Blogging for a second income - does anyone else here do this?

Ewaf

Sixer wrote: »

Please don't be rude and/or indulge in ad hominem insults. I'm not at all heated. Heated is rude and/or indulging in ad hominem insults. I'm merely questioning a) the value of the site you linked to and b) the capacity to make £500 a month from similar sites on a permanent basis. It's a discussion thread and I am discussing; it just so happens that I have reservations about the type of site you are proposing both in quality and profit terms. Nothing personal!

However, I would say to other posters on this thread - spam is not good. It clutters up the internet with rubbish. It's the Kleeneeze (sp?) of the web. This, however, is by-the-by with regards to upping your income. With regards to that, I would advise that some of the sums that people tend to mention (such as £500 per month) are unattainable via spam sites for the average user. It is also difficult to stay ahead of search engine efforts to banish the type of worthless content you will be creating unless you have advanced knowledge of the techniques involved.

It is possible to make some pocket money via a hobby blog or perhaps even a Mediawiki website that you populate with interesting/high quality posts and which you support by networking. And presumably, you will also get some personal satisfaction from it.

I became a bit frustrated and dropped the maturity level a notch, apologies. I know that the website I linked is filled with crap, but it makes money purely because of it's search page ranking. A few months ago it was top 3 when I first found it (was looking at the winter coat niche myself), but it's slumped to bottom of first now, probably due to Panda.

Like I said, you can make alot of money through these though. I can set up a niche blog in half a day, with 5 x 500 word articles that are keyword dense with my targeted long tail keyword, and configure all the onsite SEO. It's then just a matter of offsite SEO spread out over a number of weeks. If it doesn't work out, the only thing lost is abit of time and the cost of a domain name, if it does start to pick up, you upscale it and fill it regularly with higher quality content.

From what I understand the majority of the people in this thread want to blog about daily life and opinions and niche hobbies etc. This is fine and a great hobby to have, but you wont make much money.

spiritus

Ewaf wrote: »

I became a bit frustrated and dropped the maturity level a notch, apologies. I know that the website I linked is filled with crap, but it makes money purely because of it's search page ranking. A few months ago it was top 3 when I first found it (was looking at the winter coat niche myself), but it's slumped to bottom of first now, probably due to Panda.

Like I said, you can make alot of money through these though. I can set up a niche blog in half a day, with 5 x 500 word articles that are keyword dense with my targeted long tail keyword, and configure all the onsite SEO. It's then just a matter of offsite SEO spread out over a number of weeks. If it doesn't work out, the only thing lost is abit of time and the cost of a domain name, if it does start to pick up, you upscale it and fill it regularly with higher quality content.

From what I understand the majority of the people in this thread want to blog about daily life and opinions and niche hobbies etc. This is fine and a great hobby to have, but you wont make much money.

You can make £ 500 per month and more although I do doubt the "winter coats" site is a good example of this.

I agree with Ewaf in that blogging about your hobbies/daily life will not make you much money, if any at all !

I can empathise with the confusion however as when I started out in internet marketing most advice I could find was along the lines of "write what you know about". This is fine advice but not if I happen to be a collector of old copies of the TV times or my daily life consists of watching TV most days and sometimes going to a pub.

You have to FIND what people are searching for on the internet (there is a free website that Google kindly provides for this). Once you see what the popular searches are you then look sift through the ones that don't have much competition e.g. there's no point building a blog/website around the Apple IPad2 when the first ten pages on Google are dominated by Apple's own website, Amazon etc etc. You have to choose the battles you can win !!

Longships

The winter coats site would be unlikely to pass a visual inspection by Google as it has ads directly under the title without any text between. This is a typical site after the X-factor model which was popular a couple of years ago. If you read up on it on the WarriorForum you will see dozens of examples of people losing huge numbers of these sites overnight, either because their Adsense account was cancelled or the whole lot dropped out of the searches at once.

That's not to say that niche sites don't still work, but to make any money they need to be better than this.

Bigbase

Had one of the best days yesterday on one of my smaller sites! Made around £1000 worth of sales, of which i get 7%. So it made around £70 just from affiliates alone! It normally does £5-10... Keep going with your sites, dont give up. Find a valuable niche and stick to it.

skater_kat

is there a rule about where you place adverts to buy things related to the blog? For example, say I run a blog about baseball cards. Can I place an amazon or ebay ad on the blog, which directs traffic to purchase a baseball card sold by me via my amazon or ebay account?

skater_kat

or does it strictly come under affliate programs only?

steviegood

Apologies for jumping onto this thread ... I've spent of time reading through the posts on here, and I'm willing to give it a try (without getting my hopes up about any income). I have a couple of ideas, but I’m a bit reluctant to go through with this, because of a few fears:

1). The website may get banned from google for some unknown reason – I have heard some people have had their site banned because of unsuspicious click activity. The owners insisted they did not do anything unusual or immoral, yet their website still got banned. This must be very frustrating and soul destroying given the amount of time someone has put into that site (however, I wondered if this does happen could you simply create a new website with the same content on? … though I guess this must be quite time consuming).

2). Copycat competition – I guess because a website which doesn’t actually sell a physical product or service, is considered an information service, and its difficult to patent or copyright or have some protection over your data. Therefore, I’d be worried if another person could simply copy and paste content from my website onto their website.

3). Restrictions – Ideally I’d like to post youtube videos on the website and possible even a video of myself (or at least have links to them). Is this possible? Would it also be possible to send out newsletters to any subscribers who wish to register?

4). The affiliate marketing market will become too saturated, and subsequently, advertisers will be less reluctant to advertise.

5). Having taught English in Japan for a few years, I was wondering if I could offer skype lessons via my website, so I would actually be selling a service. Is it possible to advertise this on vehicles such as wordpress?

If anyone has time to advise on these issues, I’d be really grateful!

p.s. I’m worried I might be going off on a tangent on this thread, so I have also started a new thread with this post.

Ewaf

steviegood wrote: »

Apologies for jumping onto this thread ... I've spent of time reading through the posts on here, and I'm willing to give it a try (without getting my hopes up about any income). I have a couple of ideas, but I’m a bit reluctant to go through with this, because of a few fears:

1). The website may get banned from google for some unknown reason – I have heard some people have had their site banned because of unsuspicious click activity. The owners insisted they did not do anything unusual or immoral, yet their website still got banned. This must be very frustrating and soul destroying given the amount of time someone has put into that site (however, I wondered if this does happen could you simply create a new website with the same content on? … though I guess this must be quite time consuming).

It happened to me, no idea why and my appeal was declined. It put me off blogging for 2 years. Your actually google account get's banned, not your website, so theres no making another website to start earning again

2). Copycat competition – I guess because a website which doesn’t actually sell a physical product or service, is considered an information service, and its difficult to patent or copyright or have some protection over your data. Therefore, I’d be worried if another person could simply copy and paste content from my website onto their website.

Not really sure what you can do about this except email the site owner and talk bull about taking it further legally etc etc.

3). Restrictions – Ideally I’d like to post youtube videos on the website and possible even a video of myself (or at least have links to them). Is this possible? Would it also be possible to send out newsletters to any subscribers who wish to register?

Yes, this is definitely possible, there are alot of video themed wordpress themes, look up Video by Templatic


4). The affiliate marketing market will become too saturated, and subsequently, advertisers will be less reluctant to advertise.

Most of the affiliate markets are saturated. It's all about putting your own spin on things, adding something which the competition is lacking.

5). Having taught English in Japan for a few years, I was wondering if I could offer skype lessons via my website, so I would actually be selling a service. Is it possible to advertise this on vehicles such as wordpress?

There are plenty of plugins/themes with shop integration, google is your friend.

If anyone has time to advise on these issues, I’d be really grateful!

p.s. I’m worried I might be going off on a tangent on this thread, so I have also started a new thread with this post.

I haven't touched my micro niche sites for a couple of weeks, I decided to go for a complete career change and got a job as an SEO Executive :O will be sharing my knowledge aplenty, don't worry!

Katie22313

hello,

I am looking to get into Blogging and was wondering if someone could PM me with some info and the best sites

thanky ou

steviegood

Ewaf wrote: »

I haven't touched my micro niche sites for a couple of weeks, I decided to go for a complete career change and got a job as an SEO Executive :O will be sharing my knowledge aplenty, don't worry!

Congrats on the job! Hope it works out for you. I guess you're an expert in that area. If you don't mind, once I start looking into this in more detail, I might ask for some tips.

Just one question about a website being banned ... you said that your google account got banned (and not your website). Would it be possible to just open a new google account?