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, 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.

If you’re like me, you don’t do just one thing at a time. You are part of the new breed of multitaskers who have fifteen windows opened at once and you’re plugging away at your latest Adsense blog while you’re IMing your girlfriend.

So somewhere in the process you might forget something you learned, especially when building multiple sites and it helps to have a checklist you can fall back on.

I’ll be in the middle of writing a blog and John will come in with a great keyword for me to search for (the dude is a serious gold mine of ideas) and then I’m off buying another domain. I’ve bought seven in a week and only two are in any shape to roll.

Now, this is in no way an end all-be all list. It is just a list of steps I learned from all the videos and articles on Court’s site. If I have left something out, I might not have learned it yet. So, please share it with the rest of us.

1: Set up your new name server numbers

Can’t do anything without that step. Also, if you have a new website, put it in your add sub domain section of your Cpanel first.

2. Set up Wordpress through your Cpanel

Go to the Fantastico Deluxe feature and install Wordpress. For new websites, don’t forget to change the domain name or it will be called the same thing as your last site.

3. Go to your Wordpress Dashboard and configure your settings

Remember to also change your Permalinks to maximize your SEO.

4. Go get your new nifty Wordpress theme

Download at least two or three, so you can test drive them.

5. Upload your new themes and your SEO All-In-One Pack

Might as well kill both birds with one stone here. Then go activate your plugin and configure its settings.

I’m not hip to other plugins yet, so if you jiggy with them, go crazy with your add ons.

6. Gather up all your Copy and Pastes

You know, go get your statcounter, your affiliate codes, and if you have content, throw up your Google Adsense blocks. I wouldn’t advise adding this code until you have up enough content in case those damn Google Techs hit your page and wonder what the hell is going on at puppyloveparlor.com.

It seems easy, but when you are building about five sites at the same time it’s real easy to over look something. I just realized today that I skipped over a video and had to go back and load in all those SEO packs to my pages.

Look, I know there is a tone of stuff I still don’t know, but for those just starting out trying to make money with Google Adsense, one site is not going to get you rich. You need to get up multiple sites, get a portfolio going, and sometimes it’s easy to miss a step.

And to all you experts who read this, I would appreciate any comments you might have.