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.

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.

So, I bought some domains, ran them through all the set up configurations, and found some themes that I can live with for now. I have also taken care of my daily chores like cooking, going to the grocery store, showering, and listening to John’s new suggestions for websites. Because of him, I now own five websites set up for Adsense blogs but none of them have any content.

It doesn’t help that it is around ninety degrees in Los Angeles. I need to start doing my work before it gets too hot or my computer starts acting all squirrely. I live in an Internet-minded household where at any time there are at least three to five people sharing the same router and if somebody starts to download something, I am pretty much screwed.

So, it’s time to add some content to my Internet real estate. Now, in Court’s videos, he mentions visit ezinearticles.com for some ideas. But this is not such a good idea if you are going to submit your Adsense blog to that site. Ezinearticles reviews all your submissions and if you happened to “loosely paraphrase”, you are going to get rejected for similar content.

As bloggers, we are not responsible for citing our source material, but it is always a good idea that wherever you get your articles from that you rewrite what you read in your own words. Don’t be tempted to cut and paste together an article or you will never get it posted anywhere and you will never be able to link build.

I am not saying that you have to be a trained journalist. Just spend some time organizing the article in your own words. Also, don’t be tempted to do it right in WordPress. Always use whatever word processing software you have available because it has built in grammar correction that is not available when typing directly into those submission boxes.

Also develop your own unique voice and style and put a pen name on that beast. While there is a huge debate going if social trafficking can help generate revenue, it does help if your name has brand recognition when going for the long haul. I have been writing with the name Crowbar for over two years now, so there is some traffic I can count on from that pen name.

Now there is one thing I disagree with from Court’s teaching. I believe in the use of multiple pen names when designing niche websites designed to target Google Adsense blogging. I am not saying creating deceptive voices, but develop separate ones for each niche.

If you are planning on owning multiple sites, I feel that it is good to put so many sites under one pen name and so many with another. Whether you use one voice or separate voices, It comes down to personal preference, I guess.

Well, it’s been close to a week now and I own five sites (I bought this one on Day Five) and I feel I am on my way to becoming a millionaire. So far, I have spent over a hundred dollars and close to forty hours on this endeavor.

And I am completely broke. I wonder if Proud Domains accepts food stamps.

I can’t sleep at night.

My girlfriend keeps getting mad at me for getting up at 6 A.M. and sneaking off to the back house for hours.

But I can’t help it.

I’m hooked.

It’s now my fourth day and I own three domains relating to dogs. According to the Court’s Potential Formula, they should all net me around a hundred bucks a month when I get them ranked. Now, I just got to get them hosted.

Look, I’ve been using the internet for over ten years and I am sad to say that I have never owned a domain nor had a website hosted. I never knew the proper way to go about it and was a little lazy to learn. When HTML was in its early days, I did okay, but then those damn Cascading Style Sheets went over my head and I left websites to the rest of the world. So, when I ran into Court’s course I was a little hesitant about starting a website.

But, that is why I advise watching all the videos first and make sure you understand everything that you are going to have to do. I’m lucky right now. I don’t have a life and the state is taking care of my needs. I got all day to do this since I quit wasting my time playing World Of Warcraft. Now, besides designing website for making money with Google Adsense, I need to figure out how to sell my WOW account E-Bay. Anyone looking for a level 80 Death Knight with some epic gear?

The point I’m trying to make is that while I am very internet savvy, I have also been internet asleep, wasting my time, sometimes days, on the internet doing things that didn’t make me a lick of money.

I’ve done the gambling, the late night backdoor adult pass hacks, the massively multiplayer life sucking games, and now I’ve moved on to trying to make a buck online.

So, I went to HostGator, and spent the money to buy one of those unlimited packs for like eight bucks a month. Figure in the price of the three domains for two years each and I have already invested about seventy dollars into my plans to become a millionaire with Google Adsense blogging.

Well, you can’t make money unless you spend money.

At this point, gang, Hostgator is going to send you an email with your new host server numbers. When you get this email, you need to go back to the website where you bought your domains and change the name servers. All this is in Court’s tutorials.

The only thing I got to add is that when you buy another domain, and you will, make sure you go to your Cpanel page and add the subdomain before you change the name servers or you will end up like me.

I spent an hour talking to someone in India about how I can’t access my site because someone else is sitting there already.

My girlfriend started complaining about wanting some quality time together, wanting to eat, wanting to shower, and something about a baby that I don’t talk to anymore.

Doesn’t he understand? I’m trying to build his future.