My First Year Trying to Make Money Blogging

It has been close to a year now that I started trying to make money online blogging. Since then, I have been a negligent father to all my websites and have left most in a state of disrepair. i now own over twenty-five domains and I can only say that there are only a couple that I am satisfied with right now. I have not made any serious money doing this, but I have to say the fault is my own and not in the methods that are taught by people like Griz or Court. Had I stuck with it all year, I am sure I would have had a decent head start in earning a living make money through blogging and Google Adsense.

So far, I have earned around 300 dollars through Google Adsense, affiliates, and other source of monetization like Adbrite and Infolinks. I will be writing a review on these two sites, so just follow this link to learn more.

Now, 300 bucks doesn’t seem like a lot, but that is all passive income; I mean really passive income because I have largely ignored my sites over the year. In fact, some of my sites have no Google Adsense on them at all because i chose to either remove the ads due to lack of quality in the site or that Google chose to ban the site from ads. (Like this site!!)

But overall, i feel that in 2010, I can take the valuable experiences from the last year and help make my sites grow bigger and more profitable.

Some Advice on Blogging and The Mistakes I Learned From

The first thing I got to say about trying to make money blogging is that you can’t be afraid to fail. You can’t spend all your time searching for answers to your questions and reading every blog possible before you try something. You just have to jump in and prepare to fall on your feet. Look, I have made dozens of mistakes over the last year from simple editing errors with WordPress to having subpoenas served on me for copyright infringement, so i can say I am an expert on errors. i have had sites that Google has removed their ads from and I have had some articles pulled off of sites because they violate rules of content. I have posted duplicate content, scraped websites for information and just plain put together crappy sites. But in all this, I learned to make nice sites that can make money while at the same time offering exclusive well-written and SEO styled writing.

Here is a couple of pointers about making money blogging:

1. Learn to maximize your time

Over the course of blogging, you are going to write and rewrite hundreds of articles unless you are lucky and have the money to outsource your work. I am one of those unlucky bastards who has to make all my own content for not only my Adsense blog sites but for my link sites and other places i have to submit content. I used to write all my blogs in Word and then transfer them into WordPress, but have since stopped this habit.

Mozilla Firefox has a built-in spellchecker which works perfectly well with the spellchecker that is built-in to WordPress. With these two features, there is no need to write your work in Word, then transfer to WordPress. In fact, almost all of your blogging can be done in the formats that most blog sites come with. Ezine, HubPages, and Squidoo allow you to just type way right into the editing tools to design your blogs.

You have to understand that you are a blogger now, not a writer. The difference is that you must learn to just push out the content with lightning fast speed and shave off time by constantly transferring and storing files in different areas. You should write your blog as a draft and go back later to edit it, but you should not be spending an extreme amount of time trying to get it perfect.

Also, you must limit the amount of time you spend reading blogs. yes, it is good to read some blogs to get information and tips on how to make money online through blogging, on the latest on Google Adsense, and tips on how to get the best SEO for your site. These things need to be done in moderation and should only take up about 5% of the time you use to develop your blogs.

2. Have a Game Plan

Before you decide to make money through blogging, make sure you have an idea of what your expectations are. You are not going to get rich overnight. You need to put in the legwork, lots of legwork if you plan on making a living through Google Adsense blogging or any other from of affiliate programs. You need to decide how much time each day you are going to assign to this project, how many sites are you going to start with, and what keywords do you feel are the right ones to build your blogs behind.

You got to make sure you do not get to far ahead of yourself and make sure your sites are supporting your costs.

This should be your first goal. All your sites should be making back the costs you spend on maintaining them. If you only spend ten dollars a year on the domain and ten dollars a month for hosting, then your Adsense blogs must recoup this cost or you need to rework them. if you are outsourcing your work, then this expense must also be added into the projections for your site. If your blog is not making money after a year, then you must either rework the site or move on.

My game plan this year is that each site must make double its cost in 2010. We will see how that goes.

3. Don’t Get Ahead of Yourself

This was my biggest mistake. Before I had successfully developed my first Adsense blog, I was already buying up other domains. Before I knew it, I had already own over twenty domains and did not have the time or energy to work on any of them. The good news is that these sites now have a little age on them and they shouldn’t be too hard to monetize. The bad news is it gave me an overwhelming feeling of burn out when it came to working on them.

When you first start, I would suggest that you do not buy more than five domains for Adsense blogging and wait and build these sites for six months before getting more. Just keep your research in keywords and use this knowledge to expand your base. If anything, write blogs on these keywords for sites like HubPages or Squidoo and use these links later to build your new sites.

4. Understand Your Limitations

i think most of all, you got to understand exactly what you are capable of doing. if you have very little experience writing or working with webpages, then you should start off small and simple. Find one nice keyword that you feel will make money with Google Adsense while at the same time not completely bore you to death and build a simple Wordpress around this keyword. Work with HubPages, play around with Squidoo, submit to Ezine, and just build your links while at the same time doing some reading of SEO tips and read up on the themepages for other WordPress themes to get an idea of what is capable.

Building blogs for making money with Google Adsense is not just about passive income but it is also passive education. The more you work with the blogs, the more you learn, the more you know, and pretty soon, you will find yourself giving advice in the same way you were seeking it in the beginning.

My Plans for Adsense Blogging in 2010

Nothing gets your blood boiling and your fingers tapping away at the keys then when your websites come up for renewal. I may have been slow (almost turtle slow) from putting in the work on my blogs for the second half of 2009, but when I got a noticed that it was time to pay the piper to keep my blogsites I realized it was time to reevaluate my Adsense blogging.

I had to look at the disaster I created for myself and then decide what to do with all these sites I own.

You see, over the last year, I bought close to thirty domains, all with the intention of monetizing them to make money through Google Adsense and other sources of income. While my vision and plans were high, I didn’t consider two factors.

One, that life happens.

Two, that burn out happens.

Life Goes On While You Try to Make Money Blogging

Of anyone deciding to start blogging and blogging for the sake of making money online, then you must understand this saying. In fact, develop it as a mantra and mumble it day in and day out, especially when you decide it is time to research some new keywords and put more time into blogging.

No matter what your goal is or plans are for your websites, life just sometimes takes over. I have a newborn who is now one year old, I have gone back to college, so has my girlfriend, and our house that we live in had hung on the edge of foreclosure. These things have taking priority over putting in time to develop my Adsense blogsites. I have had very little time, or effort to put in the maintenance, the linkbuilding, and just the overall work to develop these sites into primo Googl;e Adsense real estate.

Over the last year, i have left a trail of destruction across the web of unfinished blogsites, quickly thrown up hack jobs, and URLs parked with nothing but Apache listings showing up when clicked on. Most of my main blogs have gone into the Internet Wastelnads, My HubPages have not reached my goal of 100, and my Squidoo lenses are cracked.

In general, I have created a mess of my plans to make money online and have just let my online real estate grow weeds.

Burned Out on Blogging

When I first started blogging to make money with Google Adsense, I was enthusiastic. It was a new, exciting frontier and I was putting in close to eighteen hours a day doing research on keywords, deciphering Wordpress themes, and just writing tons and tons of content for my blogs and link sites. I quickly saw the cents begin to trickle in on my Adsense ads and I felt I was going in the right direction. But soon, I became suffered from burn out because I now had more sites then I knew what to do with and could not afford to outsource my work.

So, I started avoiding my responsibilities to my blogs. Several, I just could not touch at all. Most have not received any new content in months and I have even bought more URls to compound the work I was already avoiding. Eventually, I decided that i was through with blogging for awhile and pulled out my subscriptions to several sites and pulled my Google Adsense from most of my sites because I was afraid Google might sandbox these sites.

Time went on, my sites began to earn very little money but i was still get a few dollars a month through monetized sites that still had Google Adsense, Adbrite, and Infolinks. I went about pursuing other interests and would occasionally look over my blogs to see if there was hope,

Then, a few weeks ago, i started receiving E-mails that my websites were coming up for renewal. I was like, “Wow, a year has gone by already?” and now I had to decide what to do with these sites.

Should I keep them?

Should I let them go?

Getting Back On Track Making Money Online

So I had to make a decision. I really thought about just quitting, but then I thought about all the work I have done so far on my sites. It would be a waste to let that all go. I just needed to my a plan this time and stick to it. I had learned a lot over the last year about making blogs, learning SEO, and just a lot about the world of monetization, Google Adsense, and the Internet in general. I was now a veteran blogger with hundreds of hours dedicated to putting my words on the World Wide Web. It was time to get back on the horse.

So, now it is 2010 and I am back in the game. I have decided to give all my websites a new look since I have learned a lot about customizing Wordpress, to add fresh new content and links, to get back into blogging on a regular basis and to see what 2010 holds for me in the world of blogging.

And I am now happy to be one of the soldiers on the front line, toiling day and day, night after night, caffeine surging through my body, a draw full of empty candy wrappers, and a half empty jar of pickles standing on my tower.

What am I talking about, gang?

I’ve decide to join the Hub Challenge. That’s right, if it is bad enough that I am designing eight sites at once, that I just recently had a baby (well, not me, my girl did), and that my bladder seems to want to empty every twenty minutes, so now I have to go and post 100 hubs in thirty days.

I am wondering if I can get an IV of coffee going and a catheter shoved in my . . .

Well, enough of my wishes. If any of you are a members of the Keyword Academy, then you received an article by Mark and Court about their crazy idea to write a whole bunch of articles to see their rankings go up on HubPages and see what kind of income can come in for their Adsense Blogs.

Well, this idea has blossomed into an all out challenge to bloggers everywhere to create content to add to Hub Pages and see who generates the most revenue for their blogs.

It is a crazy hare-brained idea that has its own group of nutcases, and I am one of them.

So, there are some rules here. You don’t want to submit a bunch of articles you have everywhere else. I started too, and I think it is the only place I don’t agree with Court, or misunderstood his teachings, when it comes to duplicate submissions. I have also run into some snags at Exinearticles.com. You see, I am a prolific writer, but I hate rewriting an article, especially to submit to another website. So, my dumb butt goes ahead and submits duplicates to HubPages to jump start my one hundred and then I find out this is the wrong approach to using HubPages.

So that means, as an Adsense blogger, I either need to rework my pieces or make sure from the beginning to use new material.

Well, I’m gonna write about 100 Dogs. That’ll show ‘em.

So, Now, I am a little behind in the race due to these damn duplicates, but I still have 28 days left and I can do this.

To infinity and beyond.

So, it’s my two week anniversary in this making money with Google Adsense game. So far I have made a dollar and thirty-five cents. I was excited when I saw the money show up in my Adsense account. I jumped up and down for joy, ran out in the street and shouted to the neighbors that I was on my way to making a million dollars. After that, I started checking my account every hour to see if the money was still rolling in. Now, it is four days later and I still only have a buck thirty-five for my Adsense blog.

What did I learn from this?

That this is a waiting game, that you have to keep building your Adsense blogs, keep building domains with the purpose of making money online, and just be patient. You got to learn to stop checking your statcounter, stop checking your Google Adsense, and just work on your long con.

In last week’s episode of Lie to Me, Dr. Lightman ran a long con on a serial rapist to get him to reveal his copy cat. That’s what I call this system of making money online. You have to be in it for the long run, you have to be willing the go the distance, and put in the leg work now. The great thing about building blogs for Adsense money is that once they are up and running, they are low maintenance. It is real easy to stack a portfolio of online real estate designed to make money online targeting Adsense and affiliate links. But it is not an overnight process. It can take months, years to make a decent income especially if you don’t have good keywords or the time to dedicate to building your websites.

Putting In the Leg Work

In the last two weeks, I have put in between ten to twenty hours a day either building or learning about Adsense blogs. The great thing is that all this work and knowledge is incremental; constantly building upon itself to create better websites designed for making money online.

One of the biggest improvements is in my keyword searches. At first, I sought out any profitable keyword that was going to have monthly CPC earnings of over fifty dollars. While these keywords are good to have, you must also think about what type of person is going to visit your page.

For example, an Adsense blog on kittens might pay you fifty bucks a month, but are the people searching for kittens really going to spend any real money on any ads targeting kittens. Sure, they might buy flea collars and kitty litter or they might just be cat lovers who like to search the internet for kitty information.

But let’s say you have developed an Adsense blog for plastic surgery. Well, the people who visit these sites are willing to spend real money on cosmetic enhancements. Also, they might have weight loss issues, might need herbal supplements, and there is a good chance they will click on your Google Adsense ads and your affiliates, which in turn will make you real money.

So when researching your keywords, think about what people are really spending money on, not just what people are searching for online. Build two or three Adsense blogs on similar subjects and provide anchor links and blogroll links between these sites to help boost their authority.

Your Adsense blog websites are like a good wine. You have to let them ripen and mature. The keys to a good site is to not only find a niche and place five articles, build some links and forget about it, but to build up these sites. Let’s say you own twenty sites designed to make money online targeting Google Adsense and have followed Court and Mark’s advice, have developed links through Griz’s niche support site, and you are making a grand a month.

Sounds really good.

So you go on building new Adsense blog sites while forgetting about your old ones. What is going to happen is that others are going to come along and knock you out of your keywords because you are not maintaining your sites.

Take this site, Adsense Blog For Beginners for instance. I know that there is some competition for this specific keyword search. It is not like there are any real legacy sites with information on making money online, but just a bunch of Adsense bloggers. Well, since the site went live, it now ranks number one and two for the keyword Adsense Blog For Beginners and is in the top fifty for Adsense blog and one of the reasons is that people became happy with just the write five article/build up some links mentality. You got to keep building up your sites adding more links, more content, gaining more authority.

You can’t just let your Adsense blog sites stew in their own juices, but let them marinate for the best taste.

Running The Long Con with Your Adsense blog Sites

You got to build up your anchor links on your Adsense blog and not just your blogroll. One way to do that is request a trade for textual anchors in another person’s blog site. Requesting links for blogs is not as hard as some think. It is good to find those in the same game of making money online to trade links then just regular blog sites. While some of the latter sites might have decent page ranking, the problem is you might have to send out a couple hundred emails just to get one or two links. Most of those who are trying to build up their Adsense blogs are friendly and considerate people especially Court. Out of the last twenty emails I sent to Adsense bloggers, almost all replied and more than half of them agreed to a link exchange.

Another way to build up links is to send some juice back to your other sites from your main Adsense blog site. If you build up your MMO site, then it is relatively easy to add anchor links in an article.

So, let’s say inside one of my posts I start talking about the difference between drug detox and drug rehab. Or I decide to discuss different companies who offer LSAT test prep. Maybe, I know some things about liposuction and feel like talking about these things in my blog.

I also can go into depth about dogs. I could talk about dog breeds that are the best for guard dog training. I could mention what are the best breeds to have as puppies, or even offer advice about dog training.

The point is that in those last couple of paragraphs I provided a little juice to my own Adsense blog sites. This is one way to help build that maturity and authority that is most vital in making money with Adsense.

Look, there is a lot of advice out there on making money online, but it really comes down to doing your homework, doing the leg work, and investing time to make sure your sites get ranked. It is not an overnight get rich plan, but instead a way to gain financial freedom from a steady income.

If you have made it this far in this article and want to request an anchor link to any unused keywords above, just list the anchor text and your Urls in the comments below. I will delete each comment after I have put in your link. Just include me in somewhere in your blog site with any of the following keywords: making money online, Adsense blog, Adsense blogging, Adsense blog for beginners, or anything similar.

I’ve been sifting through articles about Adsense blogs, Adsense blogging, and making money using Google Adsense lately. One person who really catches my eye is Griz.

Besides the upcoming review I have of his sites, he has taught me the value of running the long con or slow con when trying to make money online.

In the world of Adsense blogs, few come as crafty and honest as Griz. So far, he has taught me some valuable techniques to help me with my SEO plans. A little over a week ago I bought my first domain and began my career as an Adsense Blogger. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and sometimes I still don’t know. But I have a gut feeling that I am headed in the right direction for make a living off the internet.

If you have been watching the television series Lost, then you are familiar with the character of James Sawyer. The interesting thing about Sawyer is he is born con-man and understands the long con. If Sawyer decided to get in the internet game then he would be at the top with making money with Google Adsense.

That is how I would decide to call the business of trying to make money as an Adsense blogger. It is not a quick plan to make money, but a long term race for those who stay in it to see the payoff at the end. Some people fall for the short cons on the internet and end up getting frustrated with trying to make money online. They buy the courses, spend money on lessons, try to sell their clothes on E-Bay, and finally get frustrated and quit. Others actually try to become Adsense bloggers but end up giving in before any of their sites make any money. They use the wrong keywords, don’t understand the importance of backlinks, and fail to optimize their Adsense blog for keyword density.

So far in the last week, a few of my sites, including Adsense Blog for Beginners, have posted in the top five for long tail keywords. Sure these are not my desired Adsense keywords, but for only being a week out the box, it feels good to see your Adsense blog listing in Google already.

Being In the Adsense Blog Game For The Long Haul

Most people do not have the time to spend on building a dynasty of online real estate that will attract incomes that break the four-figure level. They don’t have time to do keyword research, write content, build links, or to do the research necessary to survive in the online money making industry. They settle for their full-time jobs, go back to playing World of Warcraft, or start surfing the internet again for free porn. They don’t understand what it takes to have a successful Adsense blog or don’t have the stamina to follow this through.

Look, if you follow Court’s crystal clear instruction and Griz’s honest advice, if you put forth the effort to build websites that are search engine optimized to draw Google to you, and then you are going to make money.

Pay the buck and sign up for The Keyword Academy. Buy yourself several domains, a hostserver, and start pounding away at that content while building your backlinks.

The key is all adds up. It keeps piling on top of itself, every day you get a little more accomplished, pretty soon you start submitting articles everywhere, pretty soon you’re trying to race Mark at the 100 hubs in thirty days challenge, pretty soon your Adsense blogs begin gathering traffic, and pretty soon money shows up in your Google Adsense account.

And life becomes happy again.

But you got to learn to run the long con first.

Build Your Adsense Blog Portfolio

In the last week I have purchased eight domains. By the beginning of June, I shall have ten. I hope for twenty by July and I don’t even have a job or any real income. What I do have is a PayPal account and several ways to make quick money online.

I call this my “petty cash” system. There are several techniques out there to make real daily money to help finance your sites while you wait to make money with Google Adsense. One, through the use of Project PayDay, you can make several hundred dollars over a few days, or even in a day if you want to take time away from building your Adsense blogs. Project Payday will introduce you to incentivized freebie websites where with very little cost you can buy in on a referral system where people pay you to help finish their referrals for Ipods and Playstation 3. You have seen these ads in your spam folder from time to time. Well, the truth is that they are real, but require a bunch of hoops to jump through.

Well, it seems like there are a lot of people willing to pay for your help with this endeavor. incentivized freebie websites are not a long term source for income for those who want to make real money, but you get paid immediately. You can then use that money to purchase new domains for your Adsense blogs.

Another source of income is to write for other websites. A lot of people who start to make money with Adsense blogging begin to outsource their articles, paying an average of 3 to 5 dollars an article. There are several websites that cater to this growing freelance market and I am currently reviewing which ones I find that are decent.

Discover Brand Recognition

Entrepreneurs like Tyler Cruz, Courtney Tuttle, and Grizzly did not start out as known experts in the field of making money online through Adsense blogs. These bloggers learned their craft, put out honest content, and gained a reputation for being great at understanding how to make money online. This didn’t happen overnight. It happened from giving a great product and generating a solid trust in the make money online community. This will not happen overnight.

Remember, your actions speak louder than words. While social networking will not get you your CPC clicks, it will get your popularity raised, or lowered by just how you deal with others in your community. So, you finally build an Adsense blog that ranks over four and others are asking you for help getting them some juice. They are also people who read your articles on Hub Pages and Squidoo and help drive your popularity up so you can attract real search engine clicks. So, how you treat others is important in the Adsense blog world.

The Long Tail, The Long Post, and The Long Con

When building your Adsense blog website, you only think in the short term. You write short articles, design short keywords, and expect money to come in the short run. Well, over at Griz’s websites, he talks in depth of the value of having rambling posts, about the value of long tail keywords, and the need to develop perfect backlinks. This is all necessary to run the long con when targeting keywords for your Adsense blog.

As Grizzly talks about on his pages about making money online with Google Adsense, you have to learn the best way to lead Google back to your pages and let them determine what your site is an authority on.

So What Is My Point?

My point is that this is my new area to post in that follows what I learned from Grizzly about running a long con on my Adsense Blog For Beginners website. The new blog post is going to be a place where I ramble about my experience developing Adsense blogs while at the same time trying to generate those key keyword searches.

So if you want to follow my musings, then this new category about Adsense blogging was made for you.

]]> http://adsenseblogforbeginners.com/2009/05/13/adsense-blog-running-the-long-con-part-one/feed/ 1 http://adsenseblogforbeginners.com/2009/05/08/day-two-in-the-adsense-blog-world/ http://adsenseblogforbeginners.com/2009/05/08/day-two-in-the-adsense-blog-world/#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 06:12:15 +0000 crowbar http://adsenseblogforbeginners.com/?p=24 ...Read the Rest]]> Alright, so I watched all the videos, read a few of the articles, and now I decide to give Court’s plan a try. I start brainstorming ideas. The first one I get to make an Adsense blog is about the swine flu pandemic that is going around. I figure there is got to be ton of traffic heading in that direction.

So swine flu is the first search I did for a keyword. Now, I go to the Google Adwords Keywords Tool, adjust the show/hide menus so that I can see all the money I am going to make with the swine flu. Well, I come to find out that I am not going to make jack-diddley because swine flu is too new of a keyword to generate any results as a blog with Adsense. Sure, I believe people are searching for it. Hell, I punched in a few URL’s and there are several sites already getting on the bandwagon. I’m sure if I was a professional at Adsense blogs I could make a fortune with the damn swine flu. But I’m not taking my chances.

Swine flu probably fits the first rule that Court mentions in his Crash Course Manual. But, it doesn’t satisfy the other two rules which are the keyword has to be able to rank and peeps need to find the damn thing valuable.

Ain’t no sense of a million people coming to your site on nose picking, if nobodies buying ya boogers.

So now my goal is to find some keywords that people are searching for, that can be ranked, and that have value.

So I start generating my list, start plugging them into an Excel sheet, start running the Potential Formula for Adsense in blog post from the manual on them. I find out that if I can get a site on laptops, I’ll make 88,ooo dollars a month.

Sweet.

So, I come down to earth when I install the SEO-for-Firefox plug-in and find out there is no way in Hell that I’m ever gonna place against the competition for laptops.

So, I go through my list and start turning all my special keywords red. Occasionally, I find one I want to make green, but I think I’m actually pushing it. Then my girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend comes into the back house where I hide with my computer and he starts going on about his dam dog and how wonderful it is and how he likes to watch mixed martial arts….blah….blah…blah.

Wait. Dogs and People Beating Each Other Up.

These are some great keywords. Now, he keeps rambling on and filling me with a plethora of keywords.

Hmm, I wonder if people are searching for plethora.

Anyways, pretty soon I have over 400 hundred keywords to begin to look at for potential Adsense blog sites. After just a few hours, I nailed down a few keywords that did not look to hard to page rank in and that can generate at least a hundred dollars a month in potential income.

Not much, but it’s a start.

Now, onto my next step: Buying a domain.

But before I could spend diaper money on domains for my new pla of making money with Google Adsense blogs, I needed to make sure I had enough diapers. So, I had to shut off my computer and head out to Target and wait until the next day to get rich.