Relayblogger

I haven’t been following the meta bloggers that much since last summer. There are a couple of them still on my bloglines feed list though.

On the quest to restart this blog I went to john chow (who dropped out of my feed list long ago) to find out what a money making blog looks like nowadays. I guess he still makes some money but to me his site looks way to desperate to be taken serious.

Then I went to problogger (that I normally follow through bloglines) and to my dismay found it equally ‘in my face’.

So, is that the way to go for a startup blog in an over crowded niche? I don’t think so.

One could guess that most people that follow them regularly use their RSS feeds so they need to throw lots of ads on the emerging internet entrepreneurs before they get involved enough to discard all ads.

I think we will never know, in the fight for readers in a small niche I guess full disclosure is not always a good thing.

By Samuel Ng

Would it nice when your wordpress blogs are being updated with highly relevant content automatically? Without you having to do anything except for an initial quick set up.

First & foremost, why do attempt to automate blog posting? Sometimes you as a blogger run out of ideas on what to blog about, sometimes your readers what to read more than what you can post. Maybe you’re not posting on a regular basis, or just you just want to go for a long vacation away from your computer.

You can grab rss feeds & allow them to be posted on your blog based on your keywords & categories.

You can do that by using rss plugin called smart rss or another rss plugin called name. Simply search for it on Google & it’ll appear quick.

This is a great way to add more content to your blog, not just content but relevant & keyword target content.

Sounds like a good idea? Unfortunately many people have no clue that such plugins actually exists! There are also those that use these plugins the wrong way.

Instead of getting keyword targeted & setting them to be posted on the right category, they just throw in a bunch of generic keywords & allow the posts to be posted automatically, then they forget it & move on.

That’s not the way to do it, we must selective with rss feeds & which category to use. Posting frequency is also an important thing, too often, such as 8 times a day will raise a red flag with the search engines.

Using news feeds is a great way to get fresh updated content, on top of that you won’t get penalized for duplicate content by the search engines, because they know that the same news is being broadcast on many different channels.

Here’s how you can create self-updating, money-making blogs, quickly & easily.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Samuel_Ng

Since this blog is new and lacks a decent page rank the traffic based revenue opportunities are quite limited. Even if I have a high click through rate on contextual ads and affiliate links the absolute numbers are low.

I have found that writing reviews for those review networks accepting low ranking blogs is the best initial monetizer. Since every review is also a post it will increase your search engine surface and generate more future traffic.

A big mistake I believe I made when writing my initial reviews is that I focused only on the requirements of the opportunity. If the requirement was 100 words I wrote 101 words and submitted the post without giving it a second thought.

Now that I have thought about it a little more I am a bit sorry I didn’t do more. Future advertisers will read those reviews and only see some words surrounding the advertisers link. My uninspired writing made the reviews look more like bought links than real reviews. By writing good reviews the price will be higher than other blogs with the same page ranking. The reviews will be more than just paid links.

Submit posts to Blog Carnivals
Go to Blog Carnival and submit your post to all carnivals you can find that matches your niche. If you have several posts you want to publish, save them for later carnivals. Since many of the carnivals are hosted by a new blogger every week you will spread your back links among more blogs that way. Even if a carnival is hosted by the same blogger every time your back links will be on more pages if you submit articles over a longer period of time. Since the primary reason to submit an article to a carnival is to get readers it must be better to have one link in five issues than five links in one issue.

Participate in contests and group writing projects
This post is submitted to Blog Project: Three and I have participated in the Top 5 - Group Writing Project with my other blog. Even though the Top 5 post was done in May I still see some traffic from the other participants. It made a huge impact on the amount of incoming links to idstam.com. Since you know your post will reach a broader audience than you usual posts it is an inspiration to do a litter better than average.

Take part in a controversial discussion.
This is something I did at idstam.com when the legal status of TestDriven.NET was questioned by Microsoft. That post gave me more comments than anything else and I still get some traffic from Google to those pages. Be careful though. Everything you write online is saved so make sure you write things you can defend and take responsibility for. Your blog is on big billboard for advertising yourself. A couple of years down the line a controversial post might become like a smelly shoe you can’t get rid of.

(At first I was going to add self submitting posts to reddit.com to this list but that traffic makes the Google Analytics graph look like a roller coaster.)

I find writing paid reviews actually help me becoming a better writer. It forces me to think in other ways when writing. It also gives me ideas for posts, both the actual paid review and related areas I find interesting.

Blogsvertise is the latest service for paid reviews I submitted this blog to.

What I really like about Blogsvertise is that they accept blogs that do not have high Alexa and Google rankings. Both PayPerPost and ReviewMe wants to have blogs that are already mature in their network.

So if your blog is new and you still want to earn money by writing reviews sign up for Blogsvertise.

Use the opportunity to write several posts when you’ve got inspiration. That way your, hopefully, steady stream of posts will make it through times when you lack inspiration or time to write posts that are good enough to publish on your blog.

Most blogging tools lets you set a publish date in the future so if you are going away for a couple of days you can keep the flow of your blog anyway.

This practice is even more important if you have decided to write a series of posts because it will be easier to make them stick together. If you are writing a series and have some research to do for the later parts, at least mash up as much as you can of the future posts to keep them in spirit of the first one.

Having some canned posts can actually make it easier to write since you are relieved of the stress that can come from feeling forced to write an article just to keep the flow going.

In Wordpress it is possible to save drafts for future editing and publication. Before I started using Google Documents for my future posts I used the drafts in Wordress a lot.

Figure out some things that an expert in your niche takes for granted. I like to go to forums and check out all the posts that are made by the people who has recently left the newbie state. I work with creating software and programmers tend to get in a state where they know to much to be careful and check everything twice, but way to little to anticipate the mess they are getting in to. As if that is not bad enough they tend to dislike being told they are doing things badly. Most programmers grow out of it though. However pointing them to a good article describing a scenario and a workable solution might make them think and get you one more subscriber.

Reason a bit around these matters of course and decorate your reasoning with a, preferably, self experienced anecdote or two. It makes the post more fun to read and it builds your reputation as an expert in your field. If you manage to write so much that you could talk about it for 45 minutes without repeating your self, you could enter yourself as a speaker in a niche conference and get even mote attention to your blog.

You have to be careful when writing these kinds of posts so that you don’t forget your audience. Problems that are huge for newbies needs a whole other language than problems faced by experts.

Get a domain name.

I’ve previously written about getting a domain name. The main two recommended patterns for domain names seems to be; get a name that describes your site, or a pronounceable word that means nothing at all.

Here is a Google search for domain name registrars.

Get a web host.

Choosing the right web host is almost like a lottery these days. There are tons of hosts to choose from and it is hard to find out the terms for most of the ones I’ve looked at. If you decide to let your web host manage your domain name registration make sure it is you who actually own the domain.

Here is a Google search for web hosts.

Update DNS servers.

Now that you have a domain name and a web host it is time to tell the world where your site is. DNS servers are a bit like the yellow pages for the web. When a user enters an address in the browser it uses DNS to look up a numeric address that the computer can understand. It can take up to 48 hours for the DNS change to propagate all over the Internet so when you have recently updated your DNS entries you might end up at different sites depending on where you are when you look for a domain. You manage DNS settings from your domain name registrar account.

Write for 48 hours.

The two days it takes for DNS to propagate are perfect to write your initial content. If you are going to blog about a specific subject I would recommend that you write ten posts that you can publish right a way. That way your index page will be fully populated since most blogs show ten posts up front. It is also a good practice to write a couple of extra posts that can be published when you don’t have the time or inspiration write.

Time to get the blog up and running

By using the Google tools for webmasters you can submit your site to the Google indexer so it will find it a little bit faster. You can also tell Google that content on http://yourdomain.com is the same as content on http://www.yourdomain.com, otherwise Google will classify all your content as duplicates and that is a bad thing according to all SEO experts online.

I use Wordpress as my blog tool so further on all my recommendations will be based on that. It is included in Fantastico, a web site configuration tool that exists on most LAMP based web hosts.

Go to your Fantastico control panel and install Wordpress. If you do this before the DNS information has propagated the site will look weird and some things will not work at all.

Get a good looking theme. There are lots of free themes at Wordpress. There is some debate of how important the look and fell of a site is for a steady user base. I think the most important thing is that you should feel comfortable with it. Time spent on content is usually better than time spent on your theme.

Since the spamming business seems to grow faster than anything else; activate the Aksimet plugin. You have to get a free API key from Wordpress.

Feed readers can check your site quite often so to save some bandwidth and get some nice statistics go to Feedburner and create an account. Feedburner has an excellent article on how to get the Feedburner plugin to work.

If you intend to make it on the social networks then theShare-this plugin will enable your readers, or your self, to easily submit your posts to a variety of them. I’m not sure if it is a good idea in the long run, but you will get some readers by self submitting articles to Digg.

If your content makes sense even after a couple of months it can be a good idea to configure your permalink structure. I use ‘/index.php/%category%/%postname%/’ on all my blogs. The default configuration just adds the post id number to the URL and if you use a predefined one with dates in it your posts might look old in a while.

Lets earn some money

, but there are other alternatives that looks and works almost the same. BidVertiser is one of them. The Adsense Delux plug-in makes it simpler to incorporate ads, not only adsense, into your posts.

You should set up a merchant account at PayPal since many offers to make money online offers payment to PayPal. That way you don’t have to pay for checks or wire transfer of money to your domestic bank.

There are several ways other than plain advertising to make money from your blog. Both Bloggerwave and PayPerPost offer payment for reviews. You can also sign up as a publisher for an affiliate network. Affiliate networks gathers advertisers and lets web site owners publish links and/or banner ads to the advertisers. The site owner can get paid depending on the readers actions, such as clicking a link, signing up for a newsletter or buying something from the advertisers store.

Bring on the readers

If you are curious about how many readers you have, what they read and where they are from, you can fulfill your curiosity with Google Analytics It is a free web site statistics package that keep track of more stuff than I could imagine before I saw it. Don’t fall in the trap and check your Google Adsense and Analytics statistics every 30 minutes. Make it a habit to check them once a day and leave it at that. You should put all your effort in producing high quality content.

Good luck!

This post has been submitted to the following blog carnivals:

• Your Potential. Our Passion. Blogging.
• Bootstrapper
• successpart2.com
• Blog Carnival Make Money Blogging 101