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

advanta

Bigbase wrote: »

Advanta, whilst I agree with majority of what you have said.. Id like to point a few things out.

I'm going to have to choose my words very carefully here to avoid giving offense.
I believe what you are saying, but what you are stating is rather incredible. I have never encountered a blogger that monetized that effectively without massive, expansive content or black hat stuff.

I suspect that there is a lot of detail that you can't/won't/probably shouldn't give away on a public forum over and above what you said here. Forgive me my scepticism, but it seems like you are saying keyword optimization alone can make the type of money your talking about-if that is true then I must really suck at keyword optimization.

I'd love to hear any further details you can share. PM me if you like, it might be to our mutual advantage.

advanta

Emuchops wrote: »

Same here-your stats sound quite impressive (to me anyway).
Also can someone do a basic explanation of 'affiliate links'? I don't think my blog is a potential vehicle for them (humour), but I'd still like to know about them.

Go to a merchant like amazon or e-bay. There'll be a link to "affiliates" or "webmasters" or something like that where you can sign up to their programme. They'll give you a special url code where you can link to their site or sometimes specific products. It'll be something like this:

www.sitethatsellsstuff.com/ID=62229
(the bit on the end is the code that tells the site you referred the customer)

Cut and paste the special url into your blog and any one who follows that link and buys stuff will earn a % of the purchase for you.

The merchant will give you a username and password and you can check your "stats" to see if any one used your code and bought anything, thereby earning you commission.

Bigbase

advanta wrote: »

I'm going to have to choose my words very carefully here to avoid giving offense.
I believe what you are saying, but what you are stating is rather incredible. I have never encountered a blogger that monetized that effectively without massive, expansive content or black hat stuff.

I suspect that there is a lot of detail that you can't/won't/probably shouldn't give away on a public forum over and above what you said here. Forgive me my scepticism, but it seems like you are saying keyword optimization alone can make the type of money your talking about-if that is true then I must really suck at keyword optimization.

I'd love to hear any further details you can share. PM me if you like, it might be to our mutual advantage.

Hey I'm happy to share details. No blackhat stuff. I've had my adsense account for around 8 years. The thing is my niche has low competition. I use http://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal to find out about keywords whether they are worth creating a site for. You can PM me and ill give you a review of your site, and what you can change. But, I want anyone who reads this thread to benefit.


Ill give you an example of how I'd start a site. I heard about a new super food called "Rutabagas". Its a turnip apparently. I've never heard of it. But around 3000 people are searching for it every month. Not alot, but it has low competition according to http://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal.

So First I'd register a domain something with rutabagas in there. I'd write up 5 or so articles.

1. what is rutabagas 2. rutabagas recipes and maybe 3 recipes that include rutabagas.

I would them do some simple onsite seo, meta tags, descriptions etc. I'd also submit a site map to google (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/).

Next its time to build some links, get good quality links form sites within the same niche as you. (in this case cooking, recipes etc). By now you should be ranking nicely, try not to spam.

The placement of your ads is very important. Here is how its done on one of my sites.



Sorry I've had to blank out certain details to keep the niche secret

NellyD

Bigbase - I have ads in my sidebar, in my post feed (at the bottom of every other post) and in my footer. I would love any tips or advice you could offer me.

Arfa__

BigBase: Very interesting read. I've a few blogs myself, two of which have been getting a lot of traffic (100 uniques/day and 350-400 uniques/day), but I'm not getting a lot of cash from them. These two main ones focus on vintage items, so most of my earning come from ebay partner network. Income has been slowly increasing, topping out at £100 for March.

I've been using adsense too and some affiliate links, but neither have earned much.

Regarding your page layouts; I read recently that Google are starting to mark down sites that have excessive ads above the fold (first screen full of page). Have you come across this?

Do you bother going for lots of backlinks etc to build up page rank etc? Or are you relying just on the low competition keywords, where you're site is the definitive authority by default?

advanta

Wow, you are like the most helpful guy in the universe. Thanks.

I'm not quite sure what you are doing with "Rutabagas" though. I can't seem to replicate the results. Global searches (this is web after all) comes to 90,500. The only figure close to 3,000 I could get is 2,400 for local monthly searches in the UK. I can't see any reason why the UK figure would be relevant. Could you explain what you are doing with the filters or maybe just provide a screenshot?

Do you have some sort of formula to determine what is worth setting up a site for? I guess you always look for low competition but there's probably a minimum threshold of traffic you don't go below?

Normally with this type of information I cringe when I see it because I know that when this stuff gets in the public domain the value from it is destroyed through over-exploitation. I'm guessing the adsense market is too big for this to happen here?

Bigbase

NellyD, feel free to PM me!

Arfa___ - Interesting. I've never heard anything about this. - Have a quick read here: http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1354747 and http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1346295 As long as you follow those guide lines you should be ok.

I dont really get a lot of links to begin with, But I do try to get a few from social media websites. Like twitter (tweeting the link and site description), digg.com, reddit and stumbleupon.

I also submit my site via http://pingomatic.com/ - And ill find a few blogs in the same niche and leave them a relevant with my link in the url field or in the post it self.


Advanta - You need to make sure you always select EXACT (and not broad) - The UK figure is more relevant than the global. I find its normally easier to dominate the UK search results (smaller market) and alot of the times, if the .com domain isnt available, ill go for the .co.uk or the .org.uk.

But my mistake - Rutabas does indeed have 170 UK searches. (I was tired when I did the post late last night)

This isnt something I'd build a site/blog about. Its too small, but it would be great for something starting out, as you're not at the deepend and you can easily top out on the search results.



I do have a simple formula - First the competition must be low, secondly over 3000 local traffic, maybe less if its a high paying keyword.

You shouldnt cringe, if you ever why people keep their niches secret, this is. People coming from google will 99.9% of the time be end customers. They have no intention of building a site on what they are searching for. They are simple looking for info or a product.

PazDeLaHuertaFan

Bigbase wrote: »

I do have a simple formula - First the competition must be low, secondly over 3000 local traffic, maybe less if its a high paying keyword.

I'm confused to how this works.

I used the adwords tool and searched for "money".

It has "low competition" and yet has 68,000,000 global monthly searches and 11,100,000 local monthly searches.

How can it have that many searches and still be low competition?

Does it mean there aren't enough sites using that keyword?

Bigbase

Very good point. One that I cannot explain to be honest. Google works in crazy ways. I guess alot of people wont be searching for just "money" (even though google says other wise.) I searched for money and google and there is about 3,630,000,000 results - So you can use that as a gage too.

PazDeLaHuertaFan

Okay, so it's best to use a "low competition" keyword regardless of the number of searches?