What I have learnt by not posting for a month
The month of February 2008 came and went and I just realised I never got around to making a new post on Pingable for the whole month. I have been busy starting a new job, which has kept me away from my blog a lot. When you spend all day looking at a PC sometimes it can be a chore to come home and do more on your PC. I also was unfortunate enough to break my laptop, I dropped it on the screen, so I only have shared desktop to use at the moment.
What have I learnt from my blog?
Well the page rank for Pingable is finally something I am proud of, PR 4 isn’t bad. I only noticed this a few days ago. Although one of my posts has had a PR of 4 for some time.
I tried the advertising network blgads, I put the ads up for less than a week, I got 8,000 impressions, and only 5 clicks (despite placing them in article, blending + different formats) and only made a total of 17cent for my efforts. So pretty much a waste of time. I guess this is the case with all contextual advertising networks. If you don’t write about a profitable topic, your clicks aren’t going to be profitable.
Since I haven’t posted in a month, I also haven’t promoted or had any content promoted on Social Media sites like Stumble. So my traffic has dropped off considerably. My Alexa score has dropped from 105,000 to 145,000.
What else have I been up to?
I have been disappointed with the cash flow that this blog brings in. I know blogging about blogging is hardly a profitable niche, so I am realistic about what sorts of mediums should be earning money on here. But the truth of the matter is Pingable hardly covers the cost of my web hosting. I guess at the end of the day, blogging hasn’t been all about money for me, my day job pays ok (we are looking at buying a house in the next few months), so I had only hoped that this blog might some day bring a bit of extra side cash.
As the blog has been a finical disappointment, I have spent some time looking for other ways to make some quick cash online.
Making Quick Cash Online Ideas
Here are some of the ideas I have tried and what success I have had:
YouTube Marketing
I decided to make this into a full post: Read full post here.
Myspace Marketing
I have a Myspace resource site, but I tell you, unless you already have a foot in the market, I have found that Myspace marketing is very hard work, and really unprofitable. I won’t go to the effort and length to describe any of the techniques I have tried, but they all failed miserably. So if you were thinking about getting into this market, I wouldn’t. PPC ads like adsense pay as lows as a few cents most of the time, and I haven’t found much else that gets any attention.
Article directory
I tried creating a article directory site. However I found the software completely unbearable to work with. Just installing it took serious effort, and even then, once I had it up and running, I couldn’t log in, and I was getting errors. The advantage of creating an Article directory, is that you can put articles in your directory that relate to high paying ppc terms, then promote these articles on the homepage, and using off site SEO. Then any clicks you get for the content will pay very well. Article directories seem to rank well in Google also, despite having very little to no unique content. But as I found the software such a pain to use, I have put this idea on the back burner for now. Maybe someone else wants to try it?
Adsense content sites using PLR content
PLR stands for private label rights, and there is plenty of PLR articles out on the Internet to be found in different places. PLR content can be redistributed for free. So if you buy PLR content you are free to give it away or sell it, if you want to. My idea was to get a whole lot of PLR content that related well paying ppc terms, then publish it with Adsense ads. The problem with this is almost all the PLR articles you find around the net are published in 100′s of sites. So even though my content looked great, related to high paying terms, I got very little search engine traffic, and haven’t made much from this technique so far. Check out some great PLR Products at 8biz.
March Onward
I am moving my online efforts back to working on Pingable, so I hope to be adding quality content at least once a week from now on. I am now a firm believer in quality over quantity, I hope you continue to enjoy reading my content.
Tags: Blogging Tips
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Comments (11)
Interesting post. We will all struggle on to find that illuisive niche to make our millions lol. As far as not posting for a while, i recently attended a family wedding which resulted in leaving the country for 5 days and in this time i hadnt posted or promoted. Just in that short space of time my serps dropped of.. not an amazing amount but enough and the traffic was noticeable also. Looks like we need to be on the case 24/7.
From my first job, I never earned less than $100,000 a year (pre-internet days). I had a web site up in 1996 which while not a pioneer, I was early in the game. For whatever this is worth to you:
1. you can never make the kind of money on-line that you can off-line
2. people buy emotionally and sitting in front of someone, you can get them to hand you a MUCH larger check (e.g. $1 million) than they will ever “hand you” on line
3. there are NO barriers to entry on-line–everyone does the same things and any advantage you have is known by everyone in 30 days and your advantage disappears
The numbers of people living very high from their off-line earnings is enormous. The number of people living high from on-line activities is few.
Thanks for the article. I can relate to the consistant lack of time. Thanks for the reminder to continue focusing on quality and consistancy. With the Internet and Internet Marketing there are so many options it is hard to resist the temptation to look for a short cut or try the next “big thing”.
I have many sites online and earn a full time living from the net, without question my best money makers are not my sites about “making money online”.
One tip, maybe start a mailing list and capture email’s from this site….That might be more profitable for you over time.
Good luck,
Brian
It can be really hard to give time needed for blogging or even on building up a website, but over time things get easier if you just blog ahead of time and then save the posts for later.
Hi I’m trying to work out a way of making a living online. One thing I have learnt is you have to focus, chasing the next big thing only makes the IM gurus who preach the next big thing rich.
Personally I’m building niche content sites. The income is steadily growing. It does take time. A single website is unlikely to make the money you look for.
Adsense + PLR = Killer.
Combining these two gives you good content and the ability to create it very quickly. Yes, it might cost you a little but shell out the money and you’ll make it back very quickly.
These are great marketing ideas! I find article marketing to be amazing for building great links!
I have run into similar concerns with PLR articles – it seems ridiculous to spew out the same content others have all over the place. I generally prefer to put my own content on my sites and have recently started experimenting with outsourcing article writing for article directory promotion of my sites.
Hello Simon. Blogging is passion and as every passion there are times where we lose control. Our job and family must be our first priority. We have to stop checking computers each second for new posts, invites, emails and so on. If this was your primary occupation, if you had a web design or web hosting firm, then ok, you are living from this and thus you have to be connected to Internet as much as possible. Don’t bound yourself by statistics applications, alexa or whatever else. Do this just for fun…
In my opinion, Article Marketing is really an effective technique to drive traffic to your site. You can actually hire writers at a reasonable price and submit them to article directory sites. It may be tedious but come up with a plan, like submitting 20 articles per day. Eventually, you’ll see results in your site traffic. Cheers!