More Traffic For The Year 2008

Happy New Year to you and belated Merry Christmas. I have been busy during Christmas so haven't got a time to greet you. It's better late than never, right?

For the holiday spirit, I have a small gift for you. I would like to tell you that my account with TrafficSwarm.com has been successfully giving me free traffic (Please see my topic about it at Traffic Tip 3: Free Traffic From TrafficSwarm.com). But it didn't give what it promised of 1,000 daily unique visitors. Today, I've got only 10 unique visitors from it. It is only 10 but for me it is better than none at all. To think that I am only starting with it, the 10 visits would be rewarding on a small effort that I gave on doing it. I believe that that 10 will increase gradually in the next few weeks. I just need to surf consistently a few minutes a day and of course, I need to give TrafficSwarm.com new referrals to increase my credits.

So as I've said, this is a little gift that you can only receive if you will jump into the bandwagon. Why don't you join us now by just clicking the link below to register.

http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?752155

By the way, to get the traffic, you need to submit your site's URL and wait for the "Active" status approval. Failure to do so will just bloat your credit points.

Thank you in advance for joining. Once again Happy New Year to you and may you have all the blessings in the new year to come. May your traffic get doubled by the next month :).

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Blogging Startup Step 7: I hope Simpleology.com can make it simple

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

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Blogging Startup Step 6: Free Blogger Templates

Do you like my new look? The car is not mine :). I used this free blogger template to remind me of my objective to earn money from blogging. I want to have this kind of car in the future and I will work for it. I hope you don't mind if I admit it to you that it's one of my motivations. At least, I am honest :).

The new template is to make my blog site looks more professional (I hope it does look like it :) ) for the new year, 2008. Yes, if you are just starting to carry out your blogging career like me, one of the things that I've learned and I should have done it when I started this blog, is to make the site as professional as possible.

It makes sense to me. When I started this blog, I treated it as business. In a traditional business, a company should have a nice office and the people working in it should be dressed professional too to gain customers' trust. Of course some of you argue that layout is just cosmetic and not everything. Good content is still king when it comes to blogging and to get customers, which are the readers, interested with it. But it is better to have both because good impression last and you should make your site aesthetically pleasing.

Did I mention that I've got this new blogger layout for free? The template was taken from finalsense.com. The catch is simply to maintain a link from this blog to them. I don't mind at all. Imagine how much would it cost me to have this if I hired someone to design something as professional as this? A lot; I am sure about that. A link is just a very small fraction of it.

So if you want to have the same professional look, get your free blogger template from finalsense.com and choose one from a variety of layouts. All of them are for free.

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Make Money Step 3: Get Paid Every Time Your Website Is Seen

This kind of advertisement is new and it's not running yet. But they are now accepting, registration so that in future product launching interested publishers can easily installed it in their site. I was some kind of hesitant in trying this but when I heard that there's no alteration will be made to my blog layout then It piqued my interest. Yes, it is true. Your pages will be intact and layout will be displayed as is.

The new ads technique they will do is to play a 5-second sound ads to your webpages. After the 5 seconds, it will stop. It will play again on the next visit to another page. Sounds cool but I'm not sure if visitors will not be annoyed by this. Anyway, it's new and never been tested. I want to be the first one to try because if this becomes successful, I will be the one to benefit.

Did I say that you will earn instantly with the 5-second play? Yes, you read it right. Every time the ads is played, you've earned. Meaning, whenever someone visits your site, the sound is played automatically then you earn automatically. There's no need for your visitors to click anything for you to get the money. It works like the radio or television. It is called Pay-Per-Play or PPP.

If you want to be the first one to have this once it is available, click the link below and register:

Pay-Per-Play Registration

If you don't want to register and just want to know more click the link below:

Pay-Per-Play Information

If you want to be updated on future development, click the link below:

Pay-Per-Play Follow-up


The code will be available soon before the first quarter of 2008 according to NetAudioAds

Why don't you try it now, there's nothing to lose but when it's good, we're gonna gain big.

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Blogging Startup Step 5: Analyze Your Site Traffic With Google Analytics

Now is the time to implement a method on counting visitors, knowing their locations, knowing the operating system they use, the keywords (yes this is true and possible) they used to discover your site and other ways of traffic analysis. This method is called Google Analytics. It is a free web tool that webmasters and bloggers can use to discover valuable information about the characteristics of visitors' traffic. This method reveals a lot. And the most important, as I've said, it's free.

Yesterday, I already installed the Google meta tags to this blog so data gathering can be displayed by Google anytime soon. I need to have this to have a proof that traffic generation methodologies that I implemented with this blog is worth to try or not.

If you are new to Google Analytics, you can register at www.google.com/analytics using your Gmail email account. But don't enter yet directly your email account to the "sign in" fields. You have to click the "Sign up now" to register first.

Once you are registered, you can click the "Add Website Profile". A page is displayed to enter the URL of the website that you want to monitor. Another field, Time zone country, should also be filled up and then click the "Continue" button. A javascript called "Legacy Tracking Code" will be given to you and you need to put that in your blog site. As for blogger.com, it is easy, just include that snippet to one of the "HTML/JavaScript" widgets that you have in your blog's "Layout". Or, you can create one, if you don't have one yet. The snippet will not display anything when your page is run in the browser so you don't have to worry about the look of your page.

Once the code is saved to your blog, go to "Website Profile" and click the "Check Status". If your code is included correctly, Google will verify that and indicate in website profile that you've done it good.

The next you do is wait then in a few hours or days you will see statistics of your traffic. Below is an example of the charts that you can see in Google Analytics; click it to enlarge:

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Traffic Tip 3: Free Traffic From TrafficSwarm.com

Just a few minutes ago, I just registered and tried another site called TrafficSwarm.com that promised a guaranteed traffic of 1,000 visitors daily. I guess there's no harm in trying so I gave it a shot.

How it works

Traffic can be generated through a link to your site from the TrafficSwarm.com website. But your links can only be possibly displayed throughout its network when your account is activated; and to activate, you need to earn first a minimum of 50 credits with your account.

Of course, you need to sign up first with TrafficSwarm.com first to have a chance to earn credit. How to earn credits? There are different ways that you can do to earn credits for free or if you want to earn credit fast, you can purchase it from them. I guess that's how they fairly earn from it because it's not that expensive. But if you prefer to work for your credits, you can do the following:

• Make TrafficSwarm.com your home page. Everytime you load up your browser, it's equivalent to 1 credit point. Very simple isn't?
• You're going to earn 100 credit points whenever you successfully referred someone to register to them. So don't blame me if I invite you to join. :)
  
• Every time your referral load their TrafficSwarm.com home page, you earn 1 credit point.
• Click on other users' links on your Start Page and you'll randomly earn between 1 and 1,000 credits for each site you visit depending on the site that you visit.
  
• When you use the TrafficSwarm.com search engine, you'll earn from 1 to 1,000 points depending on the site that you visit.
• You can win up to 25,000 credit points by joining the lottery. I don't know yet how to join, I'm still learning it.
  

It is not yet clear for me how my credits are consumed. If the activation credit points requirement is only 50 points, I don't know yet how the rest of the points can be used up for my benefits. Will discover that and inform you in the future. For now, I will just set it up.

By the way, I need to install first a Google Analytics for me to possibly count unique visitors. That will be my next topic. After the installation, I hope that I already earn enough points to activate my own account.

So join me now with TrafficSwarm.com... click http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?752155

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Traffic Tip 2: Publicize With FeedBurner

Now I am back on track. I postponed this topic to give way to two topics that got me carried away because of some useful tips that I got on social bookmarking and Firefox tweaks. I guess my enthusiasm bore a fruit because someone commented on my Firefox topic. :) Yes! The first comment I've got after 28 days. Hooray! But there's a catch; he asked me to visit a site. Wise guy heh! Anyway it's better than none at all.

To go back to my topic (I'm out of track again :) ), FeedBurner offers a handful of free services to publicize your site. I will discuss the three of them here but first you have to sign in first to Feedburner. If you don't have an account yet, click my topic on how to create one at Link Building Step 2: Sign Up To FeedBurner Step By Step. Click on My Feeds and click again the name of the feed that you want to work on. In my case, for example, my feed name is the same as my blog name, so clicked on that and it brought me to the feed tab menu. I Chose the one that said "Publicize".

Ok, so I am now at the "Publicize" display and there's a lot of choices that you can see on submenu at the leftmost column. As I've said, only 3 would be discussed; Pingshot (very important), FeedCounter (equally important), and Chicklet Chooser (very very important).


Pingshot

When you publish new content to your blog, the Pingshot automatically pings different feed reading services. If you are newbie like me and who is clueless about "ping"-ing and what it does. Well, "ping" is definitely not a sound of a gun shot nor a toy gun. I am also a newbie and I am not in the authority of expertise to expound to you what it is all about. Try reading Ping at Wikipedia.

On the left sidebar of the screen, click "Pingshot". It displays a list of all reading services that it can contact on publish of new content. The screen shot below is an example:


Choose the "read services" that you want, but four of them are already checked and can't be unchecked; Technorati, MyYahoo, Bloglines and Newsgator. Me, I also checked Google and Pingomatic and I recommend that you do the same so that there's no need for you to go to the sites of the two services and ping them yourself manually whenever you have new content posted. At the bottom part of the screen before the save button, you can choose 5 more services in dropdown list just like I did at the screen shot above. When done, click the save button.


FeedCounter

Scroll down this page and look at the bottom of the right margin. You can see a light green rectangle that says "readers" inside it and "by feedburner" underneath it. That is the feed counter. To create your own, at your FeedBurner screen, click the FeedCounter option at the left submenu. You will see the same as the screen shot below:


You can have that counter by choosing Blogger in the "Use as widget in"
dropdown list. Click "Go!" button, but be sure that you are logged in Blogger.com before you click that. A new Blogger.com window will appear and then, at that window, Select your blog in the dropdown list and then click "Add Widget". View your blog to see the result. If you want you can rearrange it according to your preference.


Chicklet Chooser

At the FeedBurner submenu, click "Chicklet Chooser". At the screen, choose the feed icon that you want and then at the bottom part of it, you will see again the "Use as widget in" dropdown list. Choose "Blogger", click "Go!" button and then do the same thing that you do in FeedCounter. View the result and rearrange according to your taste.


So that's it. You have now implemented the three important services to automatically publicize your contents.

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6 Simple Steps To Speed Up Firefox

I have been using Microsoft Explorer with my computer and have been experiencing slow down whenever I surf the Internet. I am also the kind of surfer that open up multiple pages at one time, thus making my taskbar crowded.

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about the Firefox, so I decided to try it and installed it in my PC. The Firefox is doing great. If you haven't tried it before you can download it for free by clicking the Firefox button at the bottom of the right sidebar.

There are three things that I like about Firefox that makes me completely convinced to switch. They are:

1. Multiple pages can be open up in one window, I just press the Ctrl-Tab keys simultaneously and a new blank Tab window is created for the new page that I want to visit. No more crowded taskbar.
2. It is faster than Explorer.
3. I can still configure it to be even more faster.

Yes, that's what makes it my favorite. In 6 simple steps you can configure it to become faster. Here are the steps:

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. The first time I saw it, I never thought that it has something like that. Well, every software has its own little secret.
2. Type “network.http” in the filter field to sort out what we needed in the long list.
3. Set “network.http.pipelining” to “True” if it's "False" by double clicking it.
4. Set also “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “True” by double clicking.
5. Double click the “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”. A window will prompt you to enter a new value. The new value should be from 25 to 35, but most people and most blogs that I've read prefer the value in between, 30. It means it will allow it to make 30 requests at one time. Cool isn't it? You can experiment on it and try different values. I didn't bother, though. 30 is tested by most people already.
6. Right-click anywhere in the white area of the browser and select New-> Integer at the menu. A window will prompt you to enter a string (or name). Enter “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” as shown in the screen grab below:

Set its value to zero "0".


This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

Firefox users enjoy! If your not yet one of us, you can try it for free by clicking the orange Firefox button at the bottom of the right sidebar.

I am sorry to defer again my post about FeedBurner. I was just excited to share with you the tweak I did with my Firefox.

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Traffic Tip 1: How To Make Social Bookmarking Work

I was about to blog more about FeedBurner, but a couple of minutes ago, I came across a new traffic tips from trafficdash.blogspot.com that I want to share with you. So, I need to defer the Feedburner for the next post.

I know that I can just ask you to go to that blog and read it yourself. Actually, it is a good idea to explore the site and discover some more.

I just discover it a few minutes ago and read about a simple bookmarking technique that has been under my nose but ignoring. The blog explains it well and I just want to expound it a little more to how I will use it with this blog. After all, this blog is about the blog itself and how it will flourish (if it will be) from startup.

In the next few days, I will be actively participating with the three blog communities that I've already been a member for a more than two months already (but ignoring how it would improve my traffic). I guess I'm just a slow learner that's why I didn't realize the value of these sites. So here's what you're going to see in the next few days; you will see widgets of BlogCatalog.com, MyBlogLog, and Bumpzee in here. Slowly, I will visit a blog or two in each site and join their community, make them my online friends and let's find out if it will bring the traffic. Though, I am not sure if I can do it in a daily basis. I will try.

The objective is to make use of the old-fashion (but still working) people "networking" strategy to get them visit the blog, make them at home, get them used to it and attract them to visit more often.

So if you want to join the fun, why don't you join my own community, let's be friends and increase our blog traffic:

My BlogCatalog community: http://www.blogcatalog.com/user/joprotus
My MyBlogLog community: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/joprotus
My Bumpzee community: http://www.bumpzee.com/blogs/view/14588

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Link Building Step 2: Sign Up To FeedBurner Step By Step

Notice that I have a FeedBurner counter at the bottom of the right sidebar. I set it up yesterday and it looks like it did me a favor when I checked it out just right now, I've already got 2 subscribers (Thank you, I appreciate your interest with this blog). FeedBurner is one of the few best tools I know that can drive traffic to your blog. What it does is very complicated but it made them simple to ordinary bloggers like me who doesn't have extra time to learn about new stuff.

So that is our 2nd Link Building Step. Sign up with FeedBurner and boost a little bit your traffic. I will give you an idea on how I implemented FeedBurner in this blog and at the last part of this post, you will find a video, I found in YouTube, that teaches in details how to integrate the FeedBurner account into a Blogger.com account.


At the FeedBurner.com main page, I entered the URL address of this blog as seen in the screen shot below, and then clicked the "Next" button:

The system would then prompted me to identify the feed source, either of the two can be chosen (Atom or RSS), but I preferred the RSS feed. Then the "Next" button again:


It gave me the new RSS feed where I can used to redirect my Blogger.com posts instead of pointing then to its own RSS feed. It has an option to rename before clicking the "Activate Feed".


Then you are congratulated by FeedBurner for successfully setting up the initial configuration. Instead of clicking the "Next" button, in which would bring to a more complicated setup, I clicked the "Skip directly to feed management" button to put me in the main menu.


Below is the main menu:


At the menu you can see the difference options that you can do with FeedBurner. It is out of the scope of this post, but will be tackled in the future.

If things are still complicated to you, below is a very good video shot, that I promised you, of how to go about it:



There are still a lot things that we can do with FeedBurner and I will try to discuss them to you one by one in the future. But if you want to study it in advance you can google it and there's a lot information you can get from the net. You can also try to search YouTube for some visual tutorial.

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SEO Optimization 1: Keywords, Meta Tags and Other SEO Tips

I have just finished putting the keyword and description meta tags to this blog. There’s a little technical stuff that you need to work on when doing so; but it can be carefully done by anyone. Keywords and description meta tags are used by the search engines upon crawling in the site pages. I discovered this tips in my local SEO forum group. Here are the basic SEO tips aside from meta tags that I read in there:

• Put the most important keyword that you are aiming for in the domain name of your blog. Domain name is the one that you write in the address field in browser when you want to go to a certain site. A good example is this blog. My domain name is http://blogging-startup-make-money.blogspot.com. I stated the whole name of my site, separated each word with a dash. My two main keywords are “blogging startup” and “make money”. The first one doesn’t have so much popularity as there are only few people across the globe looking for it. The second one has a good popularity but with a lot of competitions. Well, in any business there are competitors, so we will try to deal with them later on with a good business marketing plan.
• Put your important keyword in the the <title> tag. It is automatic when you put your keyword in your blog name. It is actually a bad idea not to put the keyword in your blog name, so if you’re just starting, you can still rename your blog name appropriately.
• Put your important keyword in the <h1> heading. Admittedly, this would make my blog look weird. Imagine, I have the keyword in the blog name, then in the <h1> tag which are the title of my post and then I have to put it in all my post title to make it appear in the <h1> tag; it looks redundant, isn’t it? Luckily, I found an idea to make it look ordinary. In my introductory phrase before the post, I restate the blog name, which has my keywords, I enclosed it with an <h1> tags and reduced the size to make look like an ordinary string of characters and not a large <h1> title.
• I included the keyword in the first paragraph of the page. That would be the third tip. Notice in my introductory phrase before the posts area, I invited the readers to subsribe to my blog and rephrase the blog name. That should do the trick. 
• Put the blog name again with the keywords in the footer of your page. Scroll down and you’ll see “BLOGGING STARTUP MAKE MONEY” at the bottom.
• The next tip, in which I’m still trying to figure out how to do it in here, is to put the keyword in the ALT attribute in the images. I used the picture widget of Blogger.com, so I have no access to the html code of it. I will try to use the “html” widget next time but still thinking where to store my images. Any idea?
• For this blog, I would put the following keyword and description meta tag:

<meta name='description' content=’ This blog chronicles about my journey as a blog beginner. Before, I’ve already started 3 blogs with an intention to test if I can handle the technical stuff. This blog would be the start of new one and eventually, this will become a beginners’ guide for blogging and on how to make money out of it.’ />

<meta name='keywords' content=’make money,make money online,blogging,what is blogging,make money blogging’ />

• How to put it? Login to Blogger.com. Go to Layout, then Edit HTML. Insert the two tags after the <title> tags. Then click Save Template.

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Become a Blogger on Blogger.com

I found this video tutorial on how to start a Blogger.com account in YouTube. It is only appropriate to put it here. The author explains it well.

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"Blogging Startup Make Money" Listed In Google After 3 Days

I was kinda surprised when I saw that I am already indexed in Google after three days of submission. The only thing that I did were I submitted my URL to it, Yahoo and FeedCat. I guess I am just lucky to have it that fast.

Am I really lucky or maybe it was because of the post title? I've a screen grab of it below. Notice that the one listed is not the main URL of my blog but only one of my posts. The title of the article is "Why Blogger.com?". Is it only a coincidence that the title that has "Blogger.com" in it or it is really because Google prioritized that one because it discussed about one of it affiliate companies. Well, either way, I like the result of it.

I would like to apologize for not posting for the past two days, I was sort of experimenting with new techniques I've learned from the SEO Group Forum that I've recently joined in (the same thing you should do is to join a local SEO organization or online forum in your area or country). Lots of things are to be learned. They are very generous to newbies like me by providing insights and tips on how to go about SEO. I'm glad I've discovered them.

To discover your local SEO forums, you can google "SEO + forum + your country/state". If you are lucky you can even find a group that regularly conduct trainings and seminars. You should grab the opportunity if there is one in your area.

In my next posts... probably tomorrow... we will continue with the journey by sharing to you ALL that I've learned.

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Yahoo: From No. 1 to 6

I am very sad today. My other blog about Catholic Prayers has dropped its listing from No. 1 to only No. 6 on keyword phrase "catholic Advent prayers". I have checked my InLinks (which I'm going to discuss in my future postings) and it has also dropped from 6,400 to 6,020, sometimes only 5,990. This is truly unacceptable to me. The earning is from a dollar to nothing per day. I don't know yet what caused the downfall, but I'll go to the bottom of this.

This only made me realize that there's no exact science about search engine optimization. Ranking algorithms are very complicated and unpredictable.

Nevertheless, this is a challenging situation. I will not quit on this. I know I can do this. I will study hard and will do even more research to accomplish what I've aimed for.

I checked my other keyword "catholic prayers". I went to No. 14 from No.9. I think I wanna cry. :(

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Blogger.com's RSS and Atom Feed

RSS and Arom Feed are XML files that has the list of your published blog posts. In Blogger.com, your blog feeds both RSS and Atom are updated automatically when you post an article. Here is Wikipedia's description of the RSS and Atom feeds:

RSS (formally "RDF Site Summary", known colloquially as "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel", contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually.

RSS content can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader" or an "aggregator". The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

For details visit Wikepedia - RSS.

The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol (referred to as AtomPub for short) is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a web site. To provide a web feed, a site owner may use specialized software (such as a content management system) that publishes a list (or "feed") of recent articles or content in a standardized, machine-readable format. The feed can then be downloaded by web sites that syndicate content from the feed, or by feed reader programs that allow Internet users to subscribe to feeds and view their content.

A feed contains entries, which may be headlines, full-text articles, excerpts, summaries, and/or links to content on a web site, along with various metadata.

For details, visit Wikipedia-Atom.

Blogger.com has its own RSS and Atom feeds

• Blogger.com RSS feed: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/rss.xml
  (example: http://blogging-startup-make-money.blogspot.com/rss.xml - this is the RSS feed of this blog)
  
• Blogger.com Atom feed: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/atom.xml (example: http://blogging-startup-make-money.blogspot.com/atom.xml - this is the Atom feed of this blog)
  

Why are Blogger.com RSS feed and Atom feed are important?

As Wikepedia said, RSS is a "real simple syndication". Meaning, we can use this web feed to get reader to subscribe to your blog. In my future articles, I will discussed simple ways to go about it. So stick with me as I try to tackle them in details and comprehensible. If you are a beginner, you will surely learn something from here. Otherwise, you might also get an idea or two so once I get my Feedburner account running, you better subscribe with my blog.

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Link Building Step 1: Submit your URL to Google

Today, I submitted my website address to Google for free. This is how I did it.

• Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ . You will see the following web form to fill up:
  
  
• At the URL field, enter your site address.
• Put the site description at the Comments field.
• Optionally, copy the letters from the graphic box to the last field before the "Add URL" button.
• Press "Add URL" button.

So there you go. That's how I did it. You can also do it with your blog as a start of creating your own links from other sites.

Note: You need to wait for the weeks before the Googlebot crawls in your site and index it to its list.

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Blogging Startup Step 4: Set Your Objectives

When I started blogging 6 months ago, I didn't really plan what to do with my blogs. As I told you, I have already had three of them and I never really had any idea on how to go about it especially on how to make some bucks from it. Slowly throughout the months that I've been doing it, I learned a few details on how to improve my new endeavor. I improved my layout, read few tips and tricks on how to post, and discovered that blogging can be a business to me. So, I told my self that I would go for it and discover and learn even farther, plan for it and eventually, I wanted it to be my business. So I set my objectives. But before I state my objectives to you, here's a SMART tips on how to set objectives. This is very useful in any kind of endeavor.


SMART Way of Setting Objectives

Specific - state exactly and clearly what is to be achieved.

Measurable - set specific description, amount or anything that would determine that the objectives are achieved.

Achievable - it should be realistic enough, given the circumstances in which it is set and the resources available.

Relevant - objectives should be relevant to the people responsible for achieving them

Time Bound - objectives should be set with a time-frame in mind. These deadlines also need to be realistic.

So here are my objectives:

S- I will put up a blog about how I've started my blogging and the learning experiences that I would make while doing it and will try to make money out of it. The blog would become a user's manual of new bloggers in the future. Therefore every single step will be reported and posted in this blog.

M- Since I am doing it along the side with my IT consultancy job, I am planning to earn extra from it of around $200-$500 per month.

A- I think I can achieve that since I already have an internet connection at home (I just got it two months ago) wherein I can do all my posting and research about blog stuffs like internet marketing and search engine optimization, link building. I have two computers. One desktop and a laptop that I can carry around to blog everywhere. I will join the SEO organization in my area.

R- It is relevant to what I want to achieve. Relevancy is important in blogging. You should be passionate about your topic. You know something about the topic and if you have limited knowledge about it, you are at least willing to give in extra effort to research and learn about it.

T-I started 16 days ago and my realistic target date is after 6 to 9 months before I can achieve the monthly income that I have been planning for.

So that's it. How about you? Can you state to me your objectives? Put it in the comment.

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SEO Optimization Category

Please bear with me but I have to separate again another Category that specializes on discussion about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This will tackle about strategies on dealing with search engine rankings. I separated it from Link Building Steps because link building is a very important part of Search Engine Optimization (my opinion) and there's a lot to be covered when discussing about Link Building.

Tweaking the Blogger.com is one of the things to discuss about SEO.

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Make Money Step 2: Setup Adsense With The Blog

Once your Adsense account is approved, setting up your blog with it is the next step to do. There are couple of formats that you can use when setting up the Adsense widget with Blogger.com.

Blogger.com and Adsense allow only three widgets of advertisement per page so before you start, you should decide where to put those three. For tips on what format to use, try this site:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17955

As of me, I decided to put the ads at the left sidebar and a half banner in the middle before the post area because Google and other blog publishers (most of them) are keep on telling that that is the most effective location of the ads. There's no guarantee on that. The best thing to do is to keep the ads on that location and after a few days or weeks relocate them into other part of the page and figure out which location gives the best results. In short, you should experiment on how your readers respond to it. The left side bar could be the best location for other bloggers but it doesn't mean that it would work for you as well. Analyze a little bit on what you are doing.


How to add an Adsense Widget?

At the Blogger dashboard, click "Layout". Then goto "Page Element". At the location of your choice, click the "Add Page Element" button to display the list of page element that you want to activate in your blog page. The button looks like the following screen grab:

Choose Adsense:



Then the "Configure Adsense" window will be displayed. See the graphics below to know how it looks:


At the said window, you can set up the Ads Format and the colors that you want. Then click the Save Changes button. A word of advice on the ads color setting, it should be in a way resembling to the overall page theme to create oneness.

So what are you waiting for? Explore. I am sure that you will enjoy employing your creativity on this.

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Make Money Step1: Register With Google Adsense

There are lots of ways on how to make money with blogs. We will start with the one that started it all, Google Adsense. That's the first step in making money with your blogs. Register with Adsense at http://www.google.com/adsense. You need to have an existing email to sign up. I recommend that you use the one that you used with Blogger.com so that there will be no problem when switching pages with the two. I am telling you this because, I encountered that problem when I registered with two different email addresses.

On completion of Adsense registration, you'll wait for the email notification from Google that your application is approved. It will take a few days or weeks, so you have to move on with other things that you need to do.

As of me, I already have an Adsense account that I have been using with my other blogs so there's no need for me to register. I can use that account in setting up advertisement with this blog.

On my next post I will give na idea on how to setup your Adsense Ads with your blog.

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Link Building Steps: Another Major Category

I included another major category in this blog. I called it "Link Building Steps". I need to separate this one from the Blogging Startup Steps so that I can start posting straight away some tips that I have learned along the way. Right now, theres no links going to this blog and I need to start as quick as possible so that I can build some popularity to search engines and attract readers. As of this writing, I think nobody has read any of my posts yet. So, I need to start getting readers or else this would fail.


Why do I need links from other websites?

For those of you who are just starting on blogging and clueless about Search Engine Optimization, this one is a good start of building up your ranks. But of course, you need to submit your URL first to the major search engines like Google and Yahoo before creating links with other webpages. Will discuss about that one by one. The link building steps that I am going to do with this blog will be recorded here so that everybody can follow.

Note: I should also start with the other category "Make Money Steps" so that I can create account with different money making affiliates.

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Blogging Startup Step 3: Register with Blogger.com

To start the blog, you need to register with Blogger.com. You need to have an existing personal email before you register. If you don't have one, go to Gmail.com and get one. I recommend Gmail because you can use it with other services of Google like Adsense, etc.

To create an account is straight forward just type in the URL to your browser, http://www.blogger.com (or click here), to go to Blogger.com website. Click on the orange arrow button that says "CREATE YOUR BLOG NOW" and it will prompt you with the register form and of course you need to fill it up. The rest is easy, just follow the instructions.












Once your account is created, you can log in to the website and you will be redirected to your account's dashboard. Right there, you can create your first blog by clicking "Create a blog" somewhere below the word "Dashboard" in the upper part of the page.

Blogger is user friendly and you will not get lost when creating the blog.

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Big Lesson 1: Post Everyday

I just learned this last night from John Chow's free ebook that I downloaded after I registered for his email subscription. The ebook is a good for blogging startups like me.

From now on, I will be posting in a daily basis. No matter how tight my schedule is, I will do this. After all, my objective is to be a professional blogger in the near future. I just hope that I can be successful in this.

Note: Register to John Chow's email and you can also get the ebook that I've got. Aside from that, you will learn a lot from his blog.

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Major Categories In This Blog

Notice that I am putting "Blogging Start Step #" in some of my post. That would be one of the major categories that I have decided to put in this blog so that readers can easily find the important parts. There will be two more in my future posts. That would be "Make Money Steps" and "Big Lessons".

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Blogging Startup Step 2: Blog Titles and Keywords, Is There a Difference?

If you put up a business, you need a business name. The same goes when you put up your blog. You need to come up with the right blog title. Something people always looking for. What's the difference? In choosing a business name, you think of a unique name that people can remember, but in choosing a blog name, the name should be a set of common words that you can find in the dictionary (my opinion, you can take it or leave it). You need to use common words so that when people search for those words in the search engines, those words become your first set of keywords. How to choose the right words? I outline here a few guidelines in choosing:

1. List down at least five common word or set of words that you think can best describe your blog, but not more than 10.
2. From the list, try to determine for most commonly searched in the search engines to narrow down your options. How? There are so many utilities in the internet that you can use to know these. After this list, I will give you another list of sites where you can find most searched words.
   
3. In the remaining items in the list, pick the one that has less competitions.
   
4. Decide for the one that you think is more appropriate name for your blog. Another trick is two choose two and combine, just like what I did with this blog. I included the "Make Money" phrase because it has a mass appeal.

These are what I have learned so far. If you know a more advance method of choosing a blog name, please let me know. Write it in the comment area to share it with other newbies like me reading this post.

Utilities that you can use for keyword suggestions:

• Trellian Keyword Discovery
• Wordtracker with Google Trends

If you know of other or even more sophisticated "keyword tools", please share it with me. It might be helpful to my journey.

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Blogging Startup Step 1: Discover Your Niche

This maybe hard or simple, depending on how you look at it. But finding your niche before you start your blogging, especially to those who are starting from scratch, is the best thing that you should do before anything else. Why am I saying this? Well, I've learned it the hard way. If your main objective is to make your blog an online diary open to the world, don't think about niche. You can write anything you can think of under the sun. What you did this morning, what time you fed your cat, how long had you been on the shower room, or you can just put in all your family pictures on the pages (I did the pictures :) ). There's nothing wrong with that if your objective is just to share your personal life.

But if your main goal is to MAKE MONEY out of it, you might as well narrow down the topic you will discuss in your posts. Discover your niche. Again the question is why? Because if you want your readers to come back to you, you should find a group of people looking for the same topics, ideas that they will think they will need to accomplish something.


How To Discover Your Niche?

As I've said, it could be easy or hard on your part depending on the things that you know about something. Anyway, to help you out on that matter, here is a list of questions you should ask your self to narrow down your selections:

1.) What are the things are you most enjoyed doing at? Most of the time, this question is more on the hobbies that you're into. For example, if you enjoy computer games so much, you might put up a blog about computer games providing tips, techniques or hacks about any particular game that you have expertise with.

2.) What is your profession or job expertise right now? Example. If you are a good project manager and have handled multiple successful projects in the past, may be you can start your own Project Management blog. Your actual experiences can give good education to your readers.

3.) Do you know details about something and you can do it even your eyes are closed? You should blog about it, other people might need the information that you can share to them.

The three questions I gave you have something in common. They're telling you that if there is something that you can do best, blog it. Everybody has expertise. You just have to realize and figure out what is yours. So think about it. Niche, niche and niche, that is the first step.

I have to add. Your blog will be your business and businesses MOST of the time became successful because of niche determination.

Note about this project: My niche that made me start this project was I already know how to start a simple blog and after a few research, I learned that there's a lot of people surfing the net that have been looking for tips on how to start a blog. The title of this blog should have been "Blogging and Blogger.com for Dummies". I don't want to gamble on the word "Dummies" because it could have been copyrighted and I didn't want to waste time checking it out so I settled with "Blogging Startup... Make Money?". I will stick with the question mark for now, because I'm not really sure if I can make most of my readers earn money on this. I've just had a good feeling about the phrase "Make Money" and I will tell you why in one of my future posts.

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Why Blogger.com?

Did I mentioned that I am using Blogger.com? It is the only blogging program to be discussed here because, as I told you, I am not a professional blogger (well, I will be in the near future) and it is the only program that I know right now. I heard of other programs like Wordpress, etc. But I don't want to swallow two or more big fishes with my small hungry mouth. I will not pretend that I am a very intelligent guy who grasp everything at once. I am just an average man who's trying to develop my skills as a blogger and hoping to earn a few bucks to supplement my low income.

Besides, I've found Blogger.com user friendly... :)

I want to point out that I am not going to make a link from my other three blogs. That will spoil the process and not realistic to those people who are trying to start their own blog from scratch. After you get the startup you need from here, you can do your advance research about anything that has something to do with blogging, like how to get more traffic, Search Engine Optimization, etc. But for now, stick with me and we will do it together slowly but surely.

You can also suggest and give your own tips and tricks. I prefer a "give and take" relationship. You can also correct me whenever you think there's something wrong with what I've discussed here. Feel free to give comment.

That's it for now. Happy Thanksgiving Day to those who are celebrating.

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The Journey of this Blog Starts Here

Maybe you are saying, "Oh yeah another blog about blog and money...". You are correct this is just one of those thousands (or millions) of blogs out there that are blogging how they've got their pages higher in the PageRank and how they've earned a lot of money from it. But there is one thing that this blog has that those blogs out there don't have. What is it??? Well, ah ahum! (scratching my head). To tell you the truth, I am not a professional blogger and I don't have a huge idea on how to do this thing. (scratch my head again) Alright, I admit that I heard that a lot of people are earning money blogging. So the reason is to do the same thing, with hope that I can earn big time.

I am not a professional blogger, but I have already started 3 blogs. The two of them are not actually blogs, the first one is a picture blog of my daughter, janellemica.blogspot.com, that obviously would not earn me any money. The next one is just a collection of Catholic prayers. I did it because I am a praticing Catholic and I believe that there is a need for it by us Catholics. Right now it is earning half a dollar a day. Thirdly, this is the one I considered as a real blog after the two tests, but I still encountered some difficulties in doing it. The blog is all about Microsoft Excel VBA Programming. It's not yet earning. There were lots of errors, problems and lessons that I learned while doing them. Painful at first, nevertheless exciting and challenging.

After all those trials, now I decided to do blogging as a business. And I am decided to earn money from it. To do that, the first thing I have to do, just like in any business, is to plan for it. I will do a lot of research about this topic and I will jot down every single step that I will make right here. This will be the "make of break" of my blogging career.

The status of this blog right now:

• No PageRank
• No Backlinks or Inlinks
• This is my first post.
• Not yet submitted to any Search Engines or Directories

So everything is from scratch. This blog will be a step-by-step startup manual of how to blog using Blogger.com

Enjoy reading and wish me luck!

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