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.

The Adsense Blogging World

So, I am now a two-month veteran of the I Survived Two Months In The Adsense Blogging World community. I say I am a veteran and no longer a newbie, because it has been a hard fought battle to get to this point. I have learned a lot, made several mistakes, some huge, mostly small, but most of all I had to switch my perspective as a writer.

I started this by writing what I knew and what I was comfortable with. I now find myself writing about things I have absolutely no interest in, nor any previous knowledge about just to try to make money with Google adsense. I am writing huge 1000 word plus epics on the most mundane and boring things in the world.

Why?

Because these things are popular and these things have high Cost Per Click rates.

Adsense Blogging and the CPC Killer

In the world of making money online and especially writing blogs for Adsense, you are going to find that you are eventually going to battle with who you are and what you think you know against who you need to be.

Who did I think I was?

An amateur writer who has a damn opinion about everything and anything. I would scan the Internet and write about the stuff that I thought mattered like Michael Jackson’s funeral and my opinion on stuff I knew about like dogs.

Was this going to make me any real money?

I wasn’t sure. I was writing to appease a social audience and it my first two months I has over 20,000 page views, but they only translated into less than sixty dollars in money.

I also started writing for other people which made me around a hundred dollars in that same time period. The crap I wrote for other people ranged from how to get rid of ingrown toenails to how to choose the best wine refrigerator.

During this time of writing other people’s articles, i had an epiphany.

I am writing the wrong types of Adsense blogs. I needed to stop writing about what people are searching for because they might buy it, but what people are trying to find information about before they spend money.

I had finally understood the difference.

Hubpages and Adsense Blogs

So, over the last several months, I had written about 44 useless HubPage Adsense blogs that got very little traffic and made almost no money.

I was about to give up on HubPages completely when I noticed Court having a webinar that broke down exactly what he did.

So, with bated breath and a new outlook on what I was doing, I watched his webinar and decided to do it exactly as he suggested.

That is usually how I screw up. I see how people want me to do it and I kind of go off in my own direction.

And over the last two months, I have gone off in so many directions. I’ve spent time on hubs, bought close to twenty domains, fooled around with Squidoo and basically left a long trail of half-used toys dangling all over the Internet.

My Third Month in the Adsense Blog World

What’s going to happen in my third month?

It is time to tidy up all my little messes. It’s time to go back over my Adsense blogging websites and clean up all the crappy blogs. It’s time to polish up those lenses and to actually put some work on websites that are sitting there looking empty.

You see, I have finally developed a pattern to creating my Adsense blogs and I am going to use it for all my pages.

My goal is to finally make a hundred dollars in one month.

Wish me luck.

I know now that there are not enough hours in the day to build all my Adsense blogs. I now own about fourteen domains and they are all over the place in levels of completion. Some of them still have that great “Hello World” sticking out at there for all to see. Not to mention that I have a hard time sleeping at night because of all the damn caffeine I drink all day and my family has demands, too. I really wish they would learn how to cook and that my son would change his own diapers.

It is real easy to get burned out doing this making money online thing especially if you have to write your own material. Someday, in the near future, I plan on outsourcing my Adsense blog articles, but right now I can’t afford it. I am trying to convince John (remember him as my great source of keywords) to invest so that I can buy thirty more websites and outsource the articles to undeveloped countries that speak broken English.

Oh, those great entrepreneur dreams.

So far, John is skeptical and wants to see me make more than five bucks a week. Yes, I have already made five dollars from Google Adsense, and I am trying to convince him that I have barely done five percent of the work necessary to building a steady income from my Adsense blog sites. He is not buying in to my money making system, yet, but I believe he will come around.

I have a mountain of work ahead of me, and I am glad that I have no life or I would have given up by now. Building blogs to target Google Adsense is an endurance test and I am glad it is because it helps eliminate the competition, and the bonus is when you do start to make money those already in the game make one of the friendliest communities to be involved in. Over at the Keyword Academy, there is a great community forum where even Court will add his opinion on a regular basis. They also have a cool ranking system that ranks those in the community by how much they make a month. These members must submit reports to be ranked, so that you know when you ask someone for advice they have actually made money and aren’t blowing smoke up your ass. If you are not part of the Keyword Academy, then you really don’t want to make money through Adsense blogging.

I’ve made mistakes and learned from them in the last two weeks. I really feel like I am in an elite group that gets the real deal of making money online.

Here are a few things I feel that are important to mention.

1.       Get Organized- Start making Excel sheets and keep track of your work

2.       Work on each website in rotation- Write a blog, then a Ezine, a HubPage, a Squidoo, etc. for a site, then move on to the next one.

3.       Read less, Work more- it is important to read blogs and find new info, but this should never take more than 10% of your time.

4.       Build them links- this can never be stressed enough

Remember, this an income that has low maintenance down the line, but for now, you got to put in the work.