First Milestone Reached!

Well after 13 posts over the course of three months I am proud to say that I have reached my goal of making $100.00! I am actually surprised at the quickness with which I achieved this if you count the fact that I took March and most of April off in regards to this project.

The biggest boost in my income so far has been encouraging my friends and family to start their own blogs. It has been fun seeing the variety of ideas that they come up with and it gives me more ideas to use on my own site. My blog is oriented directly on figuring out how to make cash on this.

The majority of sites will promise you riches and that all you need is their neat little program or theme design and you will be rolling in the riches with little effort. They are lying. There is a lot of hard work involved in trying to get established but it pays off in the end. It is incredibly difficult to find sites that are not over hyped but they are out there. Hopefully I can save you the time by lining them all up for you. My resources section keeps growing and for every one site that I add to it there are at least twenty five that I have skipped over.

So get onto blogger and get your blog going. If anything you'll enjoy the process and there is plenty of money to be made telling the world how to excel at your favorite video game or show off your photography masterpieces. Draw attention to the things that define you and you just might learn a little about yourself along the way.

Affiliate Marketing & Blogs?

In the age of social-networking the concept of affiliates is sound, but is the term over used? An affiliate group is a portion of like-minded people or those with subject oriented material. They link up (literally) on their sites and promote their own service, business or practice while referring an affiliate if supplemental needs arise.

There are affiliate groups for many professions such as lawyers, doctors, CPA's or contractors. In those industries it is vital to research and understand the business or men/women you are inducting into your affiliate circle so that you are not unwittingly promoting an awful doctor or a shady lawyer. In blogging however it may be simpler based on your intentions. If you are attempting to set up a social blog and are just looking for mass clicks and referrals then the due diligence will not need to be that extensive.

A great site and resource for all things affiliate related and how it applies to marketing is AM Navigator which is a very professional and informative blog admin'd by Geno Prussakov. I loved reading his articles because he sifts through the hype and presents clear options and tips on how to make some cash with affiliate marketing.

The blogging scene is more about word of mouth and how-to type information so encourage your friends to start a blog and speak their mind. Teach them how to insert ads onto their site and educate them about the way PPC (Payment Per Click) works. The majority of them are already performing a dumbed down version of blogging by means of their Facebook account so why not get them to take one extra step and turn it into some cash. Show them the design options available by means of WordPress or Tumblr and entice them with the almighty Page View Tracker.

Warning: Low page views may adversely affect your self-esteem.

Add them to your affiliate group and now every time your buddy posts his latest recipe creation the plethora of readers they have attracted may see your blog and venture on over. Or if everyone has worked up an appetite while reading about how to make loads of money blogging they may head over to his site to quell their hunger. It's circular and benefits everyone so the concept of adding more affiliates to the group should exponentially increase traffic.

Conclusion: Jump on the affiliate train to increase your online presence and if you dare dive into affiliate marketing. For more on the marketing aspect I suggest checking out the AM Navigator blog mentioned above or sifting through the vast multitudes of written material on the subject. The first one that caught my eye in the Amazon Associates program I have tied to this blog is the book by Joel Comm. Affiliate Programs: How to Make Money Online with Other People's Products. (Kindle Edition)

Add A Blog To Enhance Your Business Website

What better way to advertise your business than a Blog? I have personally noticed an increasing trend of incorporating a blog portion to the business website and I have to congratulate these forward thinking business owners for giving current, potential and past clients a reason to continue to revisit their site. 

One particular site that does this exceptionally well is Falling Waters Landscape Inc. While the website design is a great display of previous projects I truly enjoy the attention the blog draws to the business and complements the industry as a whole. Topics center around ideas involving increasing the value of your home, forward thinking designs, and environmentally friendly ("Green") landscapes.

Now the beauty of this blog is that if people in the area are looking for a landscape contractor they may Google it or ask their associates for references. Word of mouth is still a very effective tool for generating business but the mighty search engine has proved itself a gem for drumming up new business. The blog itself will increase their digital exposure by refreshing the overall content of the site and each blog entry will add to the results. It will assist in making sure that the website does not drift off the top listings when relevant words or phrases are searched. In essence the addition and maintenance of a blog acts as another portal for people to enter the business through and, as is the case with Falling Waters, supplements the main portion of the site so well.   

A blog can be built into a stand alone money making machine, but the versatility of the blog is now seen in that it can be used to promote, explain and pitch for websites already in operation. Lure the masses (read: customers) in to your site with your blog and then dazzle them with your awesomeness (read: portfolio/website). 

Disclosure: The owner of Falling Waters Landscape Inc is a close friend (and hero) of mine. The website feature was not sponsored but I thought it was a great example of what other small business owners could do to advertise and dazzle potential clients. 

Back on Track

First off I need to apologize for neglecting this experiment for so long. My original intent to let the blog sit for a week to gauge traffic and ad-click results turned into two months because I let other stuff derail my focus such as work and finishing my schooling. Now that things are in order the blogging for money attempt shall go on.

My renewed fervor for blogging is thanks to my pal Beau and his new Foody, Winey, Nerdy Stuff (the name is subject to change pending a Facebook poll) blog and my sister-in-law Nellene's Style Baggage blog. Beau's deals with his passion for cooking (and eating), well priced and delicious wine (Trader Joe's highlights) along with technological tidbits of awesomeness that only he could make understandable. Nellene's deals with a plethora of ingenious tips on DIY (Do-It-Yourself) house projects, fashionable and unique gift ideas at reasonable prices and the delicate subject of when it is time to accept and own your baldness.

Ok so maybe that was a little bit of an attempt at social networking by promoting the blogs of my loved ones but the blogging and online scene is very interconnected. Watching a blog develop from the ground up is not only fun but inspiring and making key connections by means of subscribers or affiliates will not only increase traffic but ramp up that income. More visitors to the site/blog means the higher the chance of one of them clicking your ads or hopping along to one of your affiliates sites and clicking their banners.

A few simple steps to obtaining more subscribers:

1. Ask your friends, family members and coworkers to subscribe to your blog.
2. Write meaningful and helpful articles or posts so that they enjoy visiting your blog.
3. Do not write negative things about your friends, family members or coworkers on your blog.
4. Encourage feedback via the comments section or by email.
5. Advertise your blog by using all social media available to you.
6. Interject humor when possible/appropriate and write about positive things.
7. Have fun with blogging (your readers can tell if you are not enjoying it) and make the most of sharing your thoughts with the world.

Set and Forget? Not a Chance

Wednesday and Thursday were busy days with both work and school so I thought it would be a good idea to see how my blog fared all on itself. No new posts, no updates, no links and no redesign of any sort. I did check the dashboard for a view and money count at the end of both Wednesday and Thursday and the results were disappointing.

I only landed 10 hits on Wednesday and 7 hits on Thursday. Of those 17 visitors over 2 days nobody clicked any ads so the total income was $0.00.

These last two days removed the fantasy in my mind that a blog is a money tree. You cannot plant a seed and water it once a week to receive the best results. To paraphrase a bit of the info I have read, a successful blog begins with a lot of work and very little monetary return. Some of the top blogs all reported an average of six months of minimal returns before things started to take off.

Do not be discouraged if you are not instantly overwhelmed with visitors and ad clicks galore. Stick with your niche and learn it exclusively. Size up the competition and learn from their strengths and weaknesses.

A full detailed summary of this week's adventures will be posted on Saturday. This summary will cover all the points and tips I have highlighted this week from blog inception to inculcating advertisements and posting.

Clean & Crisp

Ad Overload

I had to delete the Amazon ads. I know I said that I would wait a week and see but I think the lack of color customization on the majority of the ads made the site look overtly tacky. It looked something like this picture to the right.

Side note: I was also a little miffed at the degree of difficulty in getting blogger to coordinate with amazon through the monetize tab. Every time that it would ask me to enter my user name I would plug it in but then it would just reset to the opening screen once I pressed enter.

In a fit I decided to just rip them off of my site, change the background and theme of my site a bit and reword the title of the blog. I did receive the usual amount of traffic (40 unique visitors a day) but hopefully it will pick up in time as I add more content and master the use of key words such as Money, Making Money, Blog, Blogging and Making Money Blogging. (See what I did there?)

I realize that blogger is a starting step for bigger things and does not allow the amount of traffic an independently hosted blog would accommodate, but it is free and easy to use. This experience is a great deal of fun and each day I seem to learn something new.

I am interested in how to effectively market my blog and will spend some time researching that today. Any helpful sites or resources I find will be posted in the Links List section on the right hand side of the page.

Day 3 Summary

The highlight of yesterday was signing up for Amazon affiliates and then being disappointed at the clutter the ads caused. Perhaps I do not know how to customize all of the widgets that house their ads but I am going to continue to let them run for now. I will be sure to post a full summary each week with bullet points as a synopsis of things learned and most outstanding tips and tricks that I have discovered.

Total earnings were around four dollars for clicks and I still think this is from promoting the blog on my Facebook page. Perhaps today I should send out an email to family and friends and see if any would be interested in following. I am not showing up on any Google searches and think that changing the name of my blog might assist in this so I will attempt to do that today. "The Challenge" has turned out to be too generic, especially in a blog connotation. A possible new name could be Making Money Without Spending Any or something. Not too keen on it but I am trying to hit those keywords and march up the search engine results.

All in all this experiment is a lot more enjoyable than I initially thought and money is trickling in. Shameless plug for a Kindle incoming to see how this link + image feature works in the blog composition area. Because honestly, who doesn't like kindles!?!

As always comments, questions and suggestions are encouraged!