There has been a lot of progress in this blog project, and I have started to earn money on a regular basis. This actually made me a bit lazy and I went a couple of months without updates on gho.no, and this blog has been hanging for six months both because of lazyness and because of a turbulent real life (I use that excuse often now, I know!).

Anyways, here’s what I have learned – some of this is repetition of my previous posts but most importantly you will see my exact results and use that to get your blog or website further. I got very little response on my free blog hosting post, all though I host my girlfriends blog now, at least someone picked up on it!

My Status

This image is my weekly visitors graph from Google Analytics.
I now have between 100 and 200 unique readers per day on my Networking With Cisco blog. My ‘crowd’ seems to be filled with a lot of people that surf the web at work, because in weekends I only have between 50 and 100 unique readers, but in return the ones who find their way on a Sunday read a bit longer. (Maybe preparing for work?)

The image is my Google FeedBurner stats.
My feed has had on average 31 subscribers the past half year, all though it has become some more lately after I started socializing on Twitter more actively.

My PageRank has now climbed to 2 from non-existing, which is pretty good. I have written about how to get a higher PageRank before.

So How Did I Make It That Far?
I had a lot of progress when I was very active and wrote a lot of content for the site, you must focus on what the reader wants to read about. I think my writing has become better in time, and that my posts has become more informative and exciting to read – but I can’t say that for a fact. But like everything, writing will also improve as you practice it.

By staying active in the blogosphere, follow me on Twitter if you want to keep in touch with what I am currently doing. I can say this much; There is an exciting project which is soon to be complete that you can take part in using.

One of the things I am doing now is analyzing keywords, trying to find keywords which are searched a lot but with few competitor sites. This often means a lot of research to get the information right, but it will be rewarding to see a bunch of search engine users dump in on your site and finding exactly what they need!

Now I want to know how your blogging progress is going, please leave a comment or trackback when you respond.

My pagerank went from unranked to 1, a nice surprise in the morning.

So, what happened? Which steps did I take to up my PR in less than a month?

Lots of content
I have been writing a lot of content, trying to keep my blogs updated.
This seems to help some with attracting the google bot to my sites.
I do not know if the uniqueness of content matters, if anyone else knows, let me know.

Backlinks
I have been active in forums, it is very important to have backlinks to get your PR higher up.
This is probably what counts the most in the whole Google algorithm.
An effective way to get links is to comment on high PR blog posts.
But please, do only comment on content you are genuinely interested in… This is not an advice about to spam every blog you come across, just instead of not commenting – do it when you like the content or have something to add!

This takes a lot of time, and is what I have been spending the most time on doing.
I do not love spammers, and have probably just made around 10-15 comments with a backlink in a month.

To look at this from another point of view, you gotta find some blog post that is worth your comment!

On the fun side, I can see a lot of new Google traffic!

Hey, time for a progress update!

I just wanted to tell you guys that I have made my dollar, and some more…
But then a question arrived from a friend of mine, how much money have you made online?

Oh yeah, he means since the start of trying to make money online.
I have done numerous websites, and once had a pretty active social community online..

So how much have I made?
When I add everything together from all my sources, I find that I have made a whopping $7,387 from all my online fiddling. Not too bad actually, so where did this money come from?

A social community site that I ran for a few years, then there is some from blogging.
I also earn some money on a graphing page that I run, where I graph the real estate for sale in Norway.

I have had some limited success with porn, yes, it is a bit embarrassing, but capitalism rules.
I ran a TGP site, but did not see the future in that.

There are more ideas that I have that needs to be developed, so if you’re the type of person – I would be glad to work with you on some of mine or your projects!

Be honest, have you ever thought about this?
Have you ever felt like you are talking to a wall or to yourself?
I guess this is how a lot of bloggers feel right now, just like I do.

Lately I’ve been feeling a bit like this, and the blogging apathy can really get to me.

I was wondering how to get through this period, and I have been turning to other bloggers to see what they did in their early posts of their blog. So maybe I could learn a thing or two, and now I am sharing this with you!

Motivations
Maybe you should ask yourself about what your motivations were when you started out blogging.
The motivations can be different, but are still as valid today as the day you started, here are some examples:
“I want to make a living blogging.”
“I want to share my knowledge.”
“Wants to build a name for myself.”

People are result seekers
We are raised to believe in results, from trial and failure.
If something does not work out the way we wanted to, we are relatively quick to give up on it.

The problem with the web is that you see the effects of what you did one month ago today, or even 3 months ago.

Building Google PageRank will not happen overnight, even if your site is full of valueable quality content.

You still have the Google sandbox that your website will stay in for a long period of time before Google will start sending you real traffic.

The word of mouth also takes time, if you tell it to 10 people, you are not guaranteed that they will tell it to 20 more, and they will tell it to 40 more… Those 10 might tell it to 5 people, who tell it to 3 people – then out of those 3 maybe one tells it to 2 people where one of them loves it so much it tells it to his 200 users, which then tells it to 50 again.

It will take a long time before your site is recognized with this kind of marketing.

Motivational speech
What I am trying to say here is to keep on it, be persistant and change techniques and one day you will hit the spot with someone and when that day comes, you will not understand the days when you wanted to give up.

Try to be lucky!
I am very fond of saying ‘Try to be lucky’, and by that I don’t mean buying lucky stones or anything.
What I mean about ‘Try to be lucky’ is to be out there, at least have the possibility to become lucky!

If you are sitting at home dreaming, noone will know, if you are out there – someone might find you!

I have been trying, failing and learning for a week now and I have finally figured out something that seems to provide a certain amount of traffic and it also gave me my first frequent reader.

1. Use BloggingZoom to SHARE CONTENT
   http://bloggingzoom.com is proving as a good source for targeted traffic, blogginzoom is a place where you can post your articles to, it is meant to be used as a source for news for people who are tired of the mainstream media (that last phrasing is directly from their site). On bloggingzoom, only content coming from blogs is allowed, and nothing from the mainstream media.I have just written one article which is now in my ‘upcoming posts’, but it has still given me some hits for whatever reason.
   From what I read, people are getting a lot of success from their bloggingzoom traffic!
2. Use MyBlogLog to SOCIALIZE WITH OTHER BLOGGERS
   Socializing with other bloggers and people within your niche have always been a KEY for getting people to read my blogs and websites regularly. If you write about interesting things, people will want to read your blog, of course – but then they have to know that you exist.I have signed up at MyBlogLog.com, which is a Yahoo service for socializing with other bloggers, kind of a community -ish service. My profile is also to be found http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/holm/

3. Use EzineArticles to GET EXPOSURE
   EzineArticles is a very strict article site, but I am trying to get in there anyways – because from what I have heard, it will give you a whole ton of traffic for each and one of the articles you write for them.
   I have written one article which is in for review, I am not sure if maybe the text formatting screwed up my posting – but they will probably respond within a week or so… I hope.. But according to big bloggers, this one is supposed to be very very good.
4. Use technorati to track your popularity, get exposure, etc.
   Technorati is a blog search engine which aims in tracking blog postings and comments and so on.
   I find that technorati is widely used to track the blogs popularity.
5. Post new stories frequently
   I am sad to say that I haven’t really followed up on that on this blog, while my Networking with Cisco blog has been updated several times per day. Anyways, I find that I get more traffic when I post a new post, but that’s a lot of stuff like automatic RPC services and search engines indexing the new page.

   But along with the search engines, I get real visitors from feeds, extra exposure at all the places my blog is broadcasted, Google tends to love me more when I update frequently and there are basically no negative effects so far. Well, except that I had a comment from a person complaining about spending too much time reading my blog – but that sort of things are the thing pushing me forward.

6. Use Twingly for EXTRA EXPOSURE
   Twingly has emerged lately and are have proven me actually with a lot of referals.
   The two largest Norwegian media (newspaper) sites VG and Dagbladet uses twingly in their articles, and so some Norwegian bloggers like a good personal friend of mine, DeeWoo, actually had a massive amount of hits from a couple of the articles he commented on with a trackback link.
   Don’t think about pagerank, the websites displays your URL by loading a twingly javascript, so the Googlebot will not find your ‘direct links’, I am sorry!

7. Use forums to socialize
   I have registered on a couple of forums, and I am seeing some traffic from these forums.
   They are often VERY focused on niches, so the traffic you will receive is often very very good targeted traffic from people who are genuinely interested in your subject – just like you!

Google is a very important source of traffic, what are the immediate ways to improve your google ranking?

1. Content, content, content, content
It is important to add quality content to your blog, there are several ways to achieve this goal.
You can buy articles from ghost writers, which can be an idea if you are lazy.
I believe in writing good and helpfull articles, then I read through them like if I was the reader and see if there is something I wouldn’t understand.

2. Get linked
Getting backlinks will immediately boost your pagerank, google uses pagerank to determine your placement in search results.
I touched this subject in my previous post (Get readers for your blog), but you can also post articles to article sites like ezinearticles.com, GoArticles, SearchWarp.
You then get to say a few words in the resource box, which you obviously would use to promote your website.

Another way to get linked is to register at forums related to your blog niche and provide help and quality forum posts, where you can include your blog URL in the signature. This will eventually bring you traffic and frequent readers.

3. Comment on blogs
Comment on other blogs that writes about your subject, be humble and don’t spam other blogs with comments like «nice» or «that’s right». Don’t comment on articles that does not interest you, just join the conversation, it will bring your reputation up and it will also provide you with backlinks!

A sidenote on the link building, it is not usual for a new site to pop up with a thousand backlinks within a month. So buying links may not be any wise at all, it is your choice!

“Don’t be evil!”

Your blog is up and running, you have posted some good quality content to it just to end up with zero traffic. Why aren’t anyone reading these amazing blog posts?, you may ask.

The reason that you do not get any traffic is possibly that noone knows that your blog exists, yet.

There are a lot of ways to attract traffic to your blog, I will mention the main sources now and document each source much more when I have done proper research.

Google
Google is a good source of traffic, in my last post I mentioned google.
I will also give a more in-depth explanation of Google after a while of trying and testing to see which techniques that actually proves effective.

Forums or communities
By posting quality posts to forums or communities, you will eventually gain frequent readers from the URL in your signature. This is also a good way to get in contact with interesting people within your niche, to learn and share wisdom/links/work.

Get linked with other blogs
When you link to another blog, you can be sure that the owner will take a note of it.
You should try to target the blogs that are in the same size as yours, just remember that Microsoft once was a small company.
This is a very good way to build a good fundament for your blog, and also to get a personal network.
Remember that they need the links just as much as you do!

If anyone of you look at this blog as a good choice for exchanging links with, please contact me!

Be friendly
Being friendly with other people in your niche is probably one of the best ways to get readers and links.
If you can offer help in any subject (for example PHP coding), you will usually get at least backlink for the work.
This is also a good way to build your contact network, which is a good thing to have when choosing this path!

Just follow the road you are taking, get off the slow sidetracks and never look back!

Getting indexed by Google is always important, and is also very important for attracting visitors. Search engine traffic is usually good, because I know where I go when I want to read about something.

To see if you are indexed by google, you can use my little tool Google index checker.

I will develop more webmaster tools when I see the need for them myself, no more useless tools!

Wordpress and permalinks
Using permalinks is usually a good idea, I converted the blog over to using permalinks. I then realized that I am already indexed at some places with my old blog urls! OH NO!

How to fix?

Permalink Redirect ensures that pages and entries are always accessed via the permalink. Otherwise, a 301 redirect will be issued. A 301 redirect keeps your visitors and the search engines happy!

That will keep your visitors using your permalinks!

There is a huge amount of blog software to choose from, and the choice can seem hard.

I have been using Simple PHP Blog and Wordpress.

I am running simple php blog on blog.arpa.no, which is my kind of personal random blog where I blog about things that shakes in the news or things that I am geeking with.

And I am running wordpress here, and also on the project that you guys are following on gho.no, and have started to take a liking to wordpress.

It have a bunch of plugin modules to make your life easier, and seems very very flexible with regards to design and everything else surrounding it.
There is also a large number of people using it now, so that’s always a reason for choosing something.

Because where there are users there are creative minds, and also a lot of nice extentions.
Wordpress have plugins to make your adsense life easier, plugins for statistics, anti-spam plugins, etc.
Installing wordpress is done really really easy, and I will certainly continue using that.

The pros for using simplephpblog must be that it is really simple, it uses flat files and does not require a database.
So if you are hosting your blog somewhere without sql access, then sphpblog might prove right for you.

I discussed hosting in the last post, but if you mind reading back then dreamhost.com was the better choice.

Just remember to use the discount code ‘FIRSTDOLLAR’ to get $50 off your first year, clicking the above link will have it prefilled for you.

Now just post ahead and start writing interesting posts, maybe you’ll get a reader or two!

This one was a real head twister.

What am I going to write about?
What should I consider when making my choice?
Is profitability the only thing to consider?

Who are you? What are you interested in?
These questions would be the right ones to ask yourself.

You have to be truly and genuinely interested in the subject, or you will not
write with authority and be passionate enough to keep the reader.

Ok, so I am interested in networking and more specifically Cisco..
why shouldn’t I blog about that?

Sure, let us do that!
My niche is going to be computer networking related articles, and I will spice
the blog up with tips and tricks on how to do certain things in Cisco IOS and other platforms.

But remember the tool from the last post, the Keyword Suggestion Tool.
It will give you an idea of how popular much search engine traffic your subject will receive.

A search for ‘cisco’ shows a daily estimate from google of 1000,
while a search for iphone gives 8500.

This is something to consider while taking into account the profitability of your niche.

I know that cisco is a very specific subject, but it is also something that I am very interested in so I know that my content will be good and that it will have the correctness that the readers deserves.

One word about hosting
I have been trying to find a good host, and after a while I found
that Dreamhost is probably one of the better choices.

They even have a reseller program, so I managed to get a promotional code that will give you guys 50 dollars off on the first bill for any yearly shared hosting plan.

Just remember use the promo code FIRSTDOLLAR when registering to get the 50 dollars off!