Status Update

Well I'm pleased to report that I've cleared not only my first dollar but my second as well. As a matter of fact my lifetime profits from blogging are now a cool $2.54. I have been spending most of my time trying to learn everything I can from internet marketing forums, my favorite being digital point and the warrior forum. I've submitted 2 articles to EzineArticles (the social bookmarking and forum marketing posts below) which are currently pending approval and have done a little bit of link exchanging. I hastily posted an ad in the SF Bay Area Craigslist in the small business section, and while I've only gotten a small amount of traffic, I was indexed by Google within a couple days.

Interestingly the clumsy craigslist ad itself ranks 10th out of 30k for the search "making money with your blog" in quotations on Google. Craigslist is a powerful thing. My site doesn't appear to fall anywhere in that 30k yet, and I think its because Google hasn't indexed my content yet, for instance searching for 'makingmoneywithyourblog' does return my site but the blurb just says "Notify Blogger about objectionable content," not any of the content of any of my posts. What is also interesting is that out of the 6 search results for "makingmoneywithyourblog," my site is #2 out of 6, ahead of the craigslist ad. I have a lot to learn about Google.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is what happens when the internet is categorized by real people instead of Google's robots. People share their list of favorite and most useful websites publicly on websites like Del.ic.ous, Technorati, Stumbleupon, Digg, Spurl, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo My Web etc. Because the links are organized by real people instead of computers, the links are usually much higher quality than search engine results where webmasters can manipulate the search engine ranking system to get visually unappealing sites with minimal content and maximum advertisements to the top of the list. Social bookmarking makes for a much more seamless web browsing experience, by finding people's bookmarks who have similar interests as yourself you can easily and quickly browse a nearly limitless number of sites that you are very likely to find appealing. When used properly social bookmarking is a free and extremely powerful method of generating traffic and bloggers may reap the highest rewards. Most social bookmarking sites work with tags or keywords that you might put at the end of a blog post. When starting a blog you must make updates religiously as a high frequency of posting is the only way to drive search engine spiders and traffic to your site. Daily updates and links to your site on the social bookmarking site are invaluable to this process. It's not called the world wide web for nothing, to be successful and generate traffic you have to make connections. Your blog should link to your favorite tagged sites as well as allowing visitors to easily bookmark your site in return. The increase in backlinks from established sites will increase your traffic, page rank, search engine ranking, revenue and can have an astonishing snowball effect.

Social Bookmarking | Making Money With Blogs

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is participating in forums that let you include a link to your website in your signature line. While some niches like internet marketing have forums with a overwhelming number of signature line links in every thread, the forums for many other niches have far less members with their own websites. In these less competitive niches the fact that you have your own website will instantly make you something of an expert; most of the members are normal people who are not trying to sell anything and the free traffic your signature line link gets will be very targeted and high quality.

Obviously the first step is to research the forums for your niche paying attention to which have the highest traffic, the most members, topics, posts, views, etc. You are looking for vibrant, bustling forums with the greatest potential to send some serious traffic your way. Browse some threads to get a feel for the community. Are threads snowballing into page after page or are they petering out after one or two comments? Make sure they allow you to put links in your signature line or you may be wasting your time. Take note of how many other forum members are advertising a website in their signature line: the less competition the better.

Having selected some forums related to your niche you should being posting employing a very white hat sort of methodology. This means making a good faith effort to join and contribute to the community. The last thing you want to look like is a spammer or a shill. You should consider not even adding your link to your signature line until you have reached 50 or 100 posts. Introduce yourself, ask questions, answer what questions you can, congratulate members on their good news and sympathize with their bad news. Don't think too hard about what to say, just get in there and get posting. After you've established yourself you'll want to add your link to your signature line and start more of your own threads. This is the best way to generate traffic to your own site since people read the first post of a thread and then skim through the comments.

Your threads will need to be quality to be successful but since you will be involved in multiple forums you should be able to to borrow a clever thread idea or two from one forum and employ it on another. Once you have enrolled in several busy forums for your niche, spending just 10 or 20 minutes a day participating in the communities can yield very substantial results.

Here's a great database of the biggest online forums - Big Boards. And here's some of the biggest internet marketing forums that all allow signature links.

Warrior Forum
Digital Point Forums
Webmaster Talk
Webmaster Forums
The V7 Network
Geek Village
Name Pros
Conquer Your Niche

Forum Marketing | Make Money With Blogs

Increase Blog Traffic

It doesn't matter how good your writing is if your blog isn't getting any traffic. Learning how to build traffic is probably the biggest obstacle to success in internet marketing. Here are a few easy things you can do to get the ball rolling.

Post a free classified ad on the San Francisco Bay Area Craigslist. This is a PR8 site and gets spidered constantly. Make a legitimate advertisement in the proper category, with a link to your site, and you will find yourself indexed by google within a day or two.

Start writing articles and submit them to sites like EzineArticles and GoArticles. They get to use your content but you get to advertise your site. Google loves these article directories and you will see a steady stream of traffic from each article you submit. You should write and sumbit as many articles as you possibly can. You may want to consider a paid service like Isnare which will automatically submit your article to 40,000 publishers.

Monetize Your Blog

If you have a blog that is receiving traffic, it is very simple to monetize this traffic. The two easiest ways to start monetizing your blog are affiliate programs and pay-per-click advertisers. While there are a lot of these programs, the simplest to get started with are probably Google Adsense and Clickbank.

Start a Free Blog

Since we're not spending any money on this project the first step is to start a free blog. Blogger or Wordpress are probably your best bets. Finding the right topic could be the most important step. I have started a number of blogs that seemed like good ideas initially but later I either lost interest or could not come up with enough things to write about within that topic. My advice would be to brainstorm for several hours and make lists of your hobbies, interests and things you would like to learn a lot more about. As they say, find something you like to do, and then figure out how to get paid for it. Once you find something you like to write about, monetizing your websites traffic is pretty easy.

Making Money With Your Blog

This is a blog about trying to make a living from the internet starting from scratch, with no money and no idea what to do.

I have read a lot of other sites about making money with your blog, but they have all been from established internet marketers who know what they're doing. Inevitably these end up being blogs about how some already rich internet marketer is making even more money. The rich get richer and the poor stay dumbfounded on how to break into the business and start making even a small income. Well, rest assured this blog isn't like that.

My lifetime earnings thus far from blogging are just under $1. But even now I can see the possibilities, much like my return on an investment of zero, are infinite. Stay tuned and watch my progress as I clear my first $1, as I get my first $100 check from Google, and eventually as I generate enough income writing about things I'm interested in to quit the day job.