Welcome to my ugly Wordpress blog about making money online!
My name is Steward and I am a internet marketing noob. I started a blog for the fun of it back in December 2007 and thought it would be nice to make a little bit of money off of my entirely too witty and juvenile posts about personal finance. Over a year later and I think my personal finance blog has made me a grand total of $20. That is the result of hours and hours of work crafting the best possible posts, doing my gosh darned best to make sure that it would get all that traffic from people seeing my good titles at a blog carnival and making there way over to my site. I even went a little crazy and added some Google Adsense to the blog to see what would happen.
The short of it is that I didn’t make any money and my witty titles weren’t even that good. Nobody came to blog. Nobody subscribed to my RSS feed. Nobody left a comment. Nobody cared about what I had to say.
Except for one article. I wrote a post about pet monkeys that got picked up by Consumerist. It got placed on WoW message boards. It got on that one MSN blog about money. It didn’t make me any money, but I got comments - real live comments from real live people. It was awesome.
A little perplexed about how to get this whole money-from-the-magical-internet-land-and-into-my-pocket thing going I started searching around the web for people who wanted to teach me, for free, how to get by on the world wide web. It wasn’t too long before I got introduced to a couple of blogs who this site will try to emulate. Even the fugly blog is a hat tip to someone who has taught me a lot about this whole way of doing business here.
Don’t get me wrong, I am no SEO. I can’t seem to figure out keywords and backlinks and on-page optimization for the life of me. I’m a beginner still even though I’ve had sites up for almost a year now that are designed specifically to rank well in the SERPS. I still only make a little over $200 a month. I certainly have no new information to offer to the MMO community nor do I pretend to.
Instead, this little blog is going to be all about my experiments in making money online and it is going to come from a beginners perspective. This could be valuable for a few reasons:
- Once I do begin to start pulling in $200 a day instead of $200 a month I can have some clear and solid documentation of my journey. I’ve already missed documenting my first 10 months of the journey. Thankfully not that much has happened in that time span.
- Once I have gotten a little better at the Search Engine Optimization other new beginners can look back on my beginnings and learn a lot from my mistakes and my successes.
- I am hopelessly self absorbed, so I want other people to read what I have to say and like me. I want them to really, really like me.
Luckily no one will read this blog … ever … probably … I mean you never know, maybe somebody will read it eventually.
My Initial How To Make Make Money Online Experiment For Beginners
So lets get the party started with a little bit of experimentation. My first experiment is a doozy and could take about a year to work itself out. I have chosen to build three different sites and compare how an entirely free method of content generation and link building will affect the sites respective rankings in the SERPS.
Let’s start off with the ground rules:
- Each site will be set up on blogger and will contain the phrase that I am trying to rank for
- Each site will be ugly
- Each site will have articles written personally by me
- Each site will only have links that I can get for free (article directories, website directories, blog carnivals, message boards, comments, etc.)
- Each site will not contain any form of monetization until I feel like I am leaving so much on the table that I have to add Adsense or some Amazon Affiliate links
Now a little bit about these websites. The first one is in a very competitive nich - very competitive. You know it is competitive because it has the word debt in it and the Google Adwords tool says that the word has around a million monthly searches and the estimated average CPC is above $20. No that is a niche that might have some money in it. Oh, and I would use Adsense on this sight as my way to make money off of it.
It is also a niche that I expect to have absolutely no chance in, and that is exactly the point. I want to see how well a decently optimized site for a specific, highly competitive niche is going to do after a years worth of free, completely white hat link building. Well, maybe not completely white hat since any link building is kind of against Google’s rules - but I won’t buy links. Not for the experiment anyway.
I’ll try to write one post a week for this sucker.
The second site is in a considerably less competitive niche, getting maybe 30000 searches according to the Google Adword tool. The site will have some pretty good lateral movement if I can make it an authority site by the end of a year and that could greatly increase the amount of traffic that I can get from the site. It is also a site that could have great affiliate sales if I do things the right way.
I’m going to write articles for this one as I feel the urge to. It is kind of one of my hobbies so it shouldn’t be too hard for me to put some things together.
The third site is extremely weak niche with very little traffic but the potential for massive revenue off of affiliate sales. Just one purchase a month could make me $50-$100. When I only make ~$200 a month online that is a lot!
The plan with this one is to only write about 10 or so articles and get it some really good internal linking structure and see what happens to the site in the SERPS sans any link building on my part. I want to see how Gooogle will rank it just based upon the content alone. Right now the site sits around 250 with a total of 2 posts on it. I’m hopeful.
Well, that about does it for my first post on this blog. I hope that we all enjoy my journey to making money online … well I guess I just hope that I enjoy the journey, if you enjoy it too that would just be gravy on the cake.
2 Comments
Hi there.
First, congrats on making any money at all with this online blogging thing. If you’re a MMO noob, then I’m an MMO unborn fetus or something.
In true hat tip fashion, I’m starting my first blogs on Blogger, just as you hat tip with the ugly theme. We both know who we’re talking about
I was just wondering what you thought about Content Connect, seeing as you say you are using in in your sidebar, but I understand it to be a $12 monthly subscription…?
Anyway, cheers on the new blog Steward, and good luck. I’m adding you to my bookmarks page, as I believe that the top bloggers come in generations, and we are the next generation!
David
[Reply]
Hi David,
Thanks for stopping by.
I like Content Connect. It fits in my “spend no more than 10% of earnings on tools” plan. The one thing that I find interesting about it is that I haven’t really gotten that many links with it (maybe 10-15) and I have been using it since January of this year.
I bet it is more useful if you have lots and lots of blogs across lots and lots of niches, but I just have a handful of blogs and one or two niches that aren’t overly popular there. I have gotten some good links though so I think it has been worth it.
I do really like how you get them “naturally” as people find your anchors etc, but I do wish there was a way to get them a little more regularly. For me there has been a burst and then long periods of silence and then another burst.
Steward
[Reply]