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Blogging One Year After – The Unseen Blogging Knowledge

December 28th, 2009

This is the third and last part of my blog review.

The previous two parts are:
Blogging One Year After – The Unseen Statistics
Blogging One Year After – The Unseen Social Activities

One year of blogging has brought more activities and time spent both facing the computer or laptop and also outside of the online world.

I’d just like to share some of the blogging knowledge or experience I have gathered in a year. You would probably get the same juice off this posts if you have been following other blogs about making money online or how to blog.

Easy to start a blog

wordpress-plugins

It is very easy to start a blog. The difficult part is maintaining it.
Myself has started two websites/blogs before marvinlee.net which have now been abandoned.
I have also helped two person to start their blog and they have less posts in a month than the sight of a full moon. 🙂
If you have inclination towards starting a blog, I would recommend using WordPress instead of Blogger or any other blog platforms for that matter. WordPress is easy, popularly used and loads of plugins for you to plug and play.
Yes, you do not need to know how to program.
All you need to do is signup for webhosting that comes with WordPress, get a nice domain name, and follow those tutorial that should be easy for non-techies to start a blog. If you have problems, I’d be glad to help too.

Tips

sand_clock

Some tips though, blogging needs persistence. You might want to think of a topic for your blog that you will blog persistently. Even if it is not a theme-based blog, you should have an idea what is it that you need to keep you blogging for long term.
You might wonder how someone (or me) could be so free to blog everyday? The answer lies in WordPress. There is a schedule post option. You could create a post and scheduled it to be published tomorrow while you are at work or next week when you’re on board a plane.
Some people have scheduled posts up to a month but so far I only have scheduled posts for the same week.
Some posts have more visitors than others, those that permanently attract visitors are mostly timeless entries.
What are the timeless entries? Something like ‘How to make money online’ guide posts is timeless, while ‘I made $100 yesterday’ statement post is not. Get the drill?

Traffic

bargraph1

Some people blog and do not care about their website traffic. They just blog for fun and for personal satisfaction. If that’s the case you can use free blog hosting (like from wordpress.com or blogger.com) and not pay for it.
However, if you do care for your blog, you can use tools to analyze your traffic, like sitemeter.com and Google Analytics.
You’d also care what type of entries that would bring higher traffic (remember timeless entries).
Having a blog brings visitors from all over the world and traffic all the time even, including while you are asleep.

SEO search engine tips

search-engines

Most often than not, your blog visitors comes from Search Engine instead of a recommendation by word of mouth.
So if you do care of your blog and would like more traffic, you should make your site SEO friendly. SEO is abbreviation for Search Engine Optimatization or making your site easier to be listed in search engines and easier for people to find your site.
This goes a bit technical and you’ll need time to venture into this. However, once you get your blog started, you can then start diving into SEO easily with Google.

Making money is possible

money-photo

The million dollar question, is always related to money. Does blogging tell me that it is a way to make money?
Yes and no.
Most students and stay home mum blogs actively nowadays and I believe they are getting a hefty sum for their active effort.
Those that blogs professionally or full time has been able to use thier blog and blogs to replace a full time employment as well.
Getting rich or blog to be a millionaire? I don’t think so.
Notable professional bloggers to learn from : JohnChow, DavidRisley and Problogger.

If you are a blogger, please share what knowledge or experience you had so far with me. I will appreciate it very much.

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Blogging One Year After – The Unseen Statistics

November 30th, 2009

dsc_0131Time flies and it’s been a year since this blog has been up on the Internet.

Most of my friends who read this blog (and commented) has been quite faithful in the earlier days (I assume :-P), and was thinking that I’m up to something, probably trying to get rich from blogging.

It’s very natural to think so, as there are quite a number of bloggers who made it, blogging full-time.
So for non-techies/non geeks, having a blog indirectly equals to make money online or having a presence (fame) online. I would like to be corrected if you do not think so.

Well, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting anything like that at all when I first started, as it’s spelt out on the About Page.
However, having monetizing a blog would have been a bonus and I was sort of experimenting a bit here and there too, though never seriously.

Anyway, as an evaluation of this blog, let me just share with you statistics of marvinlee.net that has not been seen ever before.

I used sitemeter to track page views and visits.

sitemeter1
Visits (in yellow) are the number of unique visitors (by IP address). It was growing steadily and peaked at 9k visits a month, averaging 300 visits daily. This is not a very heavy traffic blog and the traffic went down slightly the last couple of months as there has been less update. However, do note that it was still higher compared to the first half of the year.

google_analytics

Google Analytics however, have different algorithm and on daily basis, the visits are not more than 200, so I guess the sitemeter stats includes return visitors. Meaning same person but uses different IP address, because Google has place a cookie on your browser and do not include you on subsequent visit on the same day.

alexa_marvinlee

Alexa is also used as a site ranking tool, although the accuracy can be debated, because it could only estimates users based on the data by users installing the Alexa toolbar. This blog is still ranked quite low in Malaysia but I’m pretty happy to be within the Top 1Million in US, again this is considered not significant enough for graph display in Alexa. A site has to be in the Top 100k to be considered for additional data.

prchecker_marvinlee

Google PageRank used to be (or still being used) to rank a site. I’m having 3 out of 10. Facebook has 9 and TheStar.com.my has 8.

google_feedburner

I’m using Google Feedburner for blog subscribers and at the moment it’s hovering in the number between 40 and 50. Still considered very very low…

akismet

Spam comments! Albeit being a low traffic blog, this blog still attracts a lot of spam comments. More than 8k! Akismet is good for wordpress blogs.

And finally, the most sought after answer. How much does blogging make?

I’m using Google Adsense as the main advertising revenue, and it’s only generating peanuts. I’m not surprised though, as have been highlighted by other bloggers/probloggers/money making blogs.

google_adsense

I am near to the USD 100 payment threshold, after a one year long blogging!

If you think blogging can make money (and a lot), I’m pretty sure it can, but are you up to it and doing it the right way?

There’s a lot of room for improvement to make but other than these statistics, this year has been an experience for me and I’ll share more of that in the second part of Blogging One Year After- The Unseen Social Activities.

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