I thought it would be interesting to start a diary here to maybe help new people interested in blogging learn from my mistakes and also to maybe learn from some OGs in this game. I'll also probably make a new blog and posts these posts there too. First some info about me. I'm 25 year old artist/film-maker/writer. I recently just finished a project I spent a few years on, so now I got some time on my hands. I'm an internet addict who used to write probably 1,500-2,000 words a day on the web about the subjects I follow. However once some friends got me into blogging, I find it a much better outlet for my ideas and it's a really fun hobby. My goal is to make my blogs as successful as possible. I've started two blogs about two subjects I'm extremely passionate about. One is a sports blog and the other a movies blog. The sports blog is going to be mainly paragraph or two ramblings a couple times a day with two or three 500 word articles each week. The movie blog is updated with a new 700-1000 word essay about a specific movie each day. The mission of two blogs is different. The sports blog is meant to generate adrev from several hits a day. The movie blog is meant to generate adrev from amazon ads at the end of each post. I've also begun submitting all my articles to pay by article sites to maximize my money returns and hopefully generate interest in my blogs. These so far have been my biggest success. Sites I'm submitting articles too http://hubpages.com/ - By far the best with the ability to tie in several different ad rev programs like Adsense and Amazon http://www.xomba.com/ - Is another good site with Adsense built in. My articles have been getting quite a few hits on here too because of a relatvely small community (usually around 300 people on this site at a time) I've also tried submitting my articles to Hellium, Triond, and Associated Content but have had mixed results and have since ceased submitting to them. Anyway, I started about four days ago and have already made $1.51 I'll continue to update this if anyone is interested.
Well, I think I'm going to call it a night. I've started submitting my blogs into different Blog directories such as Blog Catalog. I've found a very helpful site listing different places to get your blog listed. I will go through them tomorrow and report how easy they were to use for a newbie. I'm also going to buy two domains for my two main blogs tomorrow through Blogger's domain buying service. I'll report back how that went. Still at $1.51
So I registered my two domains with Google through Blogger. Very simple and painless. Had my two domains in under an hour. I was able to submit my site to BlogCatalog, Blogged, and Bloggernity. BlogCatalog is a great freaking site. A lot of my referrals are coming from there. Also I forgot to mention I'm using a free stats tracker from statcounter. It works very well. Anyway, still at $1.51 but slowly starting to get a trickle of more traffic.
My traffic just about doubles every day now. I got about 10 unique visitors yesterday and I've gotten nine or ten today with several hours left to go today. What's nice is my blogs have gotten very positive initial reactions from within their niche communities so far. I also got offered a writing job on pretty big website on in my niche community. I had been looking for a writing job like this for a few weeks, which led to be starting one of my blogs out of frustration. Kind of amazing it happened four days after I started my blogs. I offered to write a weekly article for them as long as they link back to my blog. A few weeks ago, I would've done this for free and been happy with nothing. Now I'm going to do it and get more attention and ad rev for my writing. That's god damn awesome I think. I also think I could extend my blogs into further writing jobs down the road. I think people out there new to keep their eyes open to the opportunities beyond just ad rev and tradition e-commerece. I also found an excellent site that lists a ton of blog directories. I spent a few hours making back links and submitting my site to blog sites last night. I've set about the goal of getting my blogs in the google top ten for my niche subjects. I'm not concentrating so much on ad rev now as I am on traffic as I figure traffic will generate money and that's more important right now. I hope this thread isn't annoying to the community here on digitalpoint. I just figure I don't have much to offer in the way of info, and the experienced heads want people to contribute to the community before being involved with it. So I figure the only thing I have to offer right now is my inexperience, mistakes, and ideas. Especially since so much content here is by and for new people. I thought if new people like me stumble on this thread that says exactly what someone did step by step to get their blogs successful, that it'd be an asset to the community.
Well, I'm up to $2.92 making $1.41 today. My traffic doubled again today. I also agreed to write for that niche website provided they link back to my blog. I can't imagine things going much better right now. I'm not even a week in yet.