Ezine Article:
Can you make a living from blogging?
Well, this is a question that seemingly gets asked thousands of times per day. It is probably asked by new bloggers and "pro" bloggers. A new blog has sprung up and it is claiming to detail every aspect of a blog lifestyle whilst proving the theory right or wrong that blogging can make a living. I have been looking into this site and there seems to be many of the "old school" tactics hanging around and some new ones.
What is an old school, seo tactic?
These would include link building, site submission, blog submission, leaving comments on other blogs, meta tags and generally well constructed content.
What are the new school tactics?
The author has created a google gadget which can either be added to iGoogle or added to another blog / website. Interestingly enough though is that offline marketing will be used and results printed in the blog.
What really makes this site stand out from the rest?
The concept of "The web revenue experiment" has been brought about by having two angles of approach. It has the experimental website www.ghead.co.uk where all of the tactics are put to the test. It also has seperate pages for different affiliate schemes, donations and ad blocks. The website is created using a custom built .net application, this is the brains of the experiment. It creates on the fly, fully optimised landing packs for each page created expanding its content exponetialy whilst enhancing the users experience.
The other half of the concept is a blog located at http://blog.ghead.co.uk this is where tactics are disccused, suggested and explained. Here you will also see results of each of the experiements. You will also learn how the custom application works and you can suggest an idea you have been thinking of.
The experiment is due to run for exactly one year building its self up and reporting results along the way.
I have submitted my first article to Ezine and it is awaiting approval. All over the ezine site is states that writting must be upto scratch and it will be reviewed by someone maybe in 2 weeks.
I am reluctant to submit anymore because you have no idea if it will be published. Also when you are writting about your own site fo you write from the first person or the third person perspective?
I will keep a eye on my mail and see what they say. I will of course post news here if there is any!!
Well...... Not quite actually but we have had our first hits on the blog and experimental website. Interestingly enough the blog took 1 visitor who was refered by another blog.
More interestingly though the experimentation website has taken hits through organic searching. Via google.
I have had a look at my google analytics and the search phrase seems to be way off what I was targeting. The phrase was "bank product list" and sure enough type this into google we are sitting a proud 1st. The problem is my site is not what the user is looking for therefore disappeared. See the search results here
I am now thinking do I encourage or discourage this type of hit? Obviously its not going to do me any harm but it will give me inconsistant statistics.
I will keep an eye on it to see how it pans out. Check back in a few days to see how the experiment is going or alternativly subscribe to the feed or gadget.
It would appear that the sub doamin blog.ghead.co.uk is finally working.
Tutorial for plus net users coming soon.
Here is an experiment for you, can you get help for your blog setup in the comments section of your brand new blog (its a long shot) but I am struggling!!
So I need to setup the subdomain blog.ghead.co.uk I know where I am supposed to change this in blogger but what settings do I need for the DNS settings?
Left?? Right?? CNAME A record?? I am confused. If you can shed some light on the situation please leave a note in the comments box below.
Thanks in advance
This is quite possibly the most mind bending problem I have faced so far. All I want to do is to take advantage of blogger.com kind offer of letting me point my sub domain of blog.ghead.co.uk to thewebrevenueexperiment.blogspot.com
I am using plus.net to host my domain ghead.co.uk and this is where the experiment site is located. I am told that “all” you need to do is create a CNAME for the subdomain and point it to ghs.google.com and then change the “publish” setting in blogger. So for the last few days I have tried various things and nothing seems to work. I have however found a really good site for checking DNS details http://www.squish.net/dnscheck/
The main problem is when you make a change it can take up to 72 hours to take effect, and if your impatient like me that’s just too long. I will post updates here when I have (fingers crossed) some success!!
As promised how to add a social bookmark string with images.
I was reading lots of other blogs about how to do this and each one was returning xml errors in blogger. The main reason for this is copy and pasting code was turning some characters into different ASCII codes. The solution I took here was to actually manually replace the slanted apostrophe with a normal one!! On a UK keyboard this is located under the @ symbol. The same applies for quotation marks too.
What then needs to be done is to find the correct place to display the links……
- Log in to blogger
- Click Layout
- Click Edit HTML
- Check the tick box to “expand widget templates”
Scroll down just over half way and you will find the code
div class='post-footer'
Looking at the experiment site I need to make it more attractive. I am working on the theory that if we do get a visitor they will think the site is broken and then just disappear off into the distance. So the plans for the next few days is to take its current state with 5 pages plus landing pages and products and turn it into a much prettier version.
Whilst we are working the templates visual studio keeps on moaning about tags being in upper case let’s fix that at the same time. Other things to improve will be keyword positioning, alt tags, image width and height etc. So all in all it will make for quite a lot of work. I am not sure on the end result and what style I am going for at the moment but research must be done (on a side note: don’t these blogs look very appealing and easily readable).
SoThe task list this week is as follows….
- Add images to the site
- Fix tagging issues
- Redesign layout
- Select a colour scheme
- Create CSS
- Rebuild pages
- Upload pages to the server
That should keep me busy for a while, I will post the finishing results here when I’m done. In the meantime any suggestions please leave in the comment section below.
OK, so we have done some testing, wrote a few entries and we seem to have it all working. It was all relatively painless i guess but we are up and running.
A few points to note are:
- Sub domain blog.ghead.co.uk is not working
- Google analytics is working
- Email to blog is working
- Social bookmarking is working
- Adsense for content is working
I will post an item about each of the above and how to make them work for you over the next week or so.
With regards to the experiment site
www.ghead.co.uk, this is up in some shape. Each page is dynamically built with an application I wrote in visual basic express 2008 with a sql server 2008 express backend. Currently it looks absolutley awful but we have the basics:
- Hompage
- Content Pages
- Products
- Landing Pages
- Article Lists
Each of these are displaying adsense and the product pages are displaying items from clickbank, the click bank products are very much of the get rich quick schemes but we currently dont have any traffic so it doesnt matter much.
The experiment site is being crawled by the search engines each day but no indexing as yet :( I was wondering how long it will take to get indexed? As we stand its currently 3 days.
All tips are welcome :) please leave a comment below if you have any suggestions!!
Adding social bookmarking to a blog is not as easy as it sounds. The quotes and apostrophies are all out of whack!!
Anyway, once this thing is up and running a decent tutorial needs to be written.
