Step 1: Install a do-follow plugin

This lets people who comment on your blog get a little SEO benefit from doing so.

Step 2: Put your site into a do-follow directory

This lets you be found by the people who use automatic comment submission programs.

Step 3: Use comment moderation

Set it up so that comments are moderated until a person gets one approved comment, then comments from that person bypass the moderation queue.

Step 4: See what keywords people are using

A good percentage of the people commenting, and all the people using automatic commenting programs, will keyword stuff their name in their comment. Presumably, they’ve used that particular keyword because they’ve done some research and decided that there’s a market for it.

Collect a couple dozen keywords this way, and head over to Google’s Keyword Tool to see which ones look like the best ones to create a Neglected Niche Site about. Create the site, promote it a bit, and then do the next.

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Every time I start working on the upsell package (a video tutorial series, plus some Wordpress goodies), it’s ever so tempting to just come over here and write a blog post instead.

Blogging is easy, and that’s part of what makes it attractive. Who wouldn’t want to make a living writing about what you had for dinner the night before, or what you watched on TV? Writing blog posts is just about the ideal job for anyone who is literate. You don’t have to put too much thought into them, you don’t have to think too far ahead, and you don’t have to spend the entire day at it.

By contrast, Internet Marketing is more time consuming, and harder to put together. The possible returns are greater, but putting the effort into getting there is tough, when the ease of blogging beckons.

Average blogging income is pretty limited, though, which will keep me working on my IM projects. My tests with Adsense on this blog, which gets about 100 unique visitors a day, is that it’ll earn $0.50 a day. Granted, the IM audience isn’t crazy about clicking on ads, but that’s still pretty low.

So, the work continues…

6 Comments

• At November 10, 2008, On Stage Lighting wrote:

  Hi Jay,

  I'm sure you are right about the IM community and low ad income. But I would like to shout out for niche blogging for a decent revenue. Even Adsense, without other aff programs, can be a good blog earner.

  It's just a question of subject matter, advertisers and, heaven knows, traffic.

  Best wishes

  Rob

• At November 10, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Hi Rob, thanks for the comment! I have seen much higher income with other niches, on the order of twice the income for a tenth of the traffic. Finding an audience who aren't click-shy is critical there.

  I'm not really down on blogging as an income earner, even though the post probably sounds like it. It's more that blogging is a seductive time consumer; it'd be easy to continue doing posts, rather than pushing my skills in other areas.

• At November 11, 2008, Ruby wrote:

  Blogging is great as a past time activity but will end up being stressing once taking as a career. Yes there are a few that has achieved great as professional bloggers like ShoeMoney, John Chow, etc. But it's only for the chosen few I think.

  A blog can be your supplementary income but not what you only relying on.

• At November 13, 2008, Armen Shirvanian wrote:

  It sure is true that writing in a fashion that requires very little thinking is an easy alternative to putting effort out to connect ideas and present them in an inventive fashion. Although writing about one's daily activities for the public to see might not be too useful, it can have a positive effect on certain individuals that will then be able to see what they do in longer terms. This could lead to alteration of one's routine in a beneficial way.

• At November 20, 2008, Graham Cox wrote:

  Sounds interesting. I think many people now a days are into this blogging for making money online either part time or full time, while there are many other ways of doing so. I would like to appreciate your views as a blogger.

• At November 28, 2008, Matt Hayden wrote:

  It's true that blogging is much easier and more fun than promoting a website. If you just keep posting, the traffic seems to build automatically!

  But then it's a great profile raiser to help with other ventures. And you can always use your blog posts as the raw material for longer articles that bring targeted traffic to your website.

  And there's always the potential to use these for a book after a while, too. That's another great profile raiser, and potential earner.

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As part of that site creation, I needed to display a list of dates in the sidebar. I run an organic food co-op, and members need to know when to order, when to expect delivery, etc. I wanted a solution that did not require any manual updating on my part.

What I found was the Google Calendar Wordpress Plugin.

This was really ideal for my needs. I could set up in Google Calendar repeating appointments specifying ordering and delivery dates, so that my only manual updating would be around holidays when the dates shifted slightly. The plugin would then automatically display the next 5 (or however many you specify) dates from the calendar, so that co-op members could hop onto the web site and check the upcoming dates just by looking at the sidebar.

I also embedded the full view of the calendar inside the pages dealing with ordering and delivery, but the sidebar view was far more convenient for members doing a quick check of dates.

If you deal with anything involving displaying recurring appointments, Google Calendar plus the plugin will make it a hands free affair.

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It was unexpected because I hadn’t really promoted anything from that network for six months or more, so I didn’t expect to have made any sales. Yet there was the check. So I went online, logged in to the affiliate network, and ran some reports.

It turns out that the sales were from a blog post I’d made over six months ago. A couple of posts about a particular product I’d tried, and I tossed an affiliate link to the product in it on general principles. The post was on my personal blog, which has very little traffic. I honestly never expected to make a sale from it.

What’s the moral of this story?

That blogging is very much a cumulative effect when you monetize with affiliate links. Think of it as spreading seeds around the Internet, and you never know when one of those seeds may sprout and start generating sales. The more seeds you spread, the better off you are in the long run. But it takes patience, and isn’t a way to get rich quick.

Keep plugging away, though, and eventually you’ll start to get random commission checks out of the blue.

5 Comments

• At August 26, 2008, ThemeLib.com wrote:

  You're so lucky :)

• At August 27, 2008, Tom At The Home Business Archive wrote:

  That´s great news.I have experienced almost the same.I wrote a review about a program called SFI a long time ago and it got picked up by Google.This article gives me over 25 new affiliates per month.This will turn into commissions soon enough.I just love blogging.

• At August 28, 2008, Eva White wrote:

  Well it was a pleasant surprise for you! And some extra dough always comes in handy. Yes One must keep at it and sometimes one will get unexpected returns.

• At August 30, 2008, betshopboy wrote:

  It's great to receive such pleasant surprise to keep out motivation going strong.

  Thanks for sharing, it inspired me to dig in and keep plugging away.

• At September 8, 2008, Piper wrote:

  Amazing! I mean I had serious doubts on the efforts put out. I have joined a few networks out there such as CJ.com and even though I haven't had much time to create links, I hope it will inspire my content topics. Thanks for sharing this with the rest of us doubters.

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That was fine, we’d recently moved and were only about half an hour away from them. So my wife packed up a few things, and away they went, planning on being home that evening. I get a call that evening from my wife, and my daughter decided to stay the night. Still no problem, that would give me time to get a few things done at home, and they’d have a longer visit.

Fast forward another five days, and they’re still not home. My daughter is having the time of her life, and simply refuses to leave. I managed to get a ride there with someone, and have been back and forth for the last few days, spending some time there and taking care of things at home.

So what’s the point of this personal digression?

No matter how good your plans, something can always come along and send you in a completely different direction. Planning is important, because it enables you to make progress toward goals, to track your progress, and to decide what is and isn’t working. But don’t be so invested in a plan that you can’t adapt to unexpected events.

In blogging, many of these unexpected events come from changes to Google’s algorithm, which make nearly everything you were previously doing useless, or worse. You have to be ready to adapt to the changing rules, and keep your focus on providing value to your readers.

Will my family ever come home? I’m hoping, but I’m not planning on it.

2 Comments

• At July 11, 2008, Eva White wrote:

  So sweet. Love the way you are pampering your family. Not all men are as understanding.

• At July 13, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Thanks! We just got home today, on the 13th. Went from one set of grandparents to the next, and only came home because they worked Monday.

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It’s a great place for bloggers to learn from and help each other, and the admin over there, Rob, has built it up from a veritable ghost town to a thriving forum. It’s easy to forget that the forum is only part of what Bloggeries is.

The main part of Bloggeries is a well respected PR6 blog directory. You can submit your blog there for a backlink in a relevant category. Bloggeries is a for-pay directory. You’ll pay about $40 for a permanent entry, and about $50 a year for a featured link.

The regular entry is a great value for a one-time fee, allowing three deep links to posts or pages inside your blog (with anchor text of your choosing), enhancing their SEO value. You won’t get deep links from a free directory. You can also add your RSS feed and have excerpts of your latest posts displayed as part of your entry, which is a terrific feature that might hook someone who would have otherwise passed your entry by. The deep links and RSS feed are both displayed on the blog detail page. Click here for an example.

The featured links include 5 deep links to posts or pages inside your blog, rather than the 3 for the regular listing. You also get better placement, including being guaranteed that your entry will be on page 1 of the category for your blog, rather than on page 2 or more.

All in all, an entry there will do good things for your blog. But even better, Rob’s just started up an affiliate program, so you can get paid for recommending a great blog directory to others. You get $20 when someone clicks your link and purchases a directory listing, and $5 when an affiliate you referred makes a sale. Just two primary sales, and your own listing is essentially free. Rob’s being extremely generous with commissions, since he’ll end up making only about $10 from the most commonly purchased listing.

If you write a blog, this affiliate program is pretty well targeted, too. A lot of your readers will be bloggers themselves (especially if you write about blogging), and they all need high quality backlinks.

Click here to signup as a Bloggeries affiliate. It’s free to join.

3 Comments

• At June 6, 2008, Julian wrote:

  Thanks a ton... I'm in the start up stages of my blog.. Hopefully it'll grow and make me some money. I need to know about every money making oppurtunity that exists lol

• At June 6, 2008, Jay wrote:

  It does help to look for a variety of monetization options. You just never know what will work well for a particular site, so having a lot of possibilities helps. You seem to have picked a niche that should monetize well. Good luck with it!

• At June 8, 2008, Rosa wrote:

  This sounds like a really good deal. I am glad that you brought this up and sorry that I haven't been by lately I have been super busy.

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When you write for multiple sites, you really get the point of sticking to a niche.

I’m currently writing for Online Opportunity, doWAHDiddy (the team work at home blog I mentioned in a previous post), the BellaOnline.com site about role playing games, a site where we feature our family’s healthy recipes, and at the Advisory Panel.

Each site has a different niche. In the case of Online Opportunity and doWAHdiddy, there’s some conceptual overlap. Online Opportunity deals with Internet Marketing and other ways to earn online, doWAHdiddy deals with working at home. Writing for both helps me to keep each more true to their niche than I might otherwise, and gives me an outlet for slightly off-topic posts I might want to make.

For example, I made a post recently at doWAHdiddy.org about Keeping High Productivity At Home where I talked about the importance of where your home office is. That post would have been slightly off-topic here, but if I’d only had this blog I could have justified making the post.

I’m a big fan of keeping sites and blogs tightly focused on their niches. You won’t find reviews of the latest episode of a favorite TV show, or random web pictures on any of my sites (unless that’s their niche).

So if you find yourself wanting to write a lot of off-topic posts, consider starting another site around an appropriate niche, and making them there. Your regular readers will appreciate not seeing the off-topic posts, and you just might attract a new set of readers at the new site.

3 Comments

• At May 21, 2008, Caroline wrote:

  I think it's better to write a post that is off topic from your own blog/s as a guest post on a blog that is related to that topic.

• At May 21, 2008, Jay wrote:

  That's another great idea Caroline! You get to scratch the off-topic itch, and help out someone else's blog (everyone likes free original content).

• At May 22, 2008, Tom Lindstrom wrote:

  Good post Jay! I have a home business blog, but I write about everything that is related to that. I write about blogging and affiliate programs as well.It´s much easier to find interesting subjects to write about when you "bend" the niche just a bit.With the articles I submit to article directories I try to keep strictly on the niche.

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One of the original writers has had to drop out due to time constraints, so we’re looking for a replacement. What you’d get out of the deal:

o) You put affiliate links into your posts and keep any income from those
o) You get an equal share of any revenue generated by the site itself (adsense, etc)

What you’d have to do:

o) Write one post a week on a work at home topic
o) Be willing to do some minimal keyword research on blog post topics
o) Join the Advisory Panel (that’s where we manage our work)

If you think you’re interested, give me a link to your existing blog so I can see writing style, quality of writing, etc. If you don’t write on WAH topics, then I’d also want to see a sample article of the sort you think would be appropriate for the blog. You’ll retain all rights to the sample article, and it won’t be used on the blog unless you’re accepted as a writer.

This is a great opportunity especially if you don’t have an existing blog, and want to get started without all the pressure of writing multiple posts each week, technical maintenance of the blog, etc.

2 Comments

• At May 20, 2008, Caroline wrote:

  I would apply if I had more spare time. Multi author blogs seem to be all the rage right now.

• At May 20, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Going multi-author cuts down the time needed for each author, so helps a lot since most of us are in the same situation, with not a lot of time. That's probably why they're popular. Differing points of view are always fun, too.

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The Good Bits

Automatic plugin updating — This is my favorite time saving feature. Updating a plugin to the latest version used to take minutes, but now takes seconds.

Image uploading — This was a bit buggy at first, but seems to be working well now. Lots more options for uploading and inserting images into posts.

The Bad Bits

Sidebar management — This is far worse than in 2.3. You only get to see a single sidebar at a time, so you can’t just drag a component from one sidebar to another any more. I loved the 2.3 way of managing sidebars. 2.5 leaves me cold.

Category management — Every new post is set with at least one category…that’s what categories are for. 2.3 recognized this and put categories in a prominent location. Now they’re stuck below the fold in the editing screen, meaning half the time I forget to set a category when I first write the post.

Post management — The 2.3 post management screen had useful actions as separate links. I could view a post from that screen, edit it, or delete it. In 2.5, you can only edit the post there. To view it, you must edit it, and then click View. Two clicks and a wait for the server, instead of just one click to view. A step backward in user interfaces.

Overall Impressions

I’ll use 2.5 for my blogs, but I feel like it’s a step backward from 2.3’s user interface. I’d rather have 2.3’s user interface with 2.5’s useful new features.

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I’ve always hated seeing that link. It’s a disservice to your readers to force them to make an extra click to read something. They’re already on your site, just give them the full text of the post. I generally don’t bother to click to read more, I just leave the site.

But, there’s always a way to use any technique that makes it not only useful, but enjoyable as well. I ran across this on a veterinary student’s blog, Nearly-Dr Ferox. That’s a link to his home page, if you scroll down you might see a post titled, X-ray challenge #1. Or not, if it’s scrolled off by now.

I don’t know if the use of the “click here to read more” was intentional in this case, because most of the posts have it, but in the X-ray challenge it works extremely well. He posts an X-ray, asks some questions about it, and then the link to read more. You’re left with the impression of a quiz…you actually want to look at the X-ray and see what you can find, and then you want to click the link to see the answers.

Just showing the answers without the link to read more wouldn’t have the same effect.

So while I’d previously thought I would never use the more tag in Wordpress, I now see that using it in a quiz or challenge sort of post enhances the user experience. Now I just have to come up with some quizzes or challenges!

4 Comments

• At May 6, 2008, David Shaw wrote:

  I always use the more tag on my blog.

  I understand what you are saying about not showing the whole post. But I find this an effective way of increasing page views on my blog, and people do not seem to be put off by it on my site!

  http://www.protycoon.com/index.php/2008/04/30/increase-page-views-on-your-blog/

• At May 6, 2008, Jay wrote:

  It's certainly a personal preference, but I won't follow a blog that regularly uses excerpts on the home page and/or feed. I'm glad it's working out for your blog!

• At May 7, 2008, Ferox wrote:

  Thanks for writing about me, but I just wanted to point out that I am, in fact, a she. And I routinely use the 'more' tag because many of my posts are get long, and if someone isn't interested in the first few paagraphs then I'mnot going to force them to look at the rest of it. Also, any photos of body party, surgery or dead things need to be off the homepage, so that readers have some warning before coming across them.

• At May 7, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Sorry about that! I'll edit the post when I have a bit of extra time, and correct the references.

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