Learning From The Pros 2

This is basically a follow-up to my post about the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. The month-long course run by ProBlogger finished a few days ago and I feel I definitely benefited from it. Some of the points presented I was already aware of, but they helped me focus on learning from them in a clearer and more defined manner.

I have selected 5 particular points that helped me. Obviously I'm not going to just copy here what was said about them, but just mention how I relate to them.

Spend some time on a successful blog in your niche.

When I first started this blog I wrote a post about Learning From Other Blogs, but on this course it defined more clearly how we could learn from the Content, Design, Reader Engagement, Monetisation, Traffic and SEO of a successful blog in whatever our niche is.

Learn From Successful Bloggers.

For this particular lesson we were directed to specific posts from 10 very successful bloggers. Another great way of learning.

Looking at your blog’s statistics/metrics package to see what you can learn from it.

Presumably we all look at our statistics, but this lesson showed us analytically what to look at, why, and what to do with the information. This is something I'm not so familiar with and it was a great help.

Interlinking previously written posts in your archives.

This again was something I wasn't really familiar with. Going to some of your older posts and interlinking between them, thus helping SEO and page views as well as increasing usefulness to your readers. I have been trying more consciously now to create links between posts.

Create a 'sneeze page' for your blog.

I think this is a great idea. Creating a post which includes several links to other posts you have made. One way I found to put this into practice was a post on my Authentic Greek Recipes blog where I created a post - Greek Vegetarian Meal - which put together several recipes previously posted into a recommended full meal. There were links to each of the dishes included in the meal.


All in all, I found it a useful learning opportunity and I need to take as many of these opportunities as possible until I become successful. And even then, I'm sure that the learning never stops.

Creating Your Own Social Network

In previous posts I talked about finding social networks relevant to your niche to help promote yourself and generate traffic. You can see them here and here.

You can also create your own social network for the same reasons plus you will also increase your own profile. With Ning, it couldn't be easier. First, though, I would recommend that you research what networks already exist similar to what you have in mind.

Is there already saturation? This would mean that it will be very difficult for people to be attracted to your network.

Or do you feel that there is room for your network? Go ahead - it doesn't cost anything. Once it starts to take off, as I said, it will help elevate your profile on the web and bring more traffic to your blog(s) as well as giving you the opportunity to network with similar people or people with similar blog(s).

I myself have just started a network for bloggers over 50. I've called it O Fab!! - Over Fifty And Blogging. Fab is very much a word of the sixties, so the initials suit. It's just going to be a relaxed place and I'm just going to see what interest there is and how it goes. I feel that bloggers over 50 - whether they are doing it for money or just as a hobby - have a certain 'maturity' to offer to the world of blogging!

So, if you are over 50 and blogging, do come and join here. I'm neither technical nor artistic, so I'm not particularly happy with the logo at the moment, but when, hopefully, the membership increases I'm going to see if someone would like to design something better (and get full credit for it on the main page, of course).

Visit O FAB!!

Likaholix

I recently signed up at Likaholix - a new social network where you can share your likes with other members. This can be anything you have found on the internet - sites, products, books etc. If you have at least 10 likes in a particular category, you become what is called a Tastemaker, which gives more weight to your recommendations.

I've only just recently joined, but it seems like an interesting idea, and was set up by two ex-Google employees. At the moment, joining is by invitation only, so if you're interested I have some invitations (30, I think) if you click here.

Learning From The Pros

If you want to succeed as a blogger, I think it's extremely important that you try and learn from the experts. The ones who really are successful. So, I enlisted in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course, which is run by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.

Today is the 5th day and we've been mailed a new task, along with tips, every day. I've found that it has helped me focus on what is important and giving me greater clarity. I'm a great admirer of ProBlogger and purchased his book (co-authored with Chris Garret). To see my review of the book, go to my previous post here.

The 31 Days course is completely free and he is still accepting people onto it, even though it has already started. I would recommend it and the link to sign up is here.

I'm Using TweetDeck Now

Continuing my foray into the world of Twitter, I've now signed up at TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is a great tool that you can download for free here. It is an application that allows you to monitor information from various social media in a single concise view and currently integrates services from Twitter, Twitscoop, 12seconds, Stocktwits and now Facebook. I'm just using it for Twitter at the moment just until I get into the swing of it.

TweetDeck enables you to split your main Twitter feed (All Friends) into columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. It automatically updates and so provides you with an effective and user-friendly dashboard of realtime information.

I've just installed it, so I'm still getting the hang of it but it certainly seems to clear view of friends, tweets and updates.

Has anyone else been using it? What's your experience of it?

My Earnings At Adgitize Have Quadrupled....Without Doing Anything!

I've posted here before about Adgitize, but I wanted to mention the latest good news. They have changed the payout system so that you can earn more money. This started from April 1st and I wanted to wait and see what difference it would make to my earnings before writing about it. Well, in the first couple of days my daily earnings have quadrupled!

We're not talking huge amounts of money here, but we are talking a steady little earner without really having to do anything for it. Plus traffic from views of your ad(s).

To get the most out of Adgitize, you really need to be an advertiser - it only costs $14 a month to get displayed across the whole network, and you can get more than twice that amount back through your earnings. Plus the increased traffic - I've been getting around 50 visits a day from Adgitize to my Authentic Greek Recipes ad.

So what do you have to do to make money?

Everyone can make up to 500 points a day over 5 categories which have a maximum of 100 points each -

Article Points - you get points if you post on your blog(s).
You do this anyway, so there's no extra work involved here.

Click Points - you get points for clicking on the Adgitize ads.
I combine this with Entrecard dropping, which I do anyway. Not everyone has an EC widget, but I would say that out of the 50 Adgitize sites I visit every day, only about 5 don't have one. Why do I only visit 50 sites? Because, as an advertiser my points are doubled and I get my maximum 100 from visiting just 50 sites.

Ad Views Points - If you display Adgitize ads on your site, you get points for the number of views of those ads every day.

Page Views Points - As above, but these are points for views of pages that have the ads displayed.

Advertisers Points - This is points for being an advertiser.

So where's the extra work? The only thing 'extra' you have to do is visit some blogs, which you're doing anyway if you're in EC, and even if you aren't, how long does it take to visit 50 blogs and click on them? Especially if you're getting paid for it! But even if you don't want to visit blogs and click on the ads, you're still earning points - and money - from the other categories, it's just that you're losing a potential 20% of your earnings.

As I said above, now that the money being paid out has increased, this really is a nice little earner. You can earn as a publisher, without paying anything, but by becoming an advertiser as well, you not only can get your $14 a month back, but also make more on top of it.

I'm All A-Twitter!

Well, I haven't been posting here for quite a while - I had some paid writing work to do which took up most of my time. Anyway, I'm getting back into it and have decided to give Twitter a shot. I signed up for Twitter quite a while ago, but never got into it, but now I'm going to focus a little bit more on it to see if it can help generate steady traffic.

To help things, I've signed up at Twitterfeed, which automatically posts on Twitter from your blog feeds. In this way I'll have a steady stream of posts on Twitter without any effort and I can then add other Tweets at my leisure, so to speak.

I got my button at Twitterbuttons, which I presume everyone on Twitter knows about - they have quite a comprehensive selection to choose from.

Finally, I also signed up at Twittad, where you can have paid ads on your Twitter profile. Based on your number of followers, they work out a price for advertisers to get placed on your profile - my profile's still pretty cheap at the moment - and there is also an Affiliate Programme.

So, let's see how it goes! Feel free to follow me!

By TwitterButtons.com

How To Remove Google Ads You Don't Want

If you have Google AdSense on your site, sometimes you see ads there that you don't want. Perhaps you don't want your readers to visit those sites or perhaps you don't think they are appropriate. Whatever your reason, it is possible to prevent them from displaying on your page.

Presumably a lot of you already know how to do this, but for those of you who don't, it's quite simple.

First of all, you need to know the URLs of those sites. Now, according to the Terms of Service for AdSense you aren't allowed to click on the ads on your own page to find out. What you have to do is download the AdSense Preview Tool. This can be done very quickly by going here.

Once you have downloaded and installed the Preview Tool, you go to your page and right-click. Google AdSense Preview Tool will now show up on the menu. Click this and you will see a list of ads.

Check the ads you don't want and then click on Show Selected URLs. This will give you the URLs.

Go to your AdSense account and click on AdSense Setup. Then click on Competitive Ad Filter. Under AdSense for Content filters enter the URls of the ads you want blocked and then click Save Changes.

That's it! It may take a few hours for it to take effect, but those ads will no longer appear on your page.

One thing I would like to point out is that after I had downloaded the Preview Tool, it only showed up using Internet Explorer and not with Firefox. This is something I need to check out, but you should be aware of that.

Should You Write Paid Posts?

When I started blogging, one of the ways I thought I was going to make money was by writing paid posts. There are a lot of bloggers out there who make a regular income - however small it may be - from writing posts about products or services.

Now I'm not so sure. I think it's fine for those that can and want to do it, it's whether I want to do it that I'm not sure about.

Ideally, I would like to write about something that I know and would confidently recommend whether or not I was being paid to do so. It would also need to be relevant to the purpose and content of the blog. I have signed up for most of the middlemen companies that provide opportunities for you to get paid to write about products and services, but quite honestly, I don't feel comfortable about posting about most of the products.

I don't know most of them and I certainly haven't tried them, so how can I write about them? If there was something that I had tried or looked into and I thought it was worth writing about then I would do so, but I don't use diet, pharmaceutical etc products. The other thing is that you get lots of bloggers suddenly blogging about the same things. I remember a short while ago, for example, when so many of the blogs I visited had a picture of a pair of eyeglasses and a write-up about them. How many of them had actually bought a pair of these glasses or at least, knew that they were a good product to recommend?

A while ago I wrote a post about the ProBlogger book. This wasn't a paid post - I will make some money if people buy the book through my post - but I had obtained and read the book and was giving my actual opinion about it.

I know. I know. People are going to say that you are losing a source of regular income if you don't do paid posts, but I feel (and this is just my feeling, I have nothing at all against people who do paid posts - I just won't spend a lot of time reading their posts) that I would prefer to build up a blog in the long run that has the best content that I can produce. This will eventually create a good base of people who are actually interested in your blog.

What do you think?

When Should You Start Trying To Make Money From Your Blog?

I have been reading comments and advice from successful bloggers, including the ProBlogger book (see my post about the book here) and one thing that seems to come across is that one should spend time in building one's blog's content and traffic before starting to try and make money. I haven't been blogging very long, but I think I'm beginning to see the sense in what they're saying.

I see so many blogs that are new or fairly new and they are trying to incorporate as many methods of making money on their blog as they can. I did the same when I started, because I thought that's what you did. But I didn't know anything about blogging and I've had to learn through experience - by actually doing it.

Knowing what I know now, if I started again, I would focus on creating a blog or blogs that had good content and gradually build up the traffic. Good content attracts readers and keeps them and a lot of posts help with your Search Engine Optimisation, providing a lot of content for the search engines to find. I think I would only have AdSense to start with.

The thing with trying different affiliate programmes is that you need the traffic coming to your blog(s) in order to generate income. If they're not generating income, you don't know if it's because it's a programme that isn't an income generator - for you, at least - or if it's just because you haven't got enough traffic yet. So you don't want to dump it in case it does generate income once you do have good traffic!

However, if you spend time concentrating on building up a good and interesting blog, and get traffic and subscriptions, then you can start to try out affiliate schemes and other income generators and you'll be able to tell whether they are worthwhile or not. In fact, you'll probably have been able to see them in operation in the blogging world before you even have to try them out yourself.

The difficulty is that if you start blogging with the idea that you want to make money from it - however much - then it's very hard to wait for a year or more while you're building your blog, not to have any means of making money from it, save perhaps AdSense, until you have good traffic. But in all honesty, if I started again today, that's what I would do. I feel I need to think of the long term. Blogging is not the key to instant riches, but in the long term it can provide a steady income, the scale of which depends on our effort and perseverance plus the ability to learn.

I would appreciate comments on this based on your own experience.

Sponsoring Contests

I've decided to be one of the sponsors of a contest, to see if this will help increase exposure and traffic. This is the first time I have done this, so I'll have to wait to see if it is something worth doing. I'm offering 1000 Entrecard credits and a 125 x 125 ad space for a month.

I think this is something I may try more often, but I'll wait to see how it goes this first time. The contest is over at Work At Home Blogging and you get points for writing a blog post about the contest, including all the sponsors; subscribing to the blog's feed; following the blogger on Twitter.

There are a lot of Entrecard credits and ad spaces to be won, so why not check it out. The contest ends on February 27, so I'll post about how successful it was for me as a sponsor after that.

Using Blogger

As you can see from the name of this blog, the idea is to find and discuss ways of making money without spending anything. To be honest, this was the main reason I chose Blogger as the platform for my blogs.

I am also not at all a techie, so I needed a platform that could do as much as possible for me as easily as possible. I have discovered, however, in my short blogging history, that most successful bloggers are spending some money for hosting and usually using Wordpress. So I thought to myself, "Will I have to change to another platform at some point (and spend some money), in order to become successful?" I wanted to check out Today.com, which more and more people seem to be using, but couldn't sign up as they told me it isn't available in my region.

There are advantages in having your own domain name and being just dot com (net, org or whatever) rather than being blogspot.com, but I thought I'd check out to see if any blogs had become successful while being blogspot.

So I checked with the Technorati Top 100, which gives a pretty fair indication of the most successful/popular blogs at this time. There are in fact 5 blogs there that are using Blogger. Not very many, and in fact if you discount 2 of them - The Official Google Blog and Google Operating System (The Unofficial Google Blog) - there are only 3. 3 out of 100 is not many, but it still shows that it is possible to have a blogspot address and be popular. One of those blogs is in fact at number 15 (at the time of writing) and has had over 210 million visitors - PostSecret.

So, as far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out. I'm happy with Blogger up to now, but perhaps at some later date when I feel more confident and am more experienced, I will look at the issue again and decide whether to continue with Blogger or have a revamp.