AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

Yesterday was my first real day as a full-time blogger. I set up this site on Saturday. On Sunday morning I submitted my first post to Stumbleupon. The results were fantastic! Within an hour I had gotten 132 page views from 83 unique visitors. I wrote a post about my observations of the Stumble on Aboutblogging.info.

I also submitted the post to Digg.com, Stirrdup.com and Reddit.com. Of those three I got the best result from Reddit, which I have still been getting visits from today. My total hits for the day yesterday were 199 page views from 146 unique visitors. In addition five people signed up for my feed My earnings for the day were $5. All in all, I was happy with the day.

I didn’t get very much done today. I went out to a TV show last night and ended up drinking after that and I have been nursing a horrible headache all day today, so I really haven’t been able to concentrate very much on anything. Obviously I can’t be doing this every day. I’m just glad I didn’t have to go to work!

My main focus today has been on visiting and signing up for various social media sites. So far my two favourites are definitely Stumbleupon and Reddit. I was pleased to get many comments to my first post wishing me luck and I would like to thank everyone once again.

Another means of promoting my site which I have tried is prleap.com, which allows you to submit press releases to them for distribution. They have a paid service which gives you instant distribution but I selected the free option to begin with. This delays distribution of your article for two days so it’ll be tomorrow before I’ll see if I get any results from it.

I have been thinking about what I really need to earn in order to be able to do this for a living. Realistically I would need an income of $400 every week in order to be able to get by. My aim at the moment is not to become rich from blogging but just to earn enough to live on. My rough calculation is that I would need to earn an average of $57 per day for this to work. It’s very unlikely that advertising alone will get this for me.

I was approved for sponsoredreviews.com and have placed bids on my first jobs. I am waiting to hear back from the advertisers now, which I believe can take a while. The jobs I applied for were items which I would be happy to blog about anyway, so the prospect of getting paid for that too sounds wonderful.

I have several affiliate programs running between my various blogs. I’m going to spend more time this week studying these and seeing what I can do with them.

Yesterday was my last day at work. I quit the job because the levels of noise and stress were far too much at times, to the extent that I felt it just wasn’t worth the money anymore.

At other times, when it was quiet it was almost at if I had this arrangement where they would let me come in and use the Internet and then pay me at the end of the week. It was like the best internet café ever! Overall though, I remember it for the noise and the stress and the bad tempers.

I have been working in call-centres and in taxi bases for about five years now. This place was definitely the loudest, but it was also the smallest. It was largely down to the lay-out of the room, where the base controller was sitting directly behind me shouting into a radio. The couriers would come into the room and stand directly in front of me to talk to the controller, who would be giving them jobs to do and directions to get there while I would be answering a phone call to someone sitting in a nice, quiet office who was whispering into the phone. For the first time in my life I started to get headaches on a regular basis.

I have lined up some part-time work so that I will not be totally living off my savings but my intention over the next three or four months before I run out of money is to spend more time on blogging than I have been able to up until now.

I believe it is possible to earn a living from blogging. It may take some time to do it and three months may not be enough, but it will be enough time for me to begin seeing some results. I will then be able to conclude whether there is a future for me as a professional blogger.

My blogging to date hasn’t exactly been prolific. I started my personal diary blog in June this year. It is my oldest blog and currently has 30 posts. I have a bonsai tree blog which I started in July after I bought some seeds and started to grow them, which has 42 posts and I have a blog about blogging which I started in September and which has 15 posts. I have also been publishing some of my posts on helium.com.

Payperpost.com is one of the means I intend using to earn a living from blogging. My personal diary blog is almost able to satisfy their criteria; it was recently turned down because it only had 17 posts in the last 90 days which didn’t satisfy their criteria of having 20 posts.

I am considering submitting my bonsai blog. The reason I haven’t is that I would have to write 10 paid reviews before I would be able to submit another blog and it might take me a while to find 10 posts that would suit that particular niche!

My blog about blogging has another couple of months to go before it’s old enough. I am also signing up with other pay per post sites.

The other obvious means of monetizing my web-site is advertising, such as Adsense. I have been using this on my blogs and I have found that the bonsai one is the the only one to get any regular clicks from it at the moment. My income from it at the moment is usually $2-$3 per week; hardly enough to encourage me to give up my day job but nevertheless that is what I have done.

My reasoning is that if I am able to achieve that kind of income with very little traffic and with the small amount of time I’ve had to give to them, then I feel that by building up my sites I will be able to achieve something much more worthwhile.

If you’ve ever considered doing the same yourself, you may want to check back here and see how I’m getting on!

I didn’t do a post on my Internet earnings last week. Why not? It was because there were none! My total Internet earnings last week came to 75c. Sixty-six cents came from Adsense and 9c from Helium. Since I am spending $1 dollar a day with Adwords it was clear that something had to be done.

I have decided to concentrate my Adwords campaign on the US to begin with. This is my best choice simply because all my affiliates are based there. When I initially set up the adwords campaign to direct traffic to my Amazon aStore I set it up as a US campaign and that is how I should have left it. It was a mistake to try and get too fancy by setting up a UK aStore as well and running a separate campaign to point at that.

In hindsight, there was no need for me to upgrade my Adwords account from beginner to advanced. The beginners account allows you to create one campaign to run in one country. I upgraded in order to run a separate campaign for the UK aStore and also to run my ads in countries like Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and Germany; all of which countries figure relatively high in my visitors statistics.

A rather obvious problem with this is that in my particular niche lots of the items are live plants, many of which are only available for delivery within the 48 contiguous States so there is little point in paying for someone in Alaska to read my ad, let alone someone in Australia.

Lots of what I’m doing with Adwords now is trying to reverse what I’ve already done. So far I suspended the UK campaign until I have worked out what I’m doing with the US one. I have also specified to only show my ads in the US. Note: It’s worth keeping an eye on this. So far I have changed this setting twice now and somehow it keeps reverting to showing my ads in Australia, Belgium etc. When I noticed this happening from my stats I went back into Adwords to change it again. (Ok, ok. Maybe I just forgot to click on ‘save changes’!)

I have also decided to move away from the aStore and use more widgets and product placements in my blog itself. I have read a lot of criticism about aStores, saying that they look unprofessional and partly I have to agree with this. My initial success in the first couple of weeks seems to have been beginners luck and has ended. I have sold nothing in the aStore for the last two weeks – at a cost of $14!

My new strategy is to embed widgets and links in my blog and point the Adwords campaign to go directly my front page. The advantage I see with this is that it provides original content for the customer to read and gives them a reason to buy off my site rather than to go directly to Amazons or my other affiliates web-sites. It also brightens up my gardening blog with photos of other peoples work. Since I am only a beginner I don’t have any artistic creations of my own to show off. Having these pictures included in my blog might lead people to think I had something to do with creating them!

I noticed too that when I changed my Adwords ad to point it to a different url it took more than a day for the change to register. I made this change on Friday evening. According to my stats it was only this morning that the first hits were directed from the ad to my blog rather than the aStore, and even then they were from Australia!

Another change is that I have had a look at Commission Junction and I have signed up with some other affiliates. One of these pays 20% commission compared to Amazons 4%. It certainly was worth a look because a large proportion of the items in my aStore come from this affiliate anyway. The average price on one of these items is around $40-$50 so I’m looking forward to getting sales from them!

The final decision I have made this week is to drop Adsense from my personal blog. The simple reason for this is that it hasn’t worked. Adsense seems to be working pretty well on my gardening blog. There is at least something from it every day, no matter how small but I have not registered a single click from my personal blog. I have decided therefore to remove the advertising. Since I’m earning nothing from it anyway, I may as well give the impression of not being all about the money! I’ll try to work out another way to make money from my personal blog.

First the bad news. I finally worked out how to install Wordpress a couple of days ago and moved my stuff from Pivot over to it. I customized the template and had everything looking nice I thought. Today in work I checked my web-site and when I typed in the url the old pivot blog, which was still installed on my site, came up! I don’t know why it reverted to the Pivot software. I’m putting the blame on a spammer who sent 33 spam comments to my pivot blog today. My unscientific mind tells me that this put Pivot back into a dominant position. I don’t know. It’s probably just a bad idea to have two blogging software packages installed on the same site at the same time.

Whatever the reason for it, I went into a full scale panic when I came home and set about trying to restore my Wordpress blog. I took my usual course of plunging in and seeing what happens. Unfortunately, every step I took made things worse.

I deleted Pivot. I tried to re-install Wordpress which I couldn’t do until I cleared the tables in MySQL. Before I deleted the tables I did export the database and saved a copy on my computer. Then I re-installed Wordpress, which was now minus the posts which I had imported from Pivot. Pivot was now deleted so I couldn’t import them again. I tried to import the database that I had just exported but the server wouldn’t take it back. I don’t know why. I tried several different methods but I couldn’t get it to work.

I managed to piece my blog together again from a back-up of the Pivot blog from last week and the draft of my last post in Word, all of which I had to re-enter individually because I couldn’t find any other way to do it. The blog entries and comments below this are re-constructed with the time-stamps etc changed to reflect the date that they were originally posted.

It took me two hours to do this. Two miserable and frustrating hours. It was not fun. As I was doing it I thought about how I’d probably discover a method next week that would have allowed me to do it in less than two minutes; that thought only compounded my misery!

I was close to just giving up on the whole thing. If this were a few months down the road and I had had a lot more posts I probably would have just given up at the thought of re-entering each one of them, or else just starting off again from scratch with no posts. So this is a good lesson in knowing how and making regular backups.

And now the good news. When I finished sorting out the mess I had made of this blog and re-covering my posts, I went onto Statcounter to check out my stats. They’re still dismal. Since I’ve given up on driving dumb TrafficG to it they have fallen back to single figures again on my personal blog. I was cheered though that two people had Dugg one of my posts. This is an achievement for me!

As if that didn’t make me happy enough, I then checked out my gardening blog and someone had left a comment looking for advice on planting a particular type of tree and I was able to give him some general advice.

Those two bits of good news totally wiped out my bad experiences earlier this evening. They seem to me to be what blogging is all about: Writing your content, having other people discover it, and then interacting with them. Maybe one day it’ll be financially rewarding. For the moment I’ll have to make do with this wonderful warm feeling I have inside!

I started blogging in June this year. Before that I knew next to nothing about the whole idea of it. I was an early enough adapter to the Internet in the 1990’s and started designing web-sites in 1995. My Internet knowledge got bogged down around 2000 and I didn’t learn anything new after that so the whole web 2.0 concept was new to me.

What changed for me this year? The number one thing to change was that I got a computer and broadband internet access at home so my time online has gone from maybe an hour or two a week in an Internet cafe to a good part of the evening when I get home. The PC has replaced the TV as the main entertainment source in my home.

The computer and internet access at home coincided with the start of the new year. I didn’t make any New Years resolutions this year but I was reminded of one I made three years ago: To be self-employed by the time I was 30. I am now 31 and I haven’t even tried to achieve it yet but the idea of becoming self-employed still appeals to me.

My idea when I initially made the resolution was to become self-employed by having several part-time incomes rather than having one big one. It was kind of like the idea of not having all your eggs in one basket. Also I was attracted to the notion of having lots of different part time jobs to do rather than being stuck doing the same thing all the time.”;s:4:”body”;s:4448:”The three main self-employment possibilities I selected were taxi-driving, massage therapy and writing. I should mention now the stumbling blocks: (1) I don’t know how to drive; (2) I’ve never studied massage and have the average clumsy mans grasp of it; and (3) while I can read I’ve never been known to write anything more than a short essay and only then in moments of inspiration.

My plan included preparation; that was why when I was 28 I resolved to be self-employed by the time I was 30. First I needed to learn to drive, then I had to get a driving licence and then a psv, taxi licence. I also looked up massage therapy courses and thought about different ways to improve my writing ability. Before I could do the driving lessons or the massage courses I needed money so I went and got a personal loan from the bank for $4,000 which I worked out would be enough to get me started learning what I needed to do.

What happened was that when I got the $4,000 short-term materialism took over and I ended up spending it on clothes, DVDs and a Playstation and games. I spent the rest on a deposit for a more secure flat to contain my new possessions and that was my whole self-employment education fund blown. I didn’t keep up the writing because I had no expectation of being good enough at it to make a living from it on it’s own. It was more like the cherry on the top of my self-employment plan.

My interest in writing was rekindled in June this year when in the normal course of surfing I came across a web-site that was offering to pay me to write. This web-site was helium.com and the basic deal is that you write short articles on various topics and publish them on their web-site and they split the advertising profits with you.

If you haven’t heard of this before don’t get too excited. My experience is that earnings are in the pennies rather than dollars. Admittedly I haven’t been writing for Helium very regularly. To date my earnings (since June) have been $2.27. You need to earn $25 before you get paid so I see this as being a long-term investment! But at least it got me interested in the idea of writing again.

I then thought of publishing my own personal blog (Blog A). I did this on free web-space and started off the blog by publishing the articles that I wrote on Helium on it. Since then I have updated it on an irregular basis.

In fact after my initial enthusiasm for writing and blogging in the first two weeks in June I didn’t do any more with it until the end of July when I logged into the dashboard in a fit of boredom and found that someone had left a comment on it praising my writing. That little bit of encouragement was enough to get me started again.

When I resumed blogging in July I came upon the idea of running a blog about my new-found hobby, which is gardening. New-found in that I only got interested in the subject at the beginning of July. In addition to my personal blog I set up this new blog (Blog B) and started writing about my first steps in gardening. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to offer expert advice but at the moment it is more along the lines of cautionary examples.

After the first couple of posts on my gardening blog I got the idea that I should take it further. I found a good .net domain name and went ahead and bought it and set it up on web-space.

It was then that the idea of making money from the blogs started. I went to Google where I searched for ‘making money from blogging’. The first pretty obvious choice was Adsense, which seems to be everywhere. I selected this to start with because it was from a reputable company and was straightforward.

I have signed up for various affiliate programmes since then. So far my blogging for money has only been going for just a little over a month. The number of visitors to my blogs is averaging 6 per day on Blog A and 23 per day on Blog B. My total earnings from all my various sources of revenue, which I will go into more detail about later comes to $7.57 (as at 13th September 2007). Off the top of my head I estimate that so far I have spent about $700 between the two blogs.

These are the humble beginnings I am starting from. I am like many people who would consider entering into blogging at this stage. I have an interest in writing and would love to be able to make some extra income and hopefully a living from it.

Stick with me and see if it works . .