July Statistics - Melting in the heat!

Whew! I feel like one of those melting subjects in Dali’s paintings! We are setting record temperatures here in Vancouver and the humidity is right up there. It’s enough to fry a brain or should that be melt it? Not the best environment to be blogging for money in.

Everything I read by the gurus is in sync with business in the summer ... down, so I am somewhat pleased that July had an uptick on this blog.



Posted is the chart that shows the comparison between the two months, June and July(July is the blue line). The differences are not huge and July is still below May, but seeing as these are the dog days of summer, I am OK with that.

Comments and observations:

I like that there was an increase in visits in July over June and that page views also had a decent increase. Page visits and average time per page are down however. I am still frustrated that the overall visitor stats are not significantly better than when I first started this blog in January of this year! Yes, I know that I am in a very competitive niche and I am doing this for the long term, but still I would have thought the results would have been better by now.

What I find really puzzling is how did I happen to drop my page ranking? At the beginning of July I was super pleased to have finally been awarded a Google page rank of 1 (10 being the highest, but you have to start somewhere) and Alexa was down to the 2.5M level (the lower the number the better, ideally get below 100K)– today, no page rank and Alexa up to 4M. What gives? What did I do wrong? Did I offend mother Google somehow? But Alexa has nothing to do with Google.



Another puzzling statistic. Throughout most of the month my search engine traffic was running at the 18% mark, yet, today’s stat shows a mere 8%. Clearly, there is something I did (or did not do) that dropped that statistic as well. I am confident that had the trend continued to month end, the stats would have been better. Hmmmmm.... it is a puzzlement.

I have no affiliate sales to report for the month of July and Adsense is a mere $2.92!!! That makes it the lowest ever!

OK... maybe this is what the gurus refer to as being in the trenches. What can I do to achieve better results?

1. Increase frequency of posts
2. Review keywords (I am still fighting for “blogging for money”
3. Use selected keywords in postings
4. Repurpose posts and publish in article directories

These are steps I can take right now. I know how to. There is a fifth thing I can do, but I am not sure how to use appropriately yet and that is social media.

Having said that, today is the kickoff for the 30 Day Challenge and I will be spending most of my internet marketing blocks on this endeavor ... most of my posts will have to do with my 30 Day Challenge experience and how it translates here.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS...I think somebody stole my cheese!

Quick Links:
30 Day Challenge

Zero to Ferrari - Blogging?

Once a week I mine the internet for some good blogs. I usually do it on a Sunday – a day when I visit my faves, leave some comments where appropriate, and then go on the hunt for another. Today is not Sunday. I strayed and stumbled on a blog that caught my attention – it was one of those click this link to get to that site to get to an article I was interested in. The author prefers to maintain her privacy. Her nom de plume is Silicon Valley Blogger, or SVB for short. The name of the blog is The Digerati Life.

She writes well. I’m a sucker for the well written word, so ended up reading not only the article that led me to the site in the first place, but several of her other postings as well. As her name indicates she lives in Silicon Valley and in this particular post she writes about the fast money in her industry. She uses the term “… from zero to Ferrari…” actually she wrote 0 to Ferrari.

I loved it!

Wow! What an image it conjured. I thought it would make a fantastic domain name – never mind the content, that could come later – so quickly went to buy it off of Go Daddy, my domain vendor only to find, gasp! that it was already taken? Logged on to see what this site was all about – and there is no site!!! Aha. Someone besides me collects domain names.

So I’m sorry if you thought that I was going to tell you about someone who hit the mother lode while blogging and went from zero to Ferrari! Wouldn’t that just be awesome.

But that got me thinking. You know, there are lots of bloggers out there that are making more than just decent coin. I would venture that Darren Rowse of ProBlogger could probably spot a Ferrari or two and not feel a dint in his bank account. Carl Ocab, the 13 year old wonder from the Philippines is no slouch either as he makes more per month than most adults he knows make in a year. And then there is John Chow, who lives in my backyard, and routinely makes bank of 40K plus each month. Not exactly chump change.

But they all started from the same place that you and I started. Most often blogging wasn’t their first online venture and success did not come overnight, it was more like overyears. Consistent effort was what paid off, it's like making small deposits to your own Bank of Success. It works the same way as depositing money over time - I think its called compound interest.

So keep depositing your consistent effort. Maybe you could be the first 0 to Ferrari, and in the speed of time implied.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

Cheese? What cheese? Give me the Ferrari!


Quick links:
The Digerati Life
Go Daddy
Darren Rowse
Carl Ocab
John Chow

Keywords - A Spider's Buffet

Keywords make or break your blog … use them wisely and mother Google will deliver traffic to your site, and you know that the more traffic you get, the more money you can make.

Keywords is the diet of those crawlies on the internet – the spiders – that come visiting your website for relevant content and if they like the spread of the buffet which is your article they carry a favorable review back to their Search Engine. I tend to refer to Google as the mother of all search engines, but there are many, many out there. Two other biggies are MSN and Yahoo and they all have their army of spiders.

How to use keywords, and more importantly, how do I find the good ones for my topic?

Good question grasshopper.

Let’s use this blog as an example. The topic of this blog is blogging, so blog and blogging are my main keywords. As mentioned in an earlier post, this certainly defies my own suggestion and that of the gurus to select a topic that is inch wide and mile deep – OK… I am going for the long term. I love the topic and eventually, one day mother Google will smile kindly on this blog and maybe, just maybe put it on page one. But of the two, which keyword is more likely to earn that spot?

There are lots of ways to do keyword research, many of them requiring several steps. Wordtracker is a software program that many gurus recommend. I use Market Samurai. Both have a basic free option, which for the beginner at least gets you started. Both offer a for fee option. I took the latter with Market Samurai. It is a new program, indeed still in beta. I was introduced to it when I took the 30-Day Challenge last year (watch this space for the announcement of this year’s Challenge). It is a one time software program purchase which updates frequently. Here is what I found using Market Samurai:

Blog: daily searches: 1,827,945
Blogging: daily searches: 32,877

So of the two, Blogging has a better chance of eventually showing up on page one of Google. But if I do my marketing right (and therein lies the challenge my little chickadee), search engines will deliver traffic to this site for that keyword.

When I put in “blogging” into Market Samurai, it delivers 200 related keywords, including phrases. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

Blogging for money – 145
Blog for money – 145
Make money blogging – 595
Blogging tools – 217
Blogging for dollars – 33

And so on…………

So “blogging for money”, “blog for money” and “blogging for dollars” seem to be closer to my reach. In fact, ideally one of them should have been the domain name for this blog. Alas, the domains were all taken! But I can still fight for those phrases by frequently sprinkling my posts with them.

The next thing I want to know is who is my competition for those keyword phrases. I like Blogging for Money. I ask Market Samurai to deliver my top 10 competitors and here is a screen shot of what I am up against:


I see some interesting things:

Competitors no 9 and 10 seem to be within reach. Let me explain.

Competitor no. 10 has had the site up for 3 years, enjoys a Google Page Rank of 4 and has a total of 652 links pointing to a webpage (presumably one that says blogging for money), and 882 total number of links pointing to the entire domain.

Competitor no 9 on the other hand is only a 2 year old site, has a Google Page Rank of 2 yet outranks the 3 year old site. This may have something to do with the links which are 2340, and 4380 respectively - Links coming up in the future.

So there is hope in the land of “blogging for money” but I need to attack it aggressively as clearly No. 9 is going for the top and has a two year leg up over me.

Another interesting thing is that positions 4 through 7 do not show any hard data. I checked them out, but for now, will leave that alone.

What other relevant to blogging keywords might I use in my future posts? I just run down the 200 keywords that Market Samurai delivered, select a few and include those words in my posts – ideally using them in my title. My goal? Set out an ever changing keyword buffet to keep those hungry spiders visiting Blog Along With Me!

Happy Blogging!

PS… Heading out to San Diego to attend Frank Kern’s Massive Control seminar. Hmmm … can hardly wait to pick up lots of cheeseworthy morsels to post on here!

Quicklinks:
Wordtracker

Market Samurai:

Owning Google Real Estate

How do you get to own Google real estate?

Here it was, early Saturday morning, the sun shining and the flowers finally beginning to show color, yet here we were, indoors, listening to a rock star talking to us about what? Google real estate?

I belong to a private marketing club called Smart Thinking. Once a month on a Saturday morning we meet. Every member is a business owner. We network, share stories and learn important marketing strategies that help us take our businesses to the next level. The power of this club is evidenced by the distance that members are willing to travel to attend. Each meeting we have a guest speaker. That guest speaker this morning was Colin Wiebe.

Colin is a singer and songwriter. He currently has 4 CDs released. Names like Bon Jovi and Kid Rock pepper his presentation like uncle Tom and best friend Jane would ours. We sit enthralled. Oh yeah! He played and sang with the legendary Randy Bachman of the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive for over decade.

So what is a rock star doing on a Saturday morning talking about Google real estate to a bunch of business owners? Lots.

Colin is also an Internet Marketer, the owner of Fast Creative and this morning he was talking about how to own the most expensive real estate on Google - that would be the top left hand corner of page one for the keyword you are fighting for. To bring that closer to home that would be the topic that you chose for your blog.

We haven't got there yet, but I hear it and read about it everywhere: social media marketing. That's what the internet is all a twitter about these days. Companies like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Technorati and myriads others can play a vital role in driving traffic to our sites.

Just like blogging, social media is no longer the stronghold of teens and tweens writing about their piercings, goth getups or the latest heart throb. Corporate America has taken note, or more to the point, it may be argued that the newest President of the United States owes his win to the savvy online social media campaign his team launched. I gotta tell you, when politics and business find a new media format to promote their product, it has gone mainstream, and that means that you and I need to get to get our cohoons together and start learning how to use this powerful media to our advantage.

Happy Blogging!

PS...where are the best cheese bars in your city?

Quick Links:
Smart Thinking Inc.
Colin Arthur Wiebe
Fast Creative Inc.

Traffic Generating Techniques - Part III

Keyword Rich Articles

Article Marketing is a specialized discipline within Internet Marketing. Much has been written on this inch wide-mile deep subject and it is not my intention to go that deep here. What I want to emphasize is that article marketing is a powerful traffic generating technique. Yes, it requires writing, or hiring someone to do the writing for you.

Let’s go on the assumption that the reason you have turned to blogging for money is because you enjoy writing . You can use this skill to further the success on your blogging efforts as you submit your posts to article directories.

Later on we’ll go into greater detail on article marketing. For now lets just apply what in my mind is the most important thing to remember when writing your articles: keywords.

“Write a series of keyword-targeted articles in various niches and submit them to the elite authority sites online. Continually add these keyword-targeted articles and get ranked for them in Google. Monetize the traffic by sending them to an affiliate link you’re promoting in that niche” … Alvin Phang (or at leasted quoted in his material)

Keywords is what cyber spiders dine out on. They love them.

When you were researching your niche market, you undoubtedly came across common words within that niche. When I was looking at money as my broad topic for my Money Muscle Gym blog, I looked at the sub-topic of money management which gave me words like saving, budgeting, debt-free, investing and so on. Those are the keywords I will be targeting in that section. Those posts will be massaged and submitted to article directories.

Keywords should be in the title of your articles. An example of the money management sub-topic article might be:

How to be debt-free in one year or less.

Here is what happens out there in the world of the internet. You remember I wrote about how robots go web trolling looking for fresh content and report back to Search Engine when they find some and that when that happens, the site with the fresh content goes up in value in the eyes of Search Engine. Well, there is a step in between.

When the robots find fresh content they rush back to their command center and report to Search Engine that the Money Muscle Gym has fresh content. Search Engine dispatches spider to crawl the website for keyword relevancy --- spider comes back with a glowing report. Now you get the thumbs up from Search Engine.

For best results put your keywords in the title of the post and use it as your article title as well. Pepper your article with the keyword – a word of caution: don’t overdo it because Search Engine isn’t dumb, it doesn’t like keyword stuffing and may even penalize you for it. General rule of thumb is use the keyword two to three times - five at most if it is a long article. Now you can use other keywords from previous postings, this will give depth to your articles and to your blog.

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... no chees for the spiders please!

The 100 Hour Rule - Webcast

Earlier this week, March 18 to be exact, I wrote about the importance of picking your battles to win the war. What inspired that article was a posting by Kevin Wilke on the Nitro Marketing Blog “The 100 Hour Rule.”

As a student of the Nitro Marketing Blueprint Course, I receive emails from Kevin.
Yesterday this arrived in my inbox:

“Due to the extreme popularity of Nitro Marketing's
recent blog post about what it really takes to go
full-time in your online business, we are going to
do a full 1-hour LIVE webcast training and break it
down for you into even more detail….”

I thought this was one of those pieces of information that should be shared with you. Attending the webcast is free --- just an investment of one hour of your time.

Register here to attend
These are just some of the things they will be covering:

- What are the exact steps to go from scratch (or wherever you are right now) to having a full-time online business this year?

- How can you eliminate the 5 biggest pitfalls that are holding you back from going full-time online?

- What exactly does an insanely successful internet business look like? (the visual "map" will give you instant clarity the moment you lay your eyes on it)

- What do you need to do right now to see CONSTANT progress in your online business?
(And stop 'spinning your wheels' doing a lot of "busy" work and getting nowhere)

- What do the most successful business owners do to accomplish more in ONE DAY than you normally would in one MONTH? (Especially if you've got a super busy life)

And a few other surprises they have up their sleeve!

If you have a strong desire to succeed online then get registered. I have.

Just click: Register for The 100 Hour Rule webcast to reserve your "seat."

Happy Blogging!
Valentina

PS... maybe they'll talk about cheese!

Quick Links:
To Register for the free webcast:The 100 Hour Rule free webcast
Pick Your Battles post: Pick Your Battles to Win The War

Pick Your Battles and Win the War

Pick your battles carefully if you want to win the war.

In the world of Internet Marketing the battles fought are over search engine rankings, traffic and lists. There are more. What we want to win is a big fat check - every month. A blog is a good starting point.

I just read Kevin Wilke's latest post on the Nitro Marketing Blog. It is so simple, yet so powerful ... and so wise. The title? The 100 Hour Rule.

What Kevin says is that to be successful in Inernet Marketing, you have to have razor sharp focus on one outcome and take action to support that outcome. He talks about the 100 hour rule: put in 100 hours of REAL focused work into your Internet Marketing and you will be rewarded for your efforts with MONEY, yessirree - isn't that what we are in this for? Depending on where you are in your Internet Marketing career, you may be looking for a different outcome. I for example am looking for my first $100 month from my Blog Along With Me project. That includes this blog and the spinoffs from it.

How does that translate when it comes to action? What action would deliver that amount month after month after month and continue to grow.

This is a young blog and my new one Money Muscle Gym is even younger. What I am looking for is more traffic, more subscribers. Nothing new there. Everyone looks for that --- even the gurus with their minions of subscribers are always looking for ways to increase traffic and increase their list. Well I think job one is to increase traffi, because sure as there are little green apples, more traffic will ultimately get more subscribers. So the outcome I am really gunning for is traffic.

There are many ways to increase traffic. Kevin's suggestion is to pick one and concentrate your efforts on that one way, until you really get good at it so that its almost on autopilot, then add another.

What am I going to do?

I am going to concentrate on my strength - writing. I may never win a Pulitzer but writing is something I enjoy, feel comfortable with. From now on you will see more posts here as well is on my Money Muscle Gym. I'll be blogging and I'll be submitting articles to Article Directories. Ahh! Stay tuned. The next posting is all about Article Marketing.

In the meantime, hop on over to Kevin Wilke's article ... it is brilliant

Happy Blogging!

PS... 100 hours to making money, 500 hours to kissing your nine to five goodbye!
Go read it!

PPS... Kissing 9 to 5 Goodbye is good ... you can buy all the cheese you want!

Quick Links:

Internet Marketing
The 100 Hour Rule
Money Muscle Gym

Choose a Better History - Choose a Better Future

Nothing on blogging today.

Just finished watching the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States.I don't spend much time in front of the TV, but this was a historical moment and I wanted to view it live.

Political pundits are already dissecting Barak Obama's Inaugural Address. The sound bites, the implications of certain words, the delivery are all being commented on. So far not a pundit has mentioned what to me is the most powerful sentence:

"...choose a better history ..."

It is the word choose that is so powerful. It is not only the powerful who can choose - we, every day people have the power to choose and make a difference in our own lives. We too can choose a better future, to live a life of fulfillment. We make that choice by deciding to take action that will take us to the destination we want to reach

Be debt free
Be financially free
Be stress free
Be the best that we can be

Full Text of Obama's Inaugural Address

Dan "The Man" Lok, Blogging & More

In the world of Internet Marketing, Dan "The Man" Lok is a household name ... or should that be "cyberspace" name? Dan went from bagging groceries to banking big bucks for his efforts on the internet. He is now a self made multi-millionaire and I had the privilege of attending his seminar this weekend.

The seminar itself was nothing short of fabulous. It was classic Dan - two jam packed days of content, content, content, all by The Man himself. Limited to just 60 attendees the feeling of being in an inner circle was definitely clear and present. Some of what I learned will be covered later on in this series of blogging, some of it will unfold in due time.

I've known Dan for almost three years now. Met him at a friend's BBQ. We spent an hour chatting over a hot grill. I was just starting my internet marketing career, he was well into his, although at the time I had no idea just how well At the end of the conversation his sage advice to me was to blog and publish my articles.

I should have listened to Dan then. As I mentioned in my post Blogging, The First Step to Mastering the Internet, knowing what I know now, I would have started my Internet Marketing career by blogging. I think there is some inborn streak in most of us, we don't listen to our parents and we don't listen to the gurus in our own backyards!

I have also been researching five topics to launch my next blog. I have come up with a good niche market, something I know about and narrow enough that it could qualify for inch-wide, mile deep, but its not something I would want to carry on for the long term. If you are wondering about what that topic might be it is embroidery.

I know something about embroidery having learned it at school --- we started with the most basic stitchery in grade one and by the time we graduated highschool we had learned not only how to make french knots but cutouts, shadow stitchery and tedious cross stitching (the kind you counted by the squares on the fabric, not pre-printed). Amazon carries both books and a decent number of magazines. The term embroidery may be too broad as there are over 28 million results when googled, but I did note that there were sponsored links on the right hand side. Clickbank was a bit disappointing in that it did not seem to have many affiliates to offer and the pricing was low, so low profits.

I could have done more research on the subject, but decided against it for these reasons:

1. Incongruent: I have some 20 sites and blogs in total. Not all are themed, but they are grouped by topic themes. This is good for cross marketing which will be covered down the road. If this is your first blog, don't be concerned. If you already have several blogs and/or websites, a complementary topic is a good idea, an example might be if you have a site on travel, a good complementary topic would be something like canal tours, travel by cycle and so on. You could then post reviews on the various places you can take canal tours, the types of boats/barges/cruises that are available etc.

2. Little Personal Interest: Even though I have a good deal of personal knowledge and could write well on the topic, it is not one that grabs me.

3. Monetization seems to be somewhat limited. The magazines were well priced for annual subscriptions which is good and Google defintely has advertisers, but I was surprised at the somewhat limited affiliates through Clickbank. If I had my heart set on this topic however, I am sure that there are better affioliates that are available with Commission Junction.

4. Product Development : Eventually to up the ante it is a rule of thumb that one should develop a product of one's own. Now this could be something as simple as embroidery patterns that can be delivered digitally to DVDs showing how to execute certain stitches. Absolutely no personal interest.

So that is one down, four to go.

ACTION: Continue checking the viability of your niche.