Checks Received From Making Money With Free Blogs

I've had a few readers ask why I no longer publish my blog earnings. There are several reasons plus I don't think it's necessary any more.

However, to show that I'm not making up fairy stories, here are the US$ checks I took to the bank today. (I've had to remove my personal address and affiliate details for obvious security reasons).

This isn't my full income. The likes of Google pay straight into my bank account every month, for my AdSense earnings, plus I also get a lot via PayPal. I'm keeping my full monthly blogging income to myself - and the tax man, of course!

The checks above are from the FriendFinder Group. I've mentioned them several times previously. I think the last time was in my post How To Make Money With Your Feet Up On The Desk.

I like FriendFinder because they have such a wide range of sites to promote, everything from Christian and Jewish dating to adult contacts and webcams. As you can see they also pay out fortnightly.

It's not a massive sum I've made from them for August, $321.68, but it's quite an acceptable amount. I also like the program because it has worldwide appeal and isn't aimed at purely the USA, UK or whatever.

There are also other checks below (banked today). In all they all add up to around $800 and this, with money paid direct into my bank account and to PayPal, adds up to a decent total and, what's more, it's all from free blogs.

My only outlay is for my broadband connection, which I would have any way, and my only other outlay for my blogging - ever - was for two domain names which cost a combined total of just $20. These weren't really necessary, merely speculative.

All I can say is that it is possible to make money with free blogs and without any outlay - which was my initial 'mission' when I first started Mike's Money Making Mission.



Good luck with your blogging,
Mike.

Make Money With The Right Blog Name

In my experiments with money making blogs I have found that it helps greatly if ...

(i) you choose a blog name that is relevant to the niche / subject matter of the blog and

(ii) that the blog title contains some of your keywords.

I believe that by following these two steps it's possible to get decent positions on Google search pages.

If we take Mike's Money Making Mission as an example the following keywords give the blog a useful position:

Mikes Money Making Mission - 1st on Google (probably this would be expected!)
Mikes Money Making - 1st in Google
Mikes Money - 1st on Google
Money Making Mission - 1st on Google
Making Mission - 3rd on Google
Mikes Mission - 15th on Google

Now some readers will say something like ...

"Okay, but will people search those keywords?"

or

"What about the keywords: Money Making?"

My answers to this: Firstly people do search those words.

Secondly, with the keywords Money Making, there are over 38+ million search results. With all of the big boys about I wouldn't really expect to be number one, or even on the first couple of pages but ...

... this emphasises the need for long tail keywords.

For example, with these long tail keywords:

money making chain letters - MMMM is 2nd on Google
chain letters money making - MMMM is 1st on Google
money making zlio - MMMM is 1st on Google
money making blog - MMMM is 1st on Google

Plus there are lots of other examples which I won't bother to list.

All I'm trying to illustrate is the value of:

(1) Keywords in a blog's title and also
(2) Long tail keywords which also contain the title
keyword(s).

If we also take my Celebrity Insider blog. Search the keywords Celebrity Insider on Google or Yahoo and it's top of the pile.



That's it! Think blog names and long tail keywords.

Good luck,
Mike

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Widgets: Do They Help Or Hinder?

Do you like widgets? Similar to the one in the right hand column showing photos from my celeb blog?

If you do there are some that appear to work okay and may be of use, especially if you have more than one blog.

They could be used, for example, to put your blog's feed or photos on another of your blogs. This way you may get traffic flowing between your various blogs.

Wowzio have several different styles of free widgets, which can all be customised to requirements:

(a) Feed Content
Shows details of your recent posts

(b) Panoramic Slideshow
Shows recent photos you have published in your posts (as per example in right hand column of this blog)

(c) Live Activity
Shows your recent visitors and where they arrived from

(d) Slideshow
Shows recent photos in your posts

(e) Tag Cloud
Shows main tags, though personally I doubt the effectiveness of these clouds.

From what I can see, so far, the widgets don't slow down the blog loading and seem to work okay. As to their value, this is for you to decide.

I think that a photos widget could be of use for my celebrity blogs. If there are other photos in the side columns it's possible that readers, interested in celebs, may just click and move on to one of my other blogs.

It could be debated that this means that visitors may move on too quickly, before they have properly see other bits and pieces you may want them to see on the blog. It's possible. of course, to theorise too much!

Anyway, see what you think.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Make Money With ClickBank

I've been having a look at ClickBank as a way to make money. I've seen it about for ages but have never signed up previously or studied it at any depth.

I can't form any definite impression of the program as yet, as I only joined a couple of days ago, but many people claim to be making worthwhile money. I'll experiment with it over the coming few weeks and I'll let you know how I get on.

At the moment I'm looking at it from an affiliate angle - it's also possible to sell your own products through ClickBank.

There are thousands of products to choose from which are all listed in their MarketPlace these fall into nine broad categories:

Business to Business, Health & Fitness, Home & Family, Computing and Internet, Money & Employment, Marketing & Ads, Fun & Entertainment, Sports & Recreation, Society & Culture.

These in turn are divided into subcategories to make it easier to find the right products for a particular niche to match your blog or website.

You simply choose the products you want to promote and get what they call a hoplink. This is simply a link with your chosen name included.

Nothing needs approval so you can be up and running with ClickBank in a short period of time.

Promotional material, however, is often in short supply so you may need to create your own. Otherwise it's necessary to go to the websites, of the chosen products, to see if they have an affiliate link. If they have, there may be banners, ads etc. to use. I found though that some don't offer this so all you end up with is a link.

As for the products they are a mixed lot and seem to mostly be ezines, courses, information and so on. A few examples:

Download Movies: Over 90 million movies and TV shows! The best place to download online - unlimited TV show downloads.

Blogging To The Bank: Create highly profitable blogs that suck in thousands of target visitors every day.

How To Be Irresistible To Women: Discover the powerful, step-by-step secrets of how to meet, attract, charm, impress & seduce the kind of woman you've always wanted ...using techniques that give you immediate results!!

Get Paid For Shopping & Eating Out: Make money as a Mystery Shopper and be paid $10 to $125 per assignment.

Commissions vary but can be 60% or even more of the purchase price.

Note that commission is earned from product sales, you are not paid purely for clicks.

Payments are made to affiliates every two weeks. The payout threshold can be as low as $10 - but you have to go into your account and amend the default figure which is set at $100.

My first impressions ...

The Good:
Thousands of products, something like 10,000!
Possible to get paid every two weeks.
High commission rates on some products -40%, 50%, 60%+
Instant sign up, no approval needed.
You can start promoting products immediately.
Can be promoted wordwide.
No products to handle personally.
Can be done anonymously.

The Not So Good:
Not always good promotional material available.
Have to make sales to make money.
Some of the products look a bit dodgy, so take care with your choice.
Need traffic to get sales.

I haven't done any real promoting as yet with ClickBank. All I've done so far is place a few ads on a couple of my current blogs.

I've got a couple of ideas to try, such as starting a new blog on a defined niche and filling it with associated ClickBank offers. I'll give it some proper thought and see what I come up with.

I think it's worth a little experrymentation.

Good luck,
Mike.

New Money Making Blog's Search Engine Referrals

Over the last few posts I have been talking about the value, in a money making sense, of setting up several blogs. I used the phrase 'wind them up and let them go'.

I thought I'd give a few stats for the blog I used as an example in my post How To Get Search Engine Referrals With a New Blog.

The blog in question, about Helen Flanagan, has been now running for one month.

I had set myself a target of getting 1500 unique visitors in the first 31 days, which I thought realistic. The blog did better than this and had 2751 unique visitors and 5559 with reloads included.

Of the 2751 uniques 1651 were referred from search engines, see figures below.


I'm quite happy with this. The only thing that bothers me slightly is that, up until four days ago, I was getting most referrals from the keywords 'Helen Flanagan' but these have dropped off considerably over the last few days.

Fortunately I made sure that, when writing posts, I had used other keywords as well - these were long tail and therefore still brought in referrals.

The problem can be that if you rely heavily on just one or two keywords search engine hits can dry up. For some reason they may not like, for want of a better word, your blog any more or alter their algorithm.

As I see it a blog needs a good range of keywords to play safe. The likes of Google wealds a lot of power and strange things can happen that can make search engine referrals dry up.

This happened with one of the blogs I had 'wound up and let go'. For ages the blog was always fourth or fifth on the first page of the Google results. Suddenly, overnight, it disappeared from view on all of the first ten pages so the referrals for my main keywords dried up.

I've now got that blog back on track but only with the help of Google Images which has sent me over 36,000 unique visitors.

This is what I like about blogging, if you experiment and try different things, it becomes virtually a 'teach yourself' course. You can't beat personal experience.

Sometimes things don't work out as expected but on other occasions the unexpected, in a good way, can happen.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Organisation & Discipline Makes Money With Blogs

The thing about having lots of money making blogs, which I've been talking about in the last couple of posts, is that you have to be quite organised and disciplined to keep everything ticking over.

I said in the previous post about starting blogs: 'You wind them up and let them go.' And this is true, but all blogs need to be updated occasionally and this is where the organisation and discipline steps in.

I keep track of this myself with the 'favourites' option on my computer. I have a folder for each blog and in this I keep likely sources for information for posts in a prority order.

In other words I click on the first entry to see if there is anything about the particular niche that I could write about. If there isn't I move quickly on to the next entry and so on.

I also use Google alerts which helps me monitor people, events and so on that are relative to my blogs.

The SEO Keyword Suggstion Tool is one entry I have in all of my folders.

From this I can get lots of info and keywords which can give ideas for a post. For example if my blog was about say Cristiano Ronaldo the footballer (soccer) entering his name would give 50+ keywords and phrases, any one of which might be a theme for a post.

Other good sources of information (on Ronaldo as an example) would be:

Yahoo! News

Google News UK

MSN News

ShoutWire

You can search for tags on the likes of:

Wink People

Technorati Tags

digg

Or search for blogs on:

Technorati Blogs

Bloglines

Google Blog Search

There's probably info on the person / subject on:

Wikipedia

About.com

Answers to Questions might be found on:

answerbag

Yahoo! Answers

And so it goes on. I've barely touched the surface of what is available.

I've built up what I regard as possible sources for my blogs and, when I see I haven't updated a certain blog for a while, I delve into my favourites folder for that blog, and usually come up with something about which to write a post.

It's not rocket science. The info is out there.

I also flick through the likes of Google Trends to see if there is anything that might be about the subject matter of any of my blogs in general.

Running several blogs does take a bit of discipline and organisation but it can make money and money making is the name of the game.

Above all enjoy it.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Make Money With Lots Of Free Blogs

Following my previous post I was asked: Isn't it better just to concentrate on one or two money making blogs than setting up lots of them? And how have you got the time to keep them all updated if you have lots?

I do concentrate mainly on a couple of blogs, for the biggest part of my blogging income, but I like to set up new blogs for fun, experiments and to make additional money. I must have well over thirty floating about in different places on the blogosphere.

If I can go back to yesterday's post and the example I gave of the new Helen Flanagan blog. What I will actually do, with this blog, is to try and keep it reasonably updated for about a month. I've so far done 28 posts in 22 days.

After a month, if everything has been done properly (keywords, images, titles etc), it should tick over virtually by itself. It will then only be necessary to do the occasional new post when there is some actual news about Helen - perhaps once a week or fortnight.

Now if you have several such blogs all ticking over, just being updated now and then, it's not a lot of work after the initial thrust of setting up the blog.

You wind them up and then let them go!

Some will perform better than others. Here's a couple of stat charts, for the last couple of weeks, showing the number of hits I've had on a couple of such blogs where I've followed this procedure.


Sometimes the blogs don't do this well. I've some that only get 10 or 20 hits a day. But, there again, some have done better.


If you have been reading Mike's Money Making Blog for a while you'll know that I believe, quite simply, that traffic = money.

And by this I mean any sort of traffic. I don't believe there is any bad traffic, just that some is better than others. Look at the major stores in town. What do most of them do? They run promotions to get people through their doors.

It's the same with blogging.

Going back to having lots of blogs. It's an accumulation thing: the total number of hits on all of the blogs combined. This is what makes money, providing they have been monetised properly.

You can work out the stats yourself. How many hits could you achieve with a number of blogs? Ask yourself if you think that the total traffic on these would outperform one blog. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but I know what works for me.

Good luck,
Mike.
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How To Get Search Engine Referrals With A New Blog

I was asked: How long does it take before you are likely to get search engine referrals from Google on a new blog?

Answer: 5 days.

Well that's my experience when starting up a new blog.

However it all depends on several factors but these are what I consider to be the seven essential parts of my formula when starting a new money making blog:

(1) Subject matter (niche) of blog
As I keep saying you've got to give people what they want. If it's popular the subject will be searched for but if it's obscure it won't be. Follow the trends, things, subjects that are on the way up and don't plump for an already overcrowded market.

As an example, purely because I thought she could become popular and there weren't too many blogs already, I started a new blog on Helen Flanagan. She's a UK soap star that has just started to get noticed.

Just to clarify the blog was created purely to make money. I don't even watch the soap, Coronation Street, in which she plays the part of Rosie Webster.

I started the blog on the 19th of July and the first Google referrals were on the 23rd of July.

(2) Use of keywords
In the case of my example I used her name as keywords - obviously - and made sure this was in the title of each post and also in the first sentence.

I also used long tail keywords which I got from a Keywords suggestion Tool - see yesterday's post as an example.

(3) Use of images
As the niche was about a person this was quite easy. I made sure that the 'alt' description was always completed and included chosen keywords within this. It takes longer to get image referrals but, by including them within a post, it is building for future weeks.

(4) You must have inbound links
As I understand it, to get picked up by Google the blog has to have some inbound links. If you have more than one blog this is, of course, easy.

(5) Use Tags
Tags, or labels as Blogger calls them, are essential now when writing a post, some of which should be your chosen keywords.

(6) Write as many posts as possible in the first few days
Again this is something I've mentioned previously but the more you write the more keywords you'll have floating about.

If you have a lot of subject matter perhaps you can break this up into smaller segments (posts) instead of one whopper.

(7) Ping
I always ping every new post though some are done automatically, see Technorati for example. Also sites such as Ping-o-matic will ping several services on your behalf.

You can also add your URL to Google but I don't bother with this. I also don't use the websites that say they will submit your blogs etc to lots of search engines. I've tried these and frankly they are a waste of effort.

If you do the essentials blogs will get picked up by the search engines but Google is quickest off the mark. The Helen Flanagan blog has been up and running for 21 days and to date I've had 783 search engine referrals from Google plus 34 from Yahoo, 16 from AOL, 4 from AltaVista and 1 from Dogpile.

I'm sure that SEO experts may disagree with some of my 'seven essentials' but what I try to do, with Mike's Money Making Mission, is to write about what I've personally experienced and not theories.

I could have done better, with my newest blog, but my target was to get 1,500 hits in the first month. I've just checked and see I'm up to 1466 (2834 with reloads) in 21+ days so that's okay as far as I'm concerned.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Free SEO Keyword Tool

A while back I wrote a post about The Long Tail Way To Make Money and on this I recommended a Keyword Suggestion Tool which I found useful. Here's another SEO Tool, which I came across recently, that may be of interest.

This one is called the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. Needless to say it's free.

As an example I entered keywords I was thinking of using on my celebrity blogs of 'Amanda Beard' - she's in the news recently.

The tool came up with a massive list of keyword suggestions - far too many for my screen shot below.


It also produced a lot of other interesting stuff as well, such as:

* Estimated number of searches, for the keywords, today on the likes of Google, Yahoo, MSN.

* AdWord estimates and costs.

* Links for keywords to Google News, Yahoo! News, Topix etc.

* Blog Search and Tag Links applicable to the keywords.

* Thesaurus, Dictionary and Encyclopedia links for the keywords.

* ... and lots more besides.


The value of such info depends on the individual but a lot of research can be done with the help of the tool.

I wouldn't use it for every post I write but I've found it effective on occasions. The only danger is that when you start messing with these sort of tools you can easily get sidetracked and forget about actually making money.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Going From A to Z Might Make More Money A to B

As I think I've previously mentioned I've been getting a few ads direct for my various celebrity blogs. This is great as all of the cash is mine and there's no sharing with a third party.

I've set up a separate pages, well other blogs really, with the ad rates. This way I don't have so many emails to answer.

The prospective advertiser only has to send his/her advert details and I then give him/her my PayPal info. Once the PayPal money is confirmed I publish the ad.

Here's an example for my Celebrity Insider.

This really all follows on from my post Making Money On Blogs With Your Own Products. There's a lot we can do for ourselves. Instead of the likes of PayPerPost etc, why not solicit our own reviews or sponsorship?

Or maybe write a sort of advertorial as a post about something that we are promoting or want to promote. All of the clicks and profit are then ours.

Occasionally it's necessary to maybe stand back and think: How could I do things a little differently to make (more) money?

The well trodden path works okay. It's familiar and gets us from A to B. Sometimes, however, we might get from A to Z with a different route and have a whole new more profitable experience.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Ads At End Of Posts 'Perform Well' And Make Money

I just wanted to carry on briefly from yesterday's post and to tie it in with my belief that text ads outperform banners when making money with blogs.

I have written before that text ads, placed within or at the end of an individual post, work well for me. They make more money generally speaking that most banners and widgets which are not specific to a particular blog niche.

I've noticed that Google actually recommend this themselves. They write:

"For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the editorial content tend to perform very well. It is almost as if users finish reading and ask themselves, 'What can I do next?' Precisely-targeted ads can answer that question for them."

I have to agree with this entirely. Try it and see. Not just with AdSense but also write your own small text ads, for whatever you may be promoting, and see if this increases your clicks and earnings/commission.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Make More Money With The Right AdSense Positions

I've been switching AdSense ads around on my blogs to see which positions work best for me and make the most money. No doubt you will have seen the Google Heat Map as below and read their advice.

My conclusion is slightly different to theirs. I have found that the best two positions, that work for me, are as a leader advert (i.e across the page under the blog's title) and at the top of the right hand column.

Google AdSense Heat Map The darker the colour the better the 'ideal'
for placing AdSense, according to Google.
Regarding colours I have found that it helps to change them occasionally if you have regular readers and lots of subscribers. Unless things are altered now and again regulars tend to get 'blind' to ads. It's one of the reasons I have stressed the need for regular new blood to make money.

As I see it adverts above the fold work better than those below. I've tried the same sized ads lower down a column and these aren't very worthwhile but put the same ads at the top of a column and 'ding' more clicks.

I've also never had much success either with those above the page footer as Google suggest.

As I have said these are what have worked best for me, you may get differing results, but I thought I'd pass them on. It's really down to experimentation and the design, number of columns etc that your blog has. It's difficult to generalise.

Good luck,
Mike
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A Good Title Attracts Money Making Traffic

I've been looking through the list of Mike's Money Making Mission's most read blog posts for July. The Top Ten Posts are shown below.

I find it strange that the most read post is about 17 months old and isn't particularly good. It's the title that attracts readers plus it's in a decent position on the Google Search Engine for phrases like making money with chain letters where it's number one, after the sponsored listings.

This illustrates the value of a good title.

MMMM'S TOP TEN MOST READ BLOG POSTS - JULY 08
1
How To Make Money With Chain Letters
2
How To Get 90% Discounts On Amazon Products
3
A List Of 40 Free Blog Directories
4
The Two Secrets Of Making Money With Free Blogs
5
Money Making With Free Blogs: Part 2
6
Lots Of Ways On How To Make Money
7
Making Money With Zlio
8
Making Money With Free Blogs - The Truth
9
PayPal And A Money Making Credit Cards Bonus
10
Money Making With Blogs - Part 2