Blogging for Greenbacks (Part 5): Writing content that generates traffic

If you are burning brain cells trying to think of content that will shutdown Blogger just like the way the controversial topless picture of Miley Cyrus shutdown Vanity Fair's website, look no further.

And unlike Carl Ocab, this advice is truly free with no strings attached.

Tips for writing content that will attract traffic are no secret and in fact, Blogger has published a set of very good tips on how to promote your blog.

Here are the basics:

Think of your audience. A good way to build an audience is to speak to one in particular. When you keep your audience in mind, your writing gains focus. Focus goes a long way toward repeat visitors.

Write quality content and do it well. If your "style" is bad writing, worse grammar, no punctuation, and an ugly design, that might be okay for a niche crowd. But the idea here is to achieve mass appeal, so fix yourself up a bit.

Keep your posts and paragraphs short. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on.

Publish regular updates. Simple: the more you blog, the more traffic you'll get.

Great, huh? Is that all there is to it? Would you be disappointed if I told you, "Yes"?

Of course, there is a little more to it and it has to do with this thing called the Blogosphere -- or the world wide community of bloggers.

Here are a couple more tips from Blogger that will help you reach out and link someone:

Add your blog to Blogger's listings. When you add your blog to our listings it shows up in Nextblog, Recently Updated, and other places. It's like opting-in to traffic.

Submit your address to blog search sites and directories. People look for blog content at Technorati every day, are you on their list? You should be. Submit your blog's url to Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, Popdex, and any other site of that ilk you come across.

Link to other blogs. Links are the currency of the blogosphere and it takes money to make money so start linking.

Install a blogroll. It's a very simple yet effective social networking scheme and it has the same result as a simple link if not stronger: traffic! So if you don't have one yet, sign up for a blogroll and get that link-list going.

Be an active commenter. This is in the same vein as linking. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least. So if you feel inspired, leave a comment or two in your blog travels. It behooves you.

One tip that has worked very well for me is this:

Be on the look-out for the freshest news relevant to your blog and write your account of that news. The news is a good place to start whenever you are wondering what to write about and people (other bloggers) are interested in personal accounts of how this news affects other people (you).

Also, it would help enormously if you have a level of expertise on the matter you are blogging about. I am not saying that you ought to have a Master's degree, but you have to write things that you truly know about.

The worst thing you can do is to make some thing up and post it.

(Next up: Finding things to write about that will drive people to your blog)

Freelancing writing

I am between projects right now. And, that doesn't mean I am currently jobless. I am really taking my sweet time before plunging into work again and from the looks of it, next week is going to be one heck of a week.

There's an online real estate guide that needs short zappy copy for about 40 web pages, five radio commercials for the PIA that need scripts, and whole slew of news releases that needs to be written for a brand of sing-along systems.

It'll be a tidy sum when all the checks come in and that'll be in two or three weeks.

All I had to do was to call up people whom I had written for in the past.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they were actually up to their necks in writing projects that needed to be farmed out. One guy was actually about to call me when I called him and was aghast at the apparent synchronicity.

The Universe/God, I said to him, hates vacuums and fills it up as soon as it is discovered. Moreover, it pays to call people for no other reason than to say 'Hi and by the way'... It always works in my favor.

There are days when I really miss getting pay checks from a regular job. But after about a year of freelancing, I've realized that it's actually more fun hunting for pay checks than just collecting one every two weeks -- whether you worked for it or not. It is, by far, a more honest transaction.

"Turning fun hobbies into serious money”

Written by Paul Farol last year for Cut Unlimited

Some people actually fall in love with a hobby which later turns out to be a profitable business. It is in this mode of thinking that the idea of entrepreneurship comes serendipitously. The unusual ease with which things just come together, the first bouts of inspiration and a passion for doing or making things better has a way of grabbing people from out of the blue.

Searching the internet for articles on entrepreneurship, one comes across a notion of entrepreneurship as the capitalist equivalent of a guerilla led revolution. It points to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter who says that an entrepreneur is a person who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation. Entrepreneurship forces "creative destruction" across markets and industries. In other words, it’s a situation where a small shop owner beats big business R & D with a product designed and manufactured from a small room at home. This may be very much truer in the fashion realm where small shops do better than corporations.

As a venue for the first forays into setting a fashion revolution, bazaars are among the friendliest seed beds for fomenting new movements in fine taste and scrumptious designs. It is in this sense that Cut Unlimited’s annual Noel Discovery Bazaar becomes quite an apt name for a bazaar because as far as fashion is concerned, if it’s new and absolutely to die for… you’ll discover it at Noel.

Beauty and the Beads proprietor Tess Carlos, one of the concessionaires in the upcoming Noel Discovery Bazaar on November 25 – 27 and December 21 - 23, confides that one of the best friends a new business can have is a good bazaar. Having paid her dues in the fashion business, her experience with a previous business venture allows her to compare the advantages of testing out business ideas at a bazaar rather than going whole hog with a shop at a mall.

“When we were still operating Pintura, where we sold hand-painted shirts and caps in a number of malls all over Metro Manila, we had to shell out as much as P2,000,000 just to get a shop up and running. Bazaars, on the other hand, involve substantially smaller costs that are more quickly recovered,” said Tess who opened up Beauty and the Beads about four years ago after deciding to close up Pintura.

From hand painted shirts, she has gone into jewelry making. Pearls and semi-precious stones strung out in handmade silver work and other materials make up her repertoire of wearable art. She confesses to thinking of herself as a couturier in the sense that all her jewelry are hand crafted and the designs are almost always one offs.

Joining just any bazaar won’t be enough to do the trick, though. There are certain things you have to look for.

“Among bazaars, Noel Discovery Bazaar is among the best organized and well attended with a good mixture of people. Maraming pakulo that’s why it attracts a huge crowd and another thing that got to me to join is the organizer’s good reputation, which is also quite important,” said Tess. She also explains that people who go to bazaars are more often in a buying mood.

Emily Fenix of Ala Mode, another concessionaire in the upcoming Noel Discovery Bazaar this year, also points out that choosing the World Trade Center near Roxas Boulevard as a venue is a big plus.

“People really go there and I know because I went there several times last year, there’s always a crowd,” said Emily a 23 year-old who had started out by designing and making bags way back when she was still a freshman at Ateneo.

There is also kind of freedom from knowing that you are truly working for yourself and doing what you love. In what seems like a snap of a finger, you find yourself being rewarded on several levels all at once.

Right after finishing interdisciplinary studies, Emily first got a job managing a store at a mall and confides feeling that her heart was not in what she was doing. Even while she was still working for the store, Emily and her friends were already designing, making, and selling bags as a hobby of sorts. With some money saved from her salary as store manager and some money borrowed from an Aunt, she came out with Ala Mode.

“I think of bags as amulets or talismans that make you feel good just by holding it. But what is even more important is not to lose sight of building in functionality and robust craftsmanship in your product,” says Emily who intimates that she owns between fifty and a hundred bags.

When coming up with designs for her bags, she always makes it a point to go people watching, keeping an eye out for what bags people are using and how they use their bags. With that in mind, one would guess that her two in one bag was probably inspired by a trip to Boracay. Roomy with lots of pockets, the overnighter number also features a detachable mini-bag.

Emily plans to debut her two in one bag and other creations at Noel Discovery Bazaar as will Tess Carlos who, apart from featuring her hand crafted fashion jewelry, will also showcase the next sure-fire rave – cell phone bracelets.

When comparing Tess and Emily, obvious differences in circumstances are the easiest to spot. One is a veteran businesswoman who caters to the exacting tastes in jewelry of strong women types and the other is a relative newbie to the world of business with an eye for coming up with designs for real life. However, what one gets a sense of and can’t ignore is the smile in their voices as they talk of being rewarded for doing what they love. (END)

Pinoy Biz Online: Shifting focus

For the past several months, I've been using this blog to promote Slipstream and the Philippine Touring Car Championship races. It was a good run, by certain accounts.

Nevertheless, that bit of my life is over and done. It had been a painful parting.

Before I go on and tell you guys about my plans for this blog, I have to extend my apologies to my friends at Naughty Pinay Scandals who may have been visiting this blog quite regularly to look at the photos of the babes at the Batangas Racing Circuit and the Subic International Racing Circuit. There will still be hot pictures of babes posted now and then, but less regularly so -- if at all. More likely, I will post pics of babes from car shows and I don't know when the next big car show will be.

Instead of Slipstream and the PTCC, I will be focusing on writing about successful Pinoy enterprises, political issues, film reviews, and other topics of general interest.

Why?

Certainly, there is more to learn from these things than from the conspicuous hobby spending that goes on in Philippine Motorsports.

Of feasts and famines (part 3)

Sorry if my postings seem a little disjuncted at this point, deadlines keep coming up along with calls for copy revisions and corrections -- these things make it hard to pick up from where I left off in a chain of thought.

It may seem a bit hectic, but I think I am really enjoying this feeling of being busy with so many writing jobs and once in a while I do get calls telling me that a pay check is ready or that money has been deposited in my bank account.

Receiving payment for work done and then seeing the finished product published or broadcast on TV really thrills me. This is usually when I really feel like a writer, even if most times I don't get a by-line or when sometimes my name doesn't appear in the credits of the TV shows I script.

Along with the thrills come the spills and these are the times when people who commission me to write simply don't pay up even after they've used my copy. Of course, these are the jobs that usually commence and terminate without a contract or e-mail to prove that an agreement was made. This kind of shit comes only once in a while and usually from people who say I was referred to them by so-and-so whom I had only met about twice in my life -- strangers in other words.

The best jobs come from long time acquaintances, former associates, and friends. They know my work and know what I need to come up with great work. Besides the fact that they pay up when they say they'll pay up, the interaction is a welcome respite from spending days upon days infront of the computer.

As you may have read in previous postings, Director Flor Malong of First Video is my mentor and also one of my most favorite patrons. Despite the slow pace of business and the low demand for video production projects, he still turns up a bunch of projects that keep us both happy for a couple of months. Working with him is a lot of work and loads of fun, we've never had a client that was easy to please but we have a great time -- including those almost interminable bouts of drinking beer until we both start talking about our failures in life. I don't know how he feels about me really, but I really admire this guy.

Other long time friends like Laurence Dacanay and a former officemate (who happens to be as sexy as she is smart) who had turned covert operative for a foreign government (you know who you are) recently, have sent jobs my way for which I am quite thankful for.

Other friends keep promising to send me writing jobs (hello there!), but alas!

But, as a freelance writer, I know I can't keep on counting on the goodness of friends or their belief in my abilities as a writer.

You have to strike out on your own with projects geared specifically to bring in some income.

Right now, I am working on a film script and it'll be done by next week. Hopefully, when I get a producer, this may earn me enough money to allow me to sit tight for a couple of months.

(more later)

Of feasts and famines (part 2)

When I said that the Philippine economy is in a bad state in previous posts, I was referring to the fact that people here have to work so hard just to get by and every year it gets harder to do so with the inflation being at such a high rate as it is.

Never mind that it is in the single digits (I think I read recently that 8.9% is the projected inflation rate for the rest of the year or next year), the official government statistics are at times simply unbelievable.

This is because every time I shop at any of the 4 wet markets within an 8 kilometer radius from my house in Sampaloc, Manila, my weekly budget of P1,000 buys less and less with each passing month.

During the 1980's that much money used to be the budget my mother alloted to feed more than 30 people at a feast or provide us with sustenance for two weeks. These days a thousand pesos only buys enough decent food to last two people five days or less. I pity those who have more mouths to feed and make do with a smaller budget of say P500 or less a week.

A second degree aunt who lives in a veritable squatter's area a few steps from my front door subsists on a budget of less than P100 a day for most of the month and I keep wondering how they manage it -- considering that she also feeds a son who is out of work, a daughter, and four grand children. The sorry part of their situation this year is that the land where their house sits was recently sold and now they have to contend with the imminent reality of being evicted by January 2006.

It's a small act of charity on my part and I wish I could do more, but I do tend to stretch my budget a bit more to give them at least a meal a day and hand them some money every week.
It's really costs me just about a few hundred pesos but sadly that's all I can afford, considering that my income as a freelance writer doesn't come as promptly or as regularly as the bills I have to pay in order to keep in business -- that's electricity to run my computer and an electric fan, a telephone line that allows me to connect to the internet, a maid to do my cleaning and cooking while I work, taxi fare so that I can arrive at meetings in a reasonably unruffled state, and other stuff that are quite essential to helping me concentrate on concentrating on my writing jobs.

(more later, got a deadline coming up)

Of feasts and famines

I had visited my former boss' blog www.sunshinephilippines.blogspot.com today on the off chance of reading something new there and I was not disappointed but was in fact overjoyed to find a couple of articles which I really found interesting -- of them was the one about Lucio Tan, who is probably still the richest Filipino I know of.

Anyway, I left a comment on her page which was basically a rave about the articles she wrote and she got back to me through a text message which started a short conversation.

Basically, she asked me how I was doing. I had to say that I was doing better than in previous weeks because the number of writing jobs I was doing had increased somewhat and I had an eye out for a number of other future writing jobs.

Then she said, 'Ganyan talaga tayo, feast or famine.' (That's the way our life is as writers, we

either enjoy days feasting or endure days of famine.)

It rang so true as the text message caught me at the check out counter of a Mercury Drugstore near Nagtahan Bridge. I had accompanied my elder sister while she bought my father's monthly supply of medicines (mostly for his emphysema, hypertension, rheumatism, and other health problems). The meds cost a cool Php8,500 (nearly US$200).

My contribution to that expense was basically nil, as it has been that way for a number of years after I had lost my job at RPN9 where I had written scripts for two news programs. Before that, when I was raking in good money at RPN, I used to give my father something like Php2,000 a month for whatever he needed plus some more when he asked.

Basically, his medicine bills have gone up with the number of ailments that developed over the course of the last couple of years. It was in 2003 that the doctors found out he had a pulmonary aneurysm and then a few months later he was operated on for prostate enlargement. This adds to his hypertension management drugs (medicines to treat hypertension, cholesterol, etcetera) and rheumatism drugs.

Thankfully, my elder brother, who is a ship doctor at a luxury cruise ship that plies the Mediterranean Coast, shoulders all of my father's medical the expenses.

Anyway, getting my former boss' text message got me to thinking about a couple of 'What ifs...'

Having been a writer for broadcast and print projects for about ten years now, I've already experienced a number of boom-bust cycles and for the last six years, my wife has endured the fluctuations.

Life as a writer, especially life as a freelance writer, may have all its pluses drowned out by the fact that you basically have to write stuff that'll get you paid and that really sticks it the romantic notion of writers living a life of leisure between bouts of writing.

There is this vision in my head that sort of captures what I used to think writing for a living would be like. I see Hemingway furiously typing away a manuscript in the morning light then pulling the paper out and setting it aside as he stands up and walks off to his veranda as he lights a cigar. He stands there, coolly puffing away as contemplates either going fishing for Blue Marlin the next day or having coffee with a couple of friends somewhere.

My life can't possibly be farther than that.

I usually find myself sitting infront of my 4 year old frankenstein PC, nervously tapping away at plastic keys in quick spurts as I try to beat deadline after deadline on a number of simultaneous projects. Instead of a cigar, I puff away at Marlboro Lights which will later (most probably) kill me. Instead of thinking about fishing for blue marlin or having coffee with a couple of friends, I think about what to eat for lunch (which is either cornbeef or a tuna sandwhich).

What is most unromantic about writing for a living in a third world country are the number of clients who haggle with my fees as if they were haggling with a carpenter or building contractor. I really hate that part because I tend to pity them when they come up with a figure that makes them look ultimately cheap especially when they are trying to project themselves in the media as a 'premium' something. Thankfully though, there are some clients who do have my best interests in mind and they do give me a pretty good number on my paycheck.

more later

Angels

Just a few months ago I had a conversation with my Angels as I pondered the fate of my existence while looking up at a starless night sky.

I was so worried about not getting enough writing projects and this would inevitably lead me to begin to whittle my way through my bank account. Lean months coupled with unusually high living expenses (mostly electric bills and house repair bills) had me scrounging around for a few bucks here and there.

So, while looking at the night sky, I just let out a torrent of prayer. First praying the Our Father then Hail Mary and Glory be... After that my mind was silent, then somewhere from deep inside me I began calling out for help to my Angels.

Minutes later I received a call from an old, old friend. A big project was afoot.

The answer to my prayers came so instantly and I am crediting my Angels and ofcourse God Almighty... The Great Old DP (as in Divine Providence)!

Well anyway, a friend of mine, Rochelle showed me a couple of pictures of her twins recently and they had strange images in them... Like wings. We all have come to believe that these are Angels watching over the kids.

See them here:

Freelance writing, pinoy style

I had almost forgotten what it was like to be a freelance writer and now, I am rediscovering it all over again.

Most freelance writers in the Philippines are not necessarily real freelance writers but journalists and copywriters moonlighting as freelance writers. I know only of a very few real freelance writers and usually, they're second income earners.

Nevertheless, one thing I like about freelance writing is that it allows you to accept as many jobs as you can possibly do -- given that you can deal with multiple, overlapping work schedules and deadlines. Unlike writing jobs in a corporate set up where increased workloads do zilch for your paycheck (unless you love clocking in tons of overtime), freelance writing is more equitable as each project you accept comes with a separate paycheck -- meaning if you have four or five projects, you get four or five paychecks. This can mean an aggregate or total income of as little as 500 pesos to as much as 50,000 to 100,000 pesos.

I haven't breached the 20,000 peso per writing job level and I know of only about ten people who can command fees of over a P100,000 for a single project -- these are usually well known columnists and writers. Some actually charge that much for the use of their name, supposedly because it can sell books or magazines.

Hahahahahah! Boy, wouldn't I love to be in that racket!

(Sorry, got to go for a while, another deadline is coming up... My next entry will be on what kind of writing sells.)

Writing revenues are coming in!

It has been at least since months since I had received my last government pay check from the now defunct Office of the Presidential Adviser for Jobs Generation under Secretary Luis P. Lorenzo, Junior and had gone back to the wild woods, so to speak, of writing for a living.

It was about two or three months into freelance writing that I rediscovered just how tough the market is and will, perhaps, always be.

There are a lot of good writers out there, each with their own specialization and for a jack of all trades such as myself (okay, let's be honest here, I'm really a hack), that sometimes means getting peanuts for writing like a mad man for an hour or so then getting a cute writing fee -- which is actually great if you can string together about 5 to 10 of them in a day everyday but bad if you can only manage 5 to 10 in a month.

Needless to say, I got 5 to 10 writing jobs a month all paying a cute fee.

It was utterly demoralizing at one point. What those 5 to 10 jobs in a month amounted to was just about 10 percent of the fee I normally demanded for just one job -- before I had dropped out of the freelance writing scene four years ago and gone full time into government work.

But, beyond counting peanuts, there was a bit more satisfaction involved and this mostly came from the feeling of being, essentially, your own boss even if the income wasn't that great... yet.

Like I always say during those times when I felt so low, I am a writer and I know this because I'd be writing even if no one paid me to write. From this viewpoint, getting paid to write actually becomes more of a bonus.

Anyway, after sticking it out for the last couple of months, holding on seems to have finally paid of and things are looking up.

Just recently, a friend called me up and asked me to do some writing for a cable TV show. Then another friend called me up for a huge writing job. Then two former clients sent me text messages asking for a paid meeting so we could discuss how much it would cost them to hire me for a string of tri-media projects (I do broadcast and print, from writing to production).

At this point, even though the checks haven't come in yet, I'm already thanking God for taking care of me... I had held on to the verse that said something like, if God makes sure the sparrows
have something to eat, shouldn't you expect that he'd take much better care of you? (I have to pick up my bible again, darn, I used to have these things memorized).

That's it for now... I'll blog again, time permitting.

Back to the business of writing about business

All right now! I guess it is time I returned to the business of writing about business.

I am done with writing about the politics of this land. I am through with writing about President Gloria, her State of the Nation Address, and the other controversies she is involved in. I believe others can tackle these issues better, though I really like sharing my opinions about Gloria and her follies to anybody who'd care to listen. It is in this sense that I am at time an empty tin can rolling down a rocky hill and unless I wear out whatever credibility I may have (which is not much, I suppose), I better just shut up about it for now.

So if you are looking for commentaries on the state of Philippine politics and other burning issues, please let me refer you to the blog of Joy De Los Reyes, Malaya's Editor in Chief. And if you are looking for interesting stories on tourist destinations in the Philippines, visit Jane Subang' s blog because she's a really good read and a native of Visayas, which happens to be where you can find some of the most beautiful beaches this side of the earth.

I am currently preparing a series of articles on small business loans or so called SME or Small and Medium Enterprise development loans.

When I was still working for Manuel "Mar" A. Roxas II at the time when he was still Secretary for Trade and Industry in 2003, SME development had been something like his "mantra" for economic development and he did push for SME development through SULONG or the SME Unified Lending Opportunities for National Growth. Later on, when I got hired by Luis P. Lorenzo Jr. when he was appointed as Presidential Adviser for Jobs Generation, I encountered the same "mantra" for economic development; but this time, it was being espoused as a means of generating 6 to 10 million jobs.

While I do believe that providing small and medium enterprises with all the help and support they need to thrive is a very good thing indeed, I am also given to certain doubts about the rosy numbers being reported as a way of describing the Arroyo Administration's accomplishments in this area. Perhaps I may be wrong about doubting government figures and while they can always be challenged, proving the figures to be wrong is not only a monumental undertaking -- it also serves no purpose. I suppose, I am content knowing what I know and letting the economic spindoctors spin their yarns.

Regardless of what I think about the government's reports on SME development, there are still a lot of loan programs in the private and public sector that needs to be mentioned in this blog.

After all, if you have decided to go into business, there is a possibility that you might be looking for sources of financing and the drive for SME development had actually made a number of loan facilities more accessible.

My role here is not to endorse one loan program or another but to show you where you can find information on these loan programs. I've been busy looking these things up on the internet and will save you the trouble of having to google them. Needless to say, the next post will contain links and brief descriptions on the websites/webpages that the links point to.

SO WATCH OUT FOR IT!

Great blogs of FIRE!

(a short note on blogging as the ads on my page keep promoting blogging, I may as well jot down a few notes about blogging.)

I've been writing this blog for nearly a month now and happily, others have joined me in blogging out their experiences.

It'll be quite obvious that most of my posts are about blogging, earning money through blogs, current events, and occassional news commentaries. I am journalist by trade and not a techie, though at least two techies have visited my blog (Randy Morin and no less than the President of Feedburner dropped by to post a comment on one or two of my concerns).

Hah! Would you believe that, this blog community is really great and if only for the kindness of strangers at Blogspot as well as the entire blogging community, I'd delete my friendster account. (I wonder if friends circle is any better?)

As I had told Jane Subang earlier today through a text message or SMS, blogging makes me feel like a newspaper publisher and it really thrills me no end to find out that my visit counter has logged another 40 or more visits a day.

Yesterday was SONA day, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's 2nd State of the Nation Address, and for some reason I got dozens of visits because of yahoo searches. I kept turning up in searches for "President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo 2005 SONA" because I had posted a couple of commentaries on the SONA. The lesson here is that the probability of getting visits increases when you post something that is related to a big news item and SONA was huge here in the Philippines. The only problem I have is that it didn't produce a lot of click throughs, perhaps the ads weren't relevant. Oh well! Can someone please tell me how to get either higher paying ads or ads that are more relevant to my freshest posts?

I've been advised to write to the people at Google Adsense to request changes in the ads that keep showing up, but I wonder how it would turn out and how often I can ask them to change my ad preferences.

Oh, and by the way, I do have to credit Feedburner for a slight increase in the traffic I am getting. You better sign up with them if you want to get serious about blogging. Jane has promised to sign up after I told her about it. Others will follow too, I suppose.

Right now, I am not so much into blogging for money, but I am blogging as a journalist would chronicle ongoing news events of great importance.

Working at home and earning thousands of dollars

I have tried but consistently failed to influence the ads that keep showing up on my blog. I tried writing about cameras and some techie stuff, but keep getting ads promoting "earn from home" and "make $20 per click".

Personally, I think these things are great ideas, if they really work. But I haven't tried any of them and so can't really say if they do.

Lately, I've been reading up on freebie link/traffic exchange programs (bravenet.com for one). I pored through Google's policy pages to see if they had anything against such programs and the most I found was a caution against its use because some programs farm out your e-mail address. I really wouldn't mind receiving junk e-mail if only it would guarantee hits of more than a hundred a day or perhaps, a thousand a day.

I've also read up on other ways of increasing your traffic and the means that are most endorsed involve the obvious: writing articles which people will really find useful, writing news articles with really useful new information, and other stuff which involves tinkering with your metafiles. I've tried them but really, there is no sure way to control the results. The best tack I guess is just to make your blog as well written as possible and hope more people will keep logging on.

Irrelevant Google Ads and Declining Click-Throughs

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to make my blog more searchable in the hopes of increasing the number of page impressions and ad click thoughs.

While fiddling with key words in my blog template’s metafile over the past few days has yielded has increased the number of page impressions, click throughs has not substantially increased.

Wondering about this, I took a look at the content of the google ads on my blog and correlated the days when high click throughs occurred with the degree of relevance the google ads had with my blog entries. What I discovered was that, the more relevant the ads were to my blog entry, the higher the click throughs were. The less relevant they were, the less number of click throughs I got.

The problem with this is that, there are many days when the ads aren’t at all relevant to the blog entries and there is virtually no way to control what google ads will show (they change after a certain number of page impressions), making me thing that it is just too random to be relevant all the time.

One thing that seems necessary at this point is to confine the topics of my blog entries to a narrower topic range. This is either to fit the current google ads or in some way, influence the google ads that do show up.

Also, I have to note that my blog emanates from a specific geographical location, Mountainview California. I wonder if writing on topics which would more or less interest people in California make any difference.

A lot of E-zine articles on search engine optimization strategies have so far suggested this method.

How to create a blog that earns money (part one)

I've told a lot of friends about blogger.com and Google Adsense, actually raving about it to them and telling them how great it is. But then, an old friend had to say something about it that dampened my enthuasiasm a bit, but at the same time (and this is more important) clued me in to the fact that I need to at least strive for some objectivity.

So, what you have here is a mind-setting piece, something to consider before going whole hog into putting your efforts in blogging with blogger.com and earning money through Google Adsense.

I’ve probably written this more than once by now but I am by no means an authority on the matter of Blogs or on the matter of making money through the internet.

So, feel free to stop reading this entry and switch to another website or blog – please don’t let me waste your time.

As for those of you who really want to find out what this is all about, let me begin by telling you about the few things that I do know about internet based income earning schemes.

You’ve all probably received e-mail with subject headings such as “Make money from the internet”, “free cash on the internet”, and others. If you haven’t, let me tell you that there are such schemes being hawked electronically either via e-mail or via postings on electronic bulletin boards, forums, and newsgroups

These internet income earning schemes come and go like rashes. I can only guess that there are thousands of these schemes being proliferated through the internet and I’ve tried only two of a type which I figured was easy enough to do apart from having the highest probability of paying up.

I failed to earn money from the internet income generating schemes I tried, not because the schemes I entered were merely hoaxes meant to create internet traffic for a number of websites but because they simply required too much time and effort to do. After all, what I am after is just an extra source of income, not a full time occupation.

To give you the short version of the story of one particular internet income generating project, let me tell you about the case of a website reviewer. This internet income generating scheme is free for joining (meaning you don’t have to pay a single cent to register and start earning), it offered a number of “jobs” which paid varying fees set depending on the type of job, and on top of that, offered a referral reward for people who successfully get other people to join in the scheme.

I joined with the intent of participating with the lowest level jobs and that was to do website reviews as well as getting others to join in the scheme. The other jobs required E-Bay registration and a credit card account, which to me presented a steep barrier to entry.

At first, it did not occur to me how difficult it would be to earn enough money to make it worth my time.

I am a fairly fast reader and I can write about any topic, producing several copy proofed pages in less than 15 minutes.

Making website reviews would be a walk in the park.

I figured I could write more than 20 reviews (each with a length of 9 sentences) within 45 minutes or less, depending on the speed of my internet connection and the topics involved – some need researching, especially when they are tied up with a certain locality or country.

The website reviews paid .15 US cents per approved website review, so, in my mind I figured this would give me about $3.00 a day. If I did it twice a day, this could earn me some $6.00 a day.

All together not a bad deal, considering the Philippine Peso/Dollar exchange rate was around Php55.00 to a dollar. That would net me around Php330 for less than two hours work and that’s a good deal, especially in a country where the minimum daily wage in its largest city is only around Php250 to Php300 or a little under $6.00 a day.

But here’s the hitch, the website review scheme only gave out a maximum of 3 jobs a day. Moreover, the website reviews could only pay out earnings when they reached $20.00 and this would be remitted through either Paypal or IKOBO. Remitting through either payment systems would mean a transaction fee would be deducted from my pay. In the case of IKOBO (which services people outside the US), the initial transaction fee would entail a deduction of $5.00 to cover the cost of shipping my IKOBO card and an additional $2.00 or $3.00 as a transaction charge.

Under this set-up, it would take me 133 days to earn $20.00 and this would result in a net pay (gross pay minus expenses) of $12.00 to $13.00 which is, of course, simple not my kind of deal.

In short, I stopped after writing my 14th website review and quit referring people to their website.

Now, I am telling you about this for two reasons:

One reason is to warn you about the realities of some of the schemes that may be out there. I wouldn’t blame you if you turned up your nose on so-called ‘Free Internet earning schemes’, they’re free all right… but earning is another matter all together.

The second reason is to lead you to entertaining the right mindset when it comes to these “Free Internet earning schemes” and that is, you shouldn’t expect too much from it in terms of actual money. Well, at least, not at first.

As for blogger.com and Google Adsense, both websites/pages explain the earning scheme adequately. (This earning scheme has been referred to as an “affiliate program”)

But the simpler version of the explanations they’ve offered is this:

Every time somebody visits your blog and clicks on an ad, you earn a few cents.

The amount paid out varies and I think this has something to do with the ratio of page impressions to clicks. However, this explanation is not at all consistent in a case where I had earned more from 100 page impressions/visits and less than 10 ad clicks – with a ratio of 10:1 or 10%, compared to 2 page impressions/visits and 1 ad click – with a ratio of 2:1 or 50%. May be I am reading this wrong.

What is clear to me, however, is that you earn more money as more people visit your website and a high number of those visiting click on your ads. The ideal ratio would be 1:1 or one visit resulting in 1 ad click, but perhaps even a ration of 4:1 or even 8:1 would not be all that bad.

Google Adsense, however, cautions that it is against their policy for people to make arrangements with other people to arrange visits to their website for the purpose of clicking their ads – then again, how would they know?

One critic, and I forget where I read his article, says that affiliate programs such as the one offered by Google Adsense and blogger.com shouldn’t be thought of as a means to make a living – in short, don’t try to make it into your bread and butter. The critic goes on to say that the rules of the system have been crafted in such a way so as to discourage its use as a main source of income. He even goes on to demonstrate that only page impressions and ad clicks in the magnitude of tens of thousands would be sufficient to generate an income of more than $100 a month – an amount which he figures would be worth the trouble.

The critic also pointed out, that as a means of helping defray the cost and as an incentive to bloggers, the affiliate program may not prove itself so readily as a source of substantial revenue. But, he ended his piece by saying that as with all endeavors, the final results are still up to the person engaging in this pursuit and there are rewards for those who make the best out of opportunities that come their way.

So, at this point, you may be wondering what my stand on all this is.

My stand is this, if you are already into blogging and would blog away for free anyway, registering for an affiliate program won’t hurt you and at most can even bring you a windfall at some time in the future – but only if you work hard at coming up with content that proves useful or interesting to other people.

The plus side to blogging with blogger.com under the Google Adsense affiliate program is that unlike other internet earning schemes:
- it doesn’t require too much time or work to do and in fact, it is something you can attend to when you feel like it
- you can leave it alone for a while and still earn something
- you can hold off payment until such time that the amount of money accrued to your Google Adsense account is large enough to buy you something you really like.

My next entry will be a step by step guide on how to register with blogger.com and how to register with Google Adsense.