Monetize Your Blog is Officially One Month Old

Posted on December 17, 2006
Filed Under Uncategorized |

Today marks the one month anniversary (if there is such a thing) of the birth of my Monetize Your Blog blog. This is a good time to reflect upon what I have achieved over the past month and what I have learned about monetizing blogs and about blogs in general since I am new to both.

Achievements
As of today, my blog ranks in the top 10 results returned by google for the keywords monetize my blog and monetize your blog. Unfortunately, I am not able to give a definitive answer for how I achieved this - it seems that search engine optimization is somewhat of a black art. It may be that this is not such an outstanding achievement anyway. I don’t know how popular those keywords are. I will have to do some research on that.

Here are some of the things I did which could loosely be termed search engine optimization.

It should be noted that I have only concentrated on Google as they seem to have the best tools available for monitoring inclusion and ranking. If anyone knows how to monitor inclusion and ranking in any of the other search engines, I would love to hear about it.

In addition to my search engine optimization efforts, I have spent a fair amount of time playing with the layout of my blog. Monetize Your Blog started out with a black background and the sidebar on the right. Since then I have changed the background to white, moved the sidebar to the left and changed the order of the elements in the sidebar multiple times. I have experimented with the width and positioning on the page and even dabbled in css. I finally got my blog to a state where I am happy with the presentation. I must stress that the look of my blog is not based on any in-depth research, but is just something I like the look of.

Lessons
One of the things I have come to realize is that there is no sense in trying to make money out of a blog which nobody reads. When I first started this blog, I spent a lot of time looking at the various publisher advertising and affiliate marketing programs which are available, figuring that was how I would derive earnings from my blogging. While that may be the case, none of these programs will work if I don’t have any traffic.

I have since tried many methods of generating traffic to my blog. By far the most impressive in terms of raw visitor numbers were the traffic exchanges Blog Soldiers and Blog Explosion. However I doubt the value of traffic gained in this manner as the visitors are likely to be only visiting in order to earn traffic for their own blog. Also, I since found out that traffic exchanges are frowned upon by the Adsense team.

Other traffic generating methods I have tried include submission to blog directories, leaving constructive comments on other blogs and search engine optimization. These all seemed to have worked to a limited degree, but traffic levels leave much to be desired.

Read more about why I started this blog.




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Comments

2 Responses to “Monetize Your Blog is Officially One Month Old”

  1. USuggest on January 22nd, 2007 9:06 am

    Happy one month BDay!

    USuggest.com allow the bloggers to make some extra money through recommended products directly from within their blogs, and hopefully directing their readers to the some online retailers. As such, the respective blogger would receive a commission from any sales generated through referrals!

  2. TributeK on January 5th, 2008 10:46 am

    Excellent, a young blog trying to make it big that I can follow up on often. I just started my blog about a week ago now. Traffic is definitely tough to get. I’m going to continue to check back here and post comments so look forward to it. Great job with the layout too, it’s pretty awesome.

    One question, my layout is quite graphic intense and I realize that may be kinda frustrating to others, at least, it is to me when I go to a new site. If you check mine out tell me what you think, if it loads too slow or if it’s just too much. I’d like some of your advice.

    Thanks, happy blogging.

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