PageRank 2 to 3

I just checked out the PageRank of my various blogs and was sadly disappointed to realise that one of my blogs has dropped from a PR2 to PR1. The blog is one of the ones that I have blogged quite a fair bit on regarding Singapore Stocks and is called Singapore Stock Screener.

On the happier side, my financial freedom blog has increase from PageRank 2 to PageRank 3. That is probably the highest it has ever gone.

All the other blogs are perhaps very much still at the same pagerank.

Sometimes, just when I thought I got everything figured out, it seems like there are still surprises. I never knew Pagerank could actually drop. Looks like I must get back to work and start blogging hard again.

Bought a domain name and hosting at USD$50.70

I registered a domain name http://sgstockscreener.com some days back after deciding that I was perhaps ready to try building a site using my very own domain name. I just wanted to try it out for the heck of it and just to learn the intricate details of buying a domain name and using Wordpress to set it up.

What I learnt was that it was relatively easy to set up a site using godaddy. I registered the domain name and bought a one year hosting plan which added up to the 50 bucks spent. Next I installed wordpress, chose the theme and the site was up and running in less than a day. I was quite amazed at the ease of doing it. Of course, it was't as easy as using a blogger platform but it was still relatively simple even for a computer idiot like me!

So far, the site has managed 10 to 50 hits per day. Not too bad considering that I just started out. I will most probably still need sometime before I recoup my investment but I can say that I am pretty pleased with the results thus far. The versatility of wordpress is also quite impressive and I especially like the fact that I can add pages as well as drop down menus based on the categories that I want. Installing link within widget was also much simpler than I thought.

Now that the site is up and running, all that is left for me to do is populate it with unique and quality content and hopefully the traffic will start to roll in.

Earned Almost USD1000 from Blogging

I have earned almost 1000USD from blogging thus far. It has been a 2-3 year journey and I must say a love-hate affair with blogging. I don't have much free time so blogging is actually an on and off thing for me. Do I write well? Maybe...

The truth about blogging

There are days when I run dry. And then there are days I have like a thousand articles I would like to write about.

To me, blogging is just a fun way to express my thoughts (or sometimes even rant at life itself).

But the truth about blogging is that it is fun for me. And that is the most important aspect. If I were doing it for the money, it is seriously not worth my time as I could easily earn much more money by investing my time and energies on other things that will pay me a better per hour rate compared to blogging.

What Do I Do with My Earnings?

There was once I gave away $50 to my readers by just holding a silly contest to see who post the 50th comment on a certain post. Most times, I just bank in the money. I don't really buy anything special. It is not a lot of money in the first place.

The Future of Blogging

Will Google go bankrupt? Will blogging still be around 50 years from now? Will blogger still be operating then? Will all my efforts go down the drain? What differentiates me from other bloggers? How do I reach out to China since blogger is blocked by their censorship board? What about India? How do I reach out to a global audience?

These are the questions that fill my head.

Our world is shrinking, but our blogs shouldn't be.

USD250 from Online Ads

I managed to sell some ad space at two of my sites for a whopping total of $250 per year. This is my first sales ever of online ad space. I did not find the advertiser but rather the advertiser found me.

After some haggling over the price ( I asked for $240 for the first site. This was bargained down to $150. I offered the 2nd site at $150 and this was bargained down to $100) So that is how the $250 sum came about.

The ad space was just a small one as it was mainly a text ad of less than 20 words.

Perhaps this is a start to me diversifying away from Adsense.

As a tip to bloggers out there, make sure you have a price list ready just in case advertisers start knocking on your door and you have no idea what is the "correct" price to ask for.

Quantity or Quality or Blog Posts

Am I writing right?

In pushing my boundaries, I have tried to push for both quality articles as well as quantity. When I write a lot, I realise that the quality of my posts tends to drop. But which is more important: Quantity or Quality?

I guess we can debate till the cows come home and never really be certain.

What is perhaps most important is ranking high up in Google's search ranking.

I remember doing searches on some obscure topics before and realise that blogs can make it to the top of the rankings even though the postings had no quality in them at all. Sometimes, it almost seems that it was a "cut and paste" job done.

So quantity or quality? You decide

Peter Lim Drives up Viewership to Blog

News about Peter Lim ( a Singaporean billionaire) who made an offer to buy over Liverpool Football Club has caused my adsense earnings to soar over the past 2 days.

It is one of those instances where a previous posting rides the surge in searches for a certain keyword and all of a sudden, you see a tenfold increase in viewership to your site. Of course, the earnings also go up as a result.

This was totally unintentional as I wrote about Peter Lim around a year back. I certainly did not expect him to make the headlines about buying Liverpool FC.

However, there have been instances when I tried to ride the wave of google search trends and blogged about certain topics that were HOT on people's search. That did not last long though as very often, I wasn't passionate about the topic that I was blogging about at all.

Increase Readership of Your Blog

There are many ways to increase readership of your blog. For people who are famous, it is probably very easy. If you have a large network of friends who are willing to read your blog, it also helps. However, what I have achieved is to actually increase the readership of my blog without relying on any of these factors.

Well, content is really only ONE aspect of the entire equation. You could literally write a Nobel winning peace of work with the most ground-breaking discovery but it could be lost in the ocean of information in the internet.

So sorry. One good article or even one excellent article on a blog will not improve your readership by much.

Just think about it. What do people read everyday?

Answer: Newspapers

Why do people read newspapers everyday? If you can pinpont the reasons why people read newspapers, it should give you a clue on what readers are looking for in a blog too. Okay, there might be some difference but the idea is generally the same.

Adsense Earnings Stagnates

My adsense earnings have been stagnating for the longest time. For the past half a year or so, there has neither been a decrease or increase in my earnings.

Interestingly, some sites which I have not bothered updating are actually the ones that are giving me the regular stream of income. While others which I have been updating frequently are not as "productive". Perhaps the strategy I am using is wrong.

There is one particular site that I own which apparently gets the same number of visitors for the past 3 months even though I have not updated it at all!

After all, I have heard people talk about being passionate in what you do. And I guess that motivated me to throw away all the keyword research and SEO that I have been doing in the past. All the keyword research and SEO that I did in the past are probably what got me to where I am today.

I think I need to work smarter to make my adsense earnings go up.

5 Things to Do to Get Blogging Ideas

So you have a blog up and running.... then all of a sudden, you run totally dry of ideas. You no longer have anything interesting to write about. What do you do?

Well here are a few simple things that I do whenever I run out of ideas on what to write:

1. I read the newspapers or online news to find anything interesting that might be related to my niche area that I am blogging about.

2. Look through my last 10 postings. Under each posting, find some topic that is related to the posting which you could expand upon into a single post. Brainstorm and list down any topic that comes into mind which you feel that you have not properly discussed in your previous posting.

3. Read what other people are blogging about in your niche area. After reading their posts, try to see whether you agree with them or not. From there, you will be able to build up another post.

4. Type one of your targeted keywords into Google's all-powerful search engine and see what autocomplete phrases automatically form.

5. Try out Google Trends to see the latest things people are searching for.

How To Boost Adsense Earnings

Here are a list of things you can do to boost your adsense earnings:

1. Placement of ads
2. Color of ads
3. Use Adsense for Search
4. Use Adsense for Feeds
5. Write better quality content
6. Write greater quantity of articles
7. Comment on other people's sites / blogs
8. Use social bookmarking services
9. Get more people to your site
10. Write keyword specific topics

Any other suggestions?

How Often To Blog?

New bloggers always face this dilemma on deciding how frequently to put up new posts in their blogs.

Frequency versus Regularity

Before discussing how frequently to put up new new posts in your blog, I think that we should clarify the difference between frequency and regularity.

Frequency is the number of times a new post is put up in a week or day.

Regularity is how often the blog is updated.

While it might seem that these two are the same, they are essentially different. A blogger could be putting up new posts very frequently but not regularly. This could be the serial blogger who has what I called "a posting spurt" where he posts 10 to 20 posts in a single day only to leave the blog alone for a few months before posting again.

On the otherhand, another blogger might post very infrequently but still does it on a regular basis. This kind of blogs are usually personal blogs where the bloggers update it once a week or month. Though the postings are not so frequent, they are nevertheless regular and a reader who is visiting the blog knows that when they visit the blog in a month's time, it will be different.

How Often To Blog?

How often to blog depends on the kind of readers you are expecting. If you post too frequently, you might chase them away as it is usually impossible to keep up with the quality of posts. Many experts agree that the posting frequency should be around one posting a day. New blogs should strive to put up at least 2-3 posts a day.

The issue however is not about frequency but about regular postings. If people are left to guess when to visit your blog, they will give up after sometime especially if they noticed that your blog is not updated regularly. Who wants to read stale news afterall?

How often you should blog also depends on the purpose of your blog and its audience. Once you determine who your audience are, you can safely decide how often you should put up new postings on the blog.

Blogging Does not Equal to Earning Money

Some people think that by blogging frequently, they can earn lots of money through affiliate programs or adsense. This is certainly not true.

I have a few blogs and I realised that certain blogs which I have not updated for weeks or months are still earning me a tidy sum of money each month. Talk about passive income!

On the other hand, certain blogs which I update very regularly and frequently are drawing a much smaller online income. So from this, I can vaguely conclude that though there is a correlation between frequency of posting and adsense earnings, there is certainly no simple cause and effect that can be derived.

Adsense for Search

Image by kwerfeldein

Many people often neglect the potential adsense earnings that can come from having a search toolbar in your website.

Google allows you to earn money by incorporating a websearch toolbar into your site and you earn money from the clicks on ads that appear on the search results page.

Creating this custom search engine is really easy and everyone should incorporate it into their sites especially if there is lot of content that readers will most probably need a search tool to look for articles of interest.

Three Reasons to use Adsense for Search

1. You give your readers a means to search for related content on your site all throughout the WWW. This makes for an overall better reading and browsing experience for visitors to your site.

2. You earn money from clicks on the ads that appear on the search result pages.

3. You keep users on your site. Very often, if users are not finding what they expect to find on a webpage, they are likely to search for it further or simply leave the site. You want to provide the reader with a useful tool that will keep them at your site longer. Even if it is just for 10 seconds more!

How To Get Comments on Your Blog

Have you been blogging for sometime but find that you have little or no comments on your site?

To get comments on your blog is actually really simple. Just make sure that you are engaging your readers in a virtual conversation.

While some postings might be more for information or entertainment purposes, it might not harm to ask people what their thoughts are about certain issues. Writing about controversial issues also tend to get a lot more response than if you were to just write about simple day to day topics that might not interest people.

Here are three ways to get comments on your blog:

1. Ask for Comments. Yes you heard me right. Just ask for people to leave a note or drop a comment. This simple strategy lets readers know that you are interested in hearing their opinion.

2. Ask provoking questions. Get readers to think and ask provoking questions that might get them to react.

3. Put some controversial topics in your posting. Anything controversial is where readers will most likely not be agreeable on certain positions or opinons. This will set a stage for healthy debate and will draw in more and more comments.

What do you think are the best ways to get comments on your blog? Care to share a top secret?

By the way, I think that Google ranks a blog better if it gets more comments. Comments thus play a certain factor in the ranking of your posts and blog.

2 Best Tips to Improve Adsense Earnings

I have read many tips on how one can increase their Google's adsense earnings. Frankly, I have not implemented all of them. But I have tried quite a few techniques and I must say that there are a few things one can certainly do to boost their earnings.

Today, I will share two simple tips which WORKED for me.

1. Large Rectangle ad is the one that has worked best for me thus far. I hated the way it looks as I felt that it took up too much space. I have toggled with it many times and realised that everytime I swapped the Large Rectangle ads for half banners or even full banners, my earnings would drop significantly. Another thing to note is to blend the colors of your ads with those of your blog.

2. Blog regularly. Notice I use the word regularly and NOT frequently. Give people an idea of how often they should visit your site for updates. This should help you to retain existing viewers while attracting new viewers. The key is to make sure that the content on your site is always updated and refreshed so that people will read the information on it. This will help increase your traffic and hopefully pageviews. With an increase in traffic, your adsense earnings can only improve.

So there you have it, two simple tips that have worked for me. Hope to hear success stories soon!

Record Earnings for January 2010

Another new record for my foray into Adsense.

After long experimentation and trials, I have finally managed to get an all time high adsense earnings for the month of January which stands at $65.22.

Not bad considering that I averaged around 2-3 posts per day.

Lessons Learnt:

1. Page impressions matter. Generally, the higher your page impressions, the higher your adsense earnings will be. Of course, there can be days when there is lot of traffic but you hardly make a cent.

2. Keeping blogs interesting and educational. I have always tried to keep my postings as interesting and educational as possible. This is even done when I have little time to write down my thoughts peacefully. Interesting posts attract readers. Educational posts retains them as your readers. Of course, you can just rely on having interesting posts all day long but there might come a day when your readers abandon you for someone more interesting.

3. I have blogged on 2 separate blogs regarding 2 separate topics. It works well for me at the current rate but I question my ability to do this on 3 separate sites or even 4. The amount of time taken to provide quality content regularly can be daunting especially if the topics are vastly different.

I hope February 2010 will be another record breaker so that I can hit my desired online income of $100 per day. Almost 2 years of effort and still little to show for. I need to get this right!

The No.1 Sin in Blogging

We all commit sins when blogging.

Some of us write too long paragraphs, some of us forget to respond to comments, etc.

For me, the no.1 sin in blogging is checking my adsense earnings day in day out.

I have been doing it religiously for the past few months as I am amazed at how much my earnings have increased over the years simply by blogging original and creative content.

But then I realised that I am wasting TOO MUCH of my precious time checking this information. Afterall, how much money can one truly earn in adsense when he is just starting out?

If I had put to good use all the time that I had spent checking my adsense earnings, I could easily put up one additional posting on my blog.

I need to rid myself of the bad habit.

What is your No. 1 Blogging Sin?

Tips to Increase Your Adsense Earnings

I have been thinking whether I should share some of the strategies on increasing adsense earnings.

I know many people have tried various methods.

I used to earn like $0 to $1 per month and now I am able to earn that same amount in a single day.

I am not too sure how many people need help with breaking that $0 barrier. I have walked that path before and I know how frustrating it can be to not earn any money at all. Some people get so frustrated that they stop trying altogether...

If you need help, do let me know by commenting below so that I know that there are people interested in finding out more..

I will then write a piece on how anyone can start earning some small money from their blogs.

Is Blogging A Viable Source of Income

Can blogging really earn you enough passive income such that you can work from home?

Let me explore the possibility today.

Take for example a blog that gets 500 page impressions with a click through rate of 1%. That will be 5 clicks for 100 pages impressions. Assuming that each click is only worth $0.20, the blogger will only be earning $1 per blog per day.

If the blogger somehow manages to increase his readership to 50,000 regular readers a day, that translates into a hundred fold increase in clicks and a hundred fold increase in earnings.

The expected amount he will be able to earn will be $100 per day.

However, one must understand that the possibility of creating a blog with 50,000 readers a day is very low. Thus, it is seriously unlikely that any blogger can achieve that within weeks if not months.

The best option is for one to slowly build up their blog over time and see whether they can get the results that they hope for.

Blogging for money is not as easy as it sounds and we should not be deceived by what we read on the net.

Just because somebody has done it and makes a 6 figure income from it does not mean that it is an easy task.

It most probably is much more difficult than you think.

How Many Blogs to Run

How many blogs can a person effectively manage?

After making a site that earns you $10 per month, there will definitely be the temptation to try to create 1000 other sites that twill each earn you $10 per month giving you a really cool income of $10,000 per month.

This is of course possible.

However, I would like to think that it is extremely difficult.

The reason is mainly due to the fact that most people do not have such varied interest to maintain so many blogs. Even if they are able to do so, the blogs will end up not being updated frequently.

So perhaps it is better to hire somebody to run those blogs for you. People who have passion about certain topics or subjects will create content that others want to read.

And that is perhaps the most important key to traffic. Creating useful content that will make readers come back for more.

How to Earn a 6 Digit Income With Blogging

Found this useful article and attaching it here for future reference

How To Earn A Six Digit Income With Blogging
Author: Alvin

The innate power of blogs as cash making instrument has lately invaded the online marketing community. It evolved into a new moneymaking tool and almost every online business owner started using to earn more revenue. There are even some moneymakers that are eventually producing six figure income only by making use of blogs. Amazing isn’t it?

How do you make a six figure income with blogs? Most people who are generating six digits with blog marketing would likely hesitate to give up their secrets for no reason not until they can make more revenue by selling it in the form of an ebook. But the good news is that if you are really interested about producing that amount of income and you have money to invest, there’s a great possibility that you could become a six figure earner and a blog marketing expert as well.

The stark truth about six figure blog marketing is that it can't be easily accomplished with only having just one blog. Lots of marketers would tell you that they're able to produce that large amount with just a single blog but the untold truth is that it will require several blogs to create a six figure revenue, and if you have the capital and the resources, it could be attained.

The very first step that you should do is to discover the niches that are moderate in competition but could be easy to rank in the search engines. Doing so will give you a great idea of what you would likely be marketing in your blog and what you should stay away from.

Determining a specialized market that only few marketers are promoting especially in the industry of web marketing is the most important step to do. On the other way, you then have to determine if the niche markets that you have researched are the ones that you you have passion with. Some start out with things that they have some expertise and obtain great results, whether they are niche markets or not.

If your main target is to make six figure profits with blog marketing, you are going to find out real fast that hiring out some work to others is not a bad idea. Doing all of the work yourself is not something that is possible if you’re really serious to produce that amount of income. Just be sure that you pay for freelancers that you can trust and have a good reputation for making work done on time and accurately. I guess you will not want your workers put you behind schedule.

If you are planning to hire out a part of your work to freelancers, you may want to plan and device an outline of just what is needed and what should be the priority. For example you need someone to set up your networks of blogs, or perhaps you should have someone else to write the content for the blogs. You can easily find good freelancers on respective markets that you are eyeing to blog about. You might also want to find some experts on the trade and pay them for the rights to their content. You can then freely post their articles as needed on your blog.

If you’re seriously considering to make a six figure income with blogs, all your blogs need to be updated very regularly. You are going to have to update them as regularly as possible, and maybe even hire workers to aid you only to be sure that everything works smoothly.

Aside from earning dollars with your regular online business assets, making a six figure profit with blogs is also an ideal online job. You can earn big income, while at the same time have nice people working for you. Just be certain that you hire those that real knowledge on what they are doing and are fluent in the language that you are marketing in as well. For example if your prospected consumers are English speakers see to it that your workers have a good command in written English language.

If you like this short report you can read more on ways to make money online today with a make money online from home blog.

Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_914033_13.html

About the Author: