it.  Membership programs are an excellent example as are renewable subscriptions.

Most of the digital affiliate programs already offer a continuity program which can include but are not limited to: memberships which give access to the latest updates via newsletters, webinars, podcasts, exclusive interviews with professionals in their field and often advance notice of a new program about to be rolled out.

In the physical affiliate sector a common type of continuity program would be a product of the month club.  You often see this in coffee, chocolate, wine, and florist industries.  Gift basket business are also a good fit especially if marketing to the corporate sector.

In both the above instances you earn a recurring monthly income for as long as the customer is an active member.  In addition to Clickbank, Commission Junction and the search engines, you can check out these two directories:

http://www.lifetimecommissions.com
http://www.affiliateguide.com/residual.html

Here is what this three pronged effort looks like:

Digital product:  Even if your visitor is looking for a physical product such as cigars, you can still have an informational product that gives more information about cigars, their history, where tobacco is grown, etc.

Physical product:  That would be the cigar itself, clippers, a humidor, and other accessories for cigars.

Residual product:  Membership in a cigar of the month club.

In summary, effective marketing in all three areas will triple your income over just employing one of the affiliate marketing options. Set up your affiliate marketing in such a way that you have something to offer to every visitor that comes to your site.

Here is to an awesome blog income life!

Valentina
Affiliates are cheesy!

1.  Why affiliate marketing
2. Where do I find affiliate products?

1. Why affiliate marketing?
Just like I think that blogging is the best way to get started in internet marketing because you learn the basics and build on from there, affiliate marketing in my view is the obvious next step if you are to build a blog income.  What I like about affiliate marketing is that it is a “done for you” step, yet, there is enough new stuff to learn and apply if you want to do it right that it will definitely pack on some internet marketing smarts.

The done for you part is that you do not have to develop a product of your own – someone with a proven track record has already done that.  Your job is to find products that are on the topic of your blog.  For instance this blog is all about blogging and my current focus is on affiliate marketing,  so the ad that you see on the left sidebar is  on blogging and the one the right hand column is  on affiliate marketing.

Now affiliate marketing is more than just putting up ads on your site.  If you want to make money on your affiliates you have to learn how to market them.  I will be touching on the basics of affiliate marketing on this blog in the future, but if you want to get your mits on some powerful, easy to follow instructions I highly recommend Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon – its not going to break the bank and will get you on the road to understanding affiliate marketing and how to profit from it.

2. Where do I find affiliates?
My last article on affiliate marketing focused on digital products.  Today, lets talk about physical products.  You can have a mix of both on your site.  For example, if you have a site that has to do with dogs, an example of digital affiliates would be dog training, or an ebook on how to ensure a healthy and beautiful skin and coat for your dog.  A physical product might be a special type of training collar or a pet balm that soothes and heals a dogs skin problems.

The big difference between digital and physical products is the commission.  With digital you can make as much as 70% (50% is common), while as with physical products a 25% commission would be tops, more likely in the 15% range.  That’s why I recommend a mix and match, you’ll be appealing to those who want informational products and those who want to buy a physical product.

If you haven’t already done so, Google Adsense should be given some of your valuable virtual billboard space.  Google will place ads congruent with your topic, they could be digitial products or physical.  You need not do anything with them.  When visitors to your site click on the ads, Google will pay you a small commission.  Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, click on the ads yourself or have friends and family click them on for you.  That is both unethical and contrary to your agreement with Google.

Now trust me, Adsense is not going to have the money truck
come up to your driveway, not even a Tonka!  You need to start monetizing your site with substantial revenue sharing affiliate products.

There are plenty of ways to find affiliates in your niche market – Amazon sells more than just books.  Just go to www.amazon.com, scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a section there that says “make money with us”.  Click on the Associates button.

Commission Junction www.commissionjunction.com is a good affiliate directory for  physical goods.  As with all affiliate directories you need to open an account.    Linkshare www.linkshare.com and ShareASale www.shareasale.com are two others that you might want to look into.

Not all affiliate products are listed in directories.  If yours is a niche product you can search for it by using your favorite search engine using the keyword for your niche and the word affiliate with it  i.e., “pet ointment affiliates” and you will be taken to a page with lots of options for you to choose from.

This bears repeating – make sure that when you select an affiliate that it is trustworthy and delivers on its promise, a 100% satisfaction guarantee or money back is just a starter.  I recommend that you do some due diligence before putting up a banner on your site and going the full 9 yards in promoting it – remember reputation is often judged by association.

Here’s to your profitable affiliate marketing!

Valentina
The cheese is in the affiliates

1. topic
2. keywords
3. domain
4. platform
5. posting
6. article marketing

By now you should have lots of posts on your blog, and by default you have done some link building without knowing it.  If you have done any article marketing, you have links that connect your articles to your blog.  If you downloaded my free PDF on ABC’s of Blogging for Money and followed the chapter on driving traffic, then you will have additional links from your comment postings on other blogs and in forums you may be participating in.  These are backlinks and that is what we want lots more of.

What exactly is a backlink?

Well firstly what is a link?  A link is a pathway between one site and another.  A backlink is a site that takes the reader from another site to yours, it is also know as an inbound link.  This is what links look like:

http://www.naturaldogskincare.com

That is the URL for the dog site that I opened for this year’s 30 Day Challenge.

Pretty much everyone on the internet knows that if they click on this blue/purple lettered underlined phrase, they will be taken somewhere else, in this case to my site.

Off the top of my head I do not recall if any of my postings had links to any of my other dog sites except for the K9 KlearUp product.  But supposing I did.

A visitor is on my dog skin care blog and while reading an article comes across a link to my raw dog food link, clicks that on, from that site clicks on to a link I might have posted about best dog food diets, which may or may not be mine – lets say it belongs to someone else, from that site they may click on a link that takes them to a pet insurance site and so on.  Can you see the pathway that has been created?

See how the more backlinks we have on the internet, the better are the chances of users finding our site.

The pathway created is also a pathway for search engines to follow.  When a search engine comes across a link to our site it sends out bots or spiders to crawl that link to report back on the content.  Those critters will continue following the trail before eventually coming back with a glowing report to mother search engine on how well your site is thought of by other site owners.  Search engine makes note and promotes your position withing its rankings.

This overly simplistic explanation, is one way that search engines build up their data bank.  Google and other search engines look at several things when assessing those links including:

a.  Is the link hosting site’s content congruent with the links
b.  Is the link hosting site ranked well

On this point, in the example of the dog skin care link, the content of that link does not meet the congruency test.  To overcome this I have added a bit of content about dogs.  Now it makes it somewhat relevant. The ideal option would have been to use some of my other blogs on income building but they are all currently under renovation so would not have been a good example.

A word of caution here.  Online marketers quickly caught on to the benefits of posting comments on other’s blogs just for the sake of getting the backlinks.  It wasn’t long before comment spamming reared its ugly head.  One way to explain what comment spamming is to cite the many instances that a comment added to a blog does not add any value, a common such comment would be something like “Great Post” or ” Good stuff, thanks for the post”.  While not necessarily absolute the comments do beg the branding of being spam as they appear to be just milking the system to generate backlinks.  Now there are systems which have a “no follow” rule,  so that when search engines come crawling and they come across these backlinks, the “no follow” rule tells the ‘bot or spider not to follow that link.  More on this at a future date.

The second item is more difficult to control.  It is not the easiest thing to get a good backlink from a highly ranked site, say a Google PR 5.  One way is to post comments on such high ranking content congruent sites, but again, Google assigns a lower value for comment generated back links than if the owner of that site mentioned yours within her content or put up your  link in the “recommended” links section.

By building your link network you are developing credibility and authority with the search engines.  They view backlinks as votes of confidence from the owners of those sites.

Your job if you want to drink fine wine, feast on gourmet foods, travel to exotic destinations and live in the house of your dreams is to generate a massive blog income.  Your mission should you decide to accept it is to develop that massive income by building a complex web of links.

Stay tuned for further posts on Link Building

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for money – living the good life.

PS … can you say “cheese”

]]> http://www.blogincomelife.com/link-building-part-i/feed/ 5 http://www.blogincomelife.com/new-address-new-domain-name-september-statistics/ http://www.blogincomelife.com/new-address-new-domain-name-september-statistics/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:09:19 +0000 Valentina http://www.blogincomelife.com/?p=100 Can you believe it?  We’re in to the last quarter of the year!  The next two months are traditionally the most productive make it or break it months of the year and statistically bring in more new business than at any other time of the year.  Back in the days when I was with Corporate America these were the big bonus months for those of us who were in sales.  How it generally works is that your quota is based on a calendar year and the big bonus paychecks don’t kick in unless your quota has been reached and then watchit baby!  The more over quota, the bigger and fatter the bonus check at Christmas!

Staying on that theme, I would have fired me from this blog by now.  The showing has been abysmal.  My target was to reach a four figure income by year end from this blog alone.  It just ainta gonna happen!

Before the stats get published … stay with me:

As detailed in Monday’s posting, I uncovered many areas that needed adjusting – this is something that typically one does on a quarterly basis, but I was still testing the waters at the end of QI.  By the end of QII I knew I had to do something.  I took the 30 Day Challenge and uncovered some whopper type errors!

1.  From the name Blog Along with Me, the keyword was blog in the domain name yet for me to get Google’s or any other engines attention would prove to be extremely difficult.  With over 2 million searches daily, and almost 2.5 billion blogs or sites with that word in them, it would be a very long time before my position would deliver much traffic to my blog.  That is why my search engine results were anemic – heck, lets be honest, they were on a lifeline!

2.  OK … the bulb went on early.  I decided to start fighting for blogging for money keyword phrase which is once again crowded but at least it seemed that there would be a light at the end of the tunnel — one day.  But then the keyword phrase was not part of the domain name. Its not mandatory but it helps and when you are still green behind the ears like I am, its best to stay within the rules.  Yes.  You can break the rules AFTER you understand them, know them and know how to break them in your favor.  I am a long way away from that yet.

3. Blogger gadgets just simply do not compare with all the bells and whistles of Wordpress Direct plugins.

4.  With my new domain name, Blog Income Life, my keyword phrase is blog income, which is still a very competitive field, but looking at the top 10 in Google, there is room for some  muscle flexing.  Not saying that this blog will up there terribly soon.  As I have only just moved it over, there are still no new stats.  But I’ll be watching them daily.

Now the Stats:

I stopped posting on this blog on September 09.  Typically fresh content brings in visitors.   So, anemic and pathetic as it was, search engines were still directing some traffic to the blog.

Those that visited and stayed spent an average of 4.38  minutes each.  that warms the soul.  I hope its because that those who choose to stay and read find the information valuable.    I have to tell you that none of my other blogs have the visitors spending that much time on the site.

Earnings:

Adsense           $ 4.78
Clickbank           14.00
Hostgator          50.00

Total                   $68.78

I am also happy that my e.book ABC’s of Blogging for Money is being downloaded at an average rate of 15 – 20 per month.

There is a lot of work to do with this blog before it is up to scratch.  For one thing I need to figure out how to keep the two sidebars from duplicating each other, for another – I have to monetize it quick or there will be no sales at all to report for October!  And put up that ABC’s of Blogging Banner!  I had “followers” on Blogger – that part did not transfer.  Don’t know how it will affect those who had me on their Google Reader, maybe it has to be re-subscribed.  So some of what I have to do is starting from ground zero.  From that point of view, I’ll be happy if I can at least stay even for the month of October.  Many questions I have, the answers will soon appear.

Thank you to everyone who visits and reads.  I hope that you find this helpful.  If you find value here, send it over to a friend or colleague and please do comment, what you like, don’t like, improvements you think I could implement, suggestions … hey, tell me what you want to know, all will be welcome.

Now stay for the ride.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money – living the good life!

PS: Living the good life IS the big cheese!

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