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.

Tags: adsense, analytics, blog, blog statistics, blog stats, content, google, money, pagerank, traffic

Do you wonder which affiliates other bloggers use?

It has taken me a month to read around to figure out which are the affiliates with possibilities for a steady and substrainable income for another website that I am launching. I will include some ad/referal sites.

1. Amazon.com
   This seems to be one of the most used ones, even though they not pay much. I think it is 4% then 6% if you can sell more than 6 items in a month.
   Darren Rowse wrote in is blog ProBlogger in 2007, 9 Reasons Why I AM An Amazon Affiliate, and I think many of the points still stands today.
2. Ebay
   Ebay is used by a lot of sites, you get paid for when you drive traffic to ebay that generates sales. There can be big bucks to be made here if you create a niche store.
3. Dreamhost
   Dreamhost offers $97 for each signup , then $5 for each signup under them or 10% (and then 5%) recurring, which is pretty darn good.
4. Hostgator
   Hostgator can give you up to $125 for one signup. Look at their webpage for more information. I have seen this one pop up a lot lately, I don’t know if it was that I haven’t noticed before or if people are starting to crowd it now.
5. Google Adsense
   Last but not least, Google Adsense is a very good program, you get paid per click (PPC). The payment varies, and I am not allowed to say much about it.

Hopefully you found something you didn’t use here!

Tags: adsense, affiliate, amazon, blogging, ebay, monetize

Update 20090520: Blog is moved to the root of cfg.no, if this wasn’t the post you were looking for, use search or recent posts on the sidebar to locate it.

Introduction
First a brief introduction of myself to give you an understanding from which point of view you are watching.

I am a 23 year old guy, I have a relatively good understanding of computers,
and have been doing web-ish stuff for probably 8 years.
I work in the field of computer networks and server administration.
I don’t know if that is going to help me at all.

I am interested to see if I can make one dollar online from blogging, and I am documenting
my success and failure so maybe I (and you) can benefit from this later.

One dollar is such a small amount, so if this goes faster than expected,
I will raise the amount to 10 dollars and work from that.

Ways to make money online
I have done a lot of reading, and I figured out there are quite some paths that
you can take for making money from blogging.
These are the two most attractive options that were initially presented to me:

1. The mothership blog
   This is probably the most profitable one, and the one I will focus on in this blog.
   You create one blog and try to get a lot of frequent readers and use targeted marketing to convert the readers into buyers.
   You can use this blog to present the user with new products, or write articles where you show off how good a product is, and then presents the user with options of how to get a hold of this product.
   This is probably the hardest thing to do.
2. Pay per post
   This is where you set up one or (rather) multiple blogs, and work with these to get a googlePageRank. The pros is that you can make money relatively easy from just posting, the cons is that this is never going to give you anything more than just for each post.

Step one – Find niche
Finding a niche is probably one of the hardest things about this whole process.

It has to be something you a genuinely interested in, and it also has to be something
that will for example give you search engine traffic. If you are blogging about the color red,
you will probably dry out of content and also readers very much faster than other subjects.

I found this tool: Keyword Suggestion Tool

It can give you some sort of estimate of search engine traffic for a specific keyword,
this looks like a good tool to investigate if your niche is popular enough to drive you enough earnings.

I will get the blog up and running in this post, and will consider hosting/domain and
niche as homework until the next post.

Step two – Get domain name and hosting
First I need a domain name to setup the blog on, I own some domain names – so I just picked one
that I have, it is already indexed by google and I just figure it’s a good idea.

It is probably a good idea to buy a domain name that corresponds with your blog.
As if you were going to blog about good stock picks,
your domain could just as well be good-stock-picks.com

You need hosting of your blog site, I am not sure about who is a good choice here,
but I will give an update about that in my next post.

I have a server that I already have in operation, so I will use that to host my blog.

If you are just starting out in a small scale, you can use the numerous of free services
around, but some ad networks will block these sites out, as well as shared domain names.

I will use my domain name www.gho.no for this blog

Step three – Get a google adsense account
This should be easy, just go to http://www.google.com/adsense and register.
You will get javascript code that you can place in your posts or on your blog.

Google also provides a lot of ways to help you get going with the system they provide.

In the next post I will have figured out the following:

1. Niche
   I need to find a niche that I can blog about.
2. Hosting and domain name
   I need to find an acceptable cheap hosting provider, expensive hosts just will not do.

Tags: adsense, niche