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.

Isn’t he worried about us stealing his keywords and topping him?

To those things I say, “Pish posh. Ratta matta poo.”

Well, not really.

The truth is I believe in the capitalist spirit and don’t mind if you steal my work. I hope you do make a million dollars off of what I say. I feel the only way for this Adsense blog to be successful is to pull down the curtain and show you everything that I have done. Plus, I don’t even know if what I am doing will work. So, if you steal my ideas and they fail, then I have a few partners in my misery.

Look, I got into the Internet back when it was mostly a place to share information freely and I still believe in those ideals. I feel that if you put information, pictures, movies, and content online, then others have the right to borrow it and make their own destiny from your works.

But, anyway, let’s get back to day three of my adventures trying to make money with Adsense blogging.
So, you remember my girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend, right?

Well, we will call him John from now on.

John came into the back room and gave me some great ideas for keywords, mostly relating to dogs. So I ran a bunch of dog-related keywords up the Google flagpole, and came back with some decent hits.

One that interested me was Guard Dogs. When I searched for Guard Dogs on Google, I came back with a good chance to place in the top five. Hell, I might even place top dog, but I am still new at this and will be happy for now to just place in the top five. I figure when I get some websites under my belt that are producing, then I can set my sites at some higher competition.

So the keyword search for Guard Dogs, after I put in the formula and did my SEO search, was greenlighted at around a hundred bucks a month in potential revenue.

Cool, I found my first targeted Adsense blog.

Hey, Crowbar, you ask, what the Hell do you know about dogs?

Not too much. But I live with two dogs and John knows a lot about breeds, so it’s a start.

Look, the main thing about these keywords is that you do not need to be an expert. There is plenty of information on the web for you to write a few decent articles to get started. For right now, we are just trying to find a profitable keyword and get a domain.

So I went back to Court’s Crash Course Manual and watched the videos again about buying a domain. I ran a few ideas through Proud Domain’s Domain Search and came back with www.guarddogsguide.com.

First Major Rule, gang, is you got to have the keywords in the name. You can’t be fancy and call it Inthedoghouse.com or Dothesedoggiesbite.com because we are in the keyword search business.

If your keyword is not in the name, then you already lose. Period.

Well, maybe not, but I am not arguing with Court. He has made 3500 in one month off of a keyword. So listen to him, already!

So now I have a domain and I’m ready to start making money with Google as an Adsense blogger.

Well, not yet. I need a damn host now.

But that’s for tomorrow.