Beginner’s Blog

This is part 2 of the Q&A with myself, where I talk about my first blog - Blogdotes. You can find the first part, about my goals and motives for starting Beginner’s blog here.

How long it took you to do your first post on this blog?

Too long. I hope it will get better with time. It took at least two hours to write the interview. Another couple of hours to polish it, add back links and trackbacks and post it online. Then, at least an hour, to edit it some more.

How’s your first blog – Blogdotes - doing?

It’s hard to say now. I think it’s doing Ok, for the first month. I’m getting about 30 unique visitors a day, if I am not doing any promotion. It comes mainly from the directories and link exchange. It seems that I already have some regular readers, because some of them are coming without any referral, and I see the same IP every other day. I have 5 subscribers to my feed. I checked Technorati, and it says that Blogdotes has 11 links from 2 sites.

Could you tell me more about your promotion efforts?

I submitted my blog to a number of directories. Exchanged links with other humor of sites. Tried some cheap paid promotion through BlogExplosion and Funny Page Exchange. Spent about $30 on that, for a total of 3000 clicks.

My blog already got indexed by major search engines. I got the first hit from MSN Search last Friday, Google came on Monday and yesterday I got a hit from Yahoo search.

I also submitted some tips to Eric Giguere, which he published in his newsletter, with reference to my blog. So I’m getting some hits from that.

If I’m more active in promotion, the number of hits I get is anywhere between 250 and 700. This is mostly from free promotion efforts –submitting jokes to bulletin boards and other sites. The best results I get, is from Jenga Jam. I get between 200 and 300 hits per joke, when they are accepted there.

What about income? Did you start with that?

Yes. I added AdSense to my blog on January 3d and earned my first $.01 two days later. Right now I’m averaging about $.25 a day. My best day’s earnings were $1.95, but I was doing promotion through Fun Page Exchange that day and it cost me $10, so that’s not a natural income stream. My total earnings so far - $8.38.

I tried some other avenues – like running affiliate banners from Prank Place or Amazon. But they really messed up the overall look of my blog and were not generating almost any clickthroughs, let alone referrals. So I skipped that for now. Now I’m only adding affiliate links in the text, where they come naturally, like a link to Prank Place here and above.

So it seems that you’ve been losing money on your blog?

Yes. But I do not focus on income generation at this point. My primary focus right now - is filling the blog with the best content I can and promoting the blog. You can not have income, before you have traffic.

Is it time consuming?

Oh yes. I spend 3 to 4 hours every day on the blog. But most of that, probably 75% is learning, tweaking the design and promoting the blog. If I’d split all the activities during this month, it will probably be like this:

25% - generating content (writing), 25% - learning, 25% - tweaking the design and 25% - promoting the site.

I am sure, the time I spend on this blog will decrease eventually. I will arrive at the point where I can practically stop tweaking the design. The efforts to promote the site should also decrease. I probably can not do much about the learning part. To be successful you should be constantly looking for new things, learning from others and trying new things out. However, this part will become spread through other blogs that I launch, so it still might take 25% or even more of my total time, but it will be much less for one blog. I’m not sure about the content generation part, I hope that with the experience I will write better and faster, but I will have to wait and see.

Why did you pick to start with humor blog? It seems to be pretty generic and competitive topic? And revenue opportunities are not that attractive.

Yes. But I did not know that at the time. I just wanted to start with the blogging and blog of jokes seemed to be the easiest way to go. It was pretty easy for me to find content. Most of the posts are short, so it does not take much time to write them.

Sure, keywords are cheap, so you do not earn much per click. Affiliate opportunities are also limited – not much things to sell in this field. Promotion opportunities are few – most of other sites are commercial and not generous with links. There’s not much place for discussion, so no trackbacks, link baiting and other similar opportunities for that. But here comes the first lesson – do some research when choosing a niche for your blog.

On the other hand, since it isn’t very time consuming to generate daily content for the jokes blog – it doesn’t have to be very profitable. And over time, when more of the blog’s content gets indexed, you get more and more random traffic from search engines. And, I think, there are quite a few people looking for a jokes on the net. So, if I can get the income from Blogdotes to an area of $100 a month within a year, I will consider it a success.

I always looked at Blogdotes as a learning experience. And I already learned a lot. So I think I can do better with my other projects.

My second project - this blog - is also, probably, in a not very profitable field. But I hope it will provide me a lot of learning opportunities, possibilities for discussion with other bloggers. It’s also a good platform to test how trackbacks, linkbacks, linkbaiting and other promotion techniques work. And it should advance me forward on the blogging path.

Tags:Blog