Get more traffic

A quick update on a blog directory I found, Blog Explosion. You can sign up for free, list your blog and get traffic to your blog by visiting other blogs. Unlike other traffic exchange programs, all of the blogs I've visited so far have been genuine and of good quality and some I have even bookmarked for visiting again later. In return for visiting these sites you get credits that you can exchange for getting visitors to your site. I've got all three of my blogs listed so I'm hoping to increase traffic to all of them quite a bit. I'll let you know what happens in a couple of days.

On the subject of link traffic exchange I signed up for one yesterday and it did get me about 70 extra unique visitors. I'm not going to recommend it because unlike Blog Explosion the quality of sites that were included were really poor and you had to visit 50 other sites before yours was shown to others.

Bye for now.

The first days of my quest - Part 5

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 /Part 4

The story continues...

Now where was I? Ah yes, I was promoting my blog. I've submitted my blog to numerous directories, participated in a meme and posted to forums, done some link exchanges and created feeds that people can subscribe to. I've been posting at least once a day and I'm getting a small steady stream of visitors, not many but it's a good start. I've actually started to enjoy writing my blog so I created my second, "HD In The UK" about High Definition TV. I chose this topic because it's something that I'm really interested in and the content should get me higher paying adsense ads. I then had to promote my HD blog as well, so I used all the methods I mentioned above plus I used this blog that I'm already getting traffic to, to promote the HD blog. I'm now also getting a very small amount of traffic directly to my HD blog, which is also bringing visitors to this blog.

Keep on blogging

A couple of days after creating "HD In The UK", I created blog number three, "Online Book Club". I created this one less to make money and more for my own interest, so on this one I will be keeping advertising to a minimum. What started of as a way of making money has turned into something that I really enjoy doing and if I make any money it will be a bonus.

That bring us up to date, I now have three blogs running, which is keeping me busy as I'm constantly trying to think of new content and trying to promote them.

Conclusion

Well, that's the end of my first week of internet entrepreneurship, obviously it's still early days, but my conclusions are as follows:

• Cashback Schemes are only good if you buy a lot online, because you have to spend money in order to make any back.
• Paid Surveys, I'm not sure about yet, I've done a few but they've all been low paid. I think you success with these depends on who you are and what demographic you fit into, most surveys are targeted to a particular audience. Maybe they already have enough 30 year old males in IT signed up, perhaps if you're a 55 year old female acrobat you might get more offers.
• In order to make money writing reviews for the likes of Ciao, you need to be able to write good detailed reviews and lots of them.
• Web logs and web sites, can make good money, but it's all about content, without it you're dead in the water and not just any content, good quality, original content. If you can come up with an original idea and get people interested you've got a good chance of making some money.

All of this takes hard work and a lot of time, you could almost make it a full time job and still not have the time to do all you want. I don't know how successful my ventures are going to be, but I'm going to keep at it and see what happens. Now that I've come to the end of my first week this will be the final part of this series of posts, but I will continue to regulary post tips, resources, articles and other things that I come across as I continue on my quest. Below is a quick tally of how much I've made so far, remember though most of these sites only payout once you reach a certain amount so I probably need to make another £150 before I actually see any money.

Free Fivers: £6.67
Google AdSense: $0.83 (approx. £0.44)
Ciao: £0.12
Valued Opinions: £2.50
Global Test Market: 10 Market Points = $0.50 (approx. £0.27)
Test & Vote: 11840 Points = approx. £2.50

Grand Total: £12.50

I don't know how many hours in the last week have been spent doing this stuff, but £12.50 is less than my hourly rate at work, I could have done an hours ovetime and earnt more than that. Oh well, it's a start at least.

Thank you for reading

Martin

Bookish Thursday

"Bookish Thursday" is the new meme I've started over at my other blog Online Book Club, please go and check it out.

Thanks
Martin

The first days of my quest - Part 4

Part 1 /Part 2 / Part 3

Blogging continued...

Yesterday I started to tell you about my recent blogging activities and I promised I would give you a bit more detail today, so here we go.

I've created my first blog and my first post now I need people to read it, so it was back to google with the search terms "promote blog". After trawling through a few useless links I found this site http://www.manhattanservice.com/ it has a massive list of blog directories to submit to, each directory is listed with its Google Ranking (I will come back to this in a bit) . This site also has a list of Blog Forums also with their Google Ranking.

Directories

I went through the list of directories with the highest rankings (minimum 6) and started submitting my blog, this is quite tedious but pretty easy. Some of the directories will list you straight away, some have some kind of manual verification to make sure your site is suitable and some require you to place a reciprocal link on your site first.

Google PageRank

From Googles website, PageRank explained:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your
query.

So, what does all this mean, well to get more traffic you need people to be able to find you and one of the ways people do this is through a search engine and the higher the PageRank you have the higher you're likely to be in the search results. In order to get a higher PageRank you need to have your link listed in lots of places, but they need to be places that already have a high PageRank, thats why I only submitted my blog to directories with a minimum rank of 6.

Blogging Forums

Believe it or not most of my traffic at the moment comes from forums, especially as I'm still waiting for my blog to be listed on a lot of the directories. Forums are very different to directories in that you can't just post a link to your blog and leave it at that, you need to participate in the forum. It's probably only worth signing up to a couple of forums (links to my favourites at the end of this section) as it's very difficult to keep your blog up to date as well as posting to many forums. So, after joining a couple of forums I set up my signature with links to my blogs and started posting. I've tried to participate in the forums I've joined rather than just randomly posting links to my blog.

Blogger Forums
Blogger Talk

Memes

Getting involved in memes are another good way of increasing traffic to your blog, for a description of what a meme is and a list of ones you can do visit The Daily Meme. Doing these encourages people to come and leave comments at your site. Monday Madness is a good example of a meme that I've just started to get involved in.

Please remember though don't just get involved in forums and memes as a way to increase traffic do it because you want to get involved in the blogging community as well, don't just become a spammer.

Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow for the 5th and final part in my first days series.

Martin

Quick Update

While you're waiting for Part 4 of "The first few days of my quest", please take a moment to have a look at my 2 new blogs, HD In The UK and Online Book Club Blog. Let me know what you think any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks
Martin

PS Come back this afternoon for Part 4

100 Jobs

100 Jobs

"100 Jobs That I have no right applying for but which I'm going to apply for anyway... "

A really clever and funny blog, well worth a visit.

The first days of my quest - Part 3

Part 1 / Part 2

For today's topic I will be mostly talking about Blogs...

Even though I've been a regular user of the internet since 1994, I've only very recently become aware of blogging and blogs. It was while searching google for more ways of making that elusive extra cash, that I kept coming across pages titled "How to make money with your blog", so I thought I'd investigate. After a bit of reading up on various web sites and looking at other peoples blogs, I thought "why not?" and set about creating my own blog.

So I had this great idea to create my own blog, but I didn't have a clue as to what it would be about. After around 2 hours of trying to think of things I know about that other people might be interested in, I had nothing, and then it came to me, write about what I'm doing now. That's when I created this blog you are reading right now "My quest to make money from the internet", simple.

Of course the main reason for creating my own blog in the first place is to make money, so I had my own blog, what next? Well I wrote my first post "My first blog" so I had at least a little bit of content and then signed up with Google's AdSense (see link in sidebar), which provides targeted ads to display on your site. Once I was signed up I added a couple of ads to my page and that was it my little money spinner was up and away. Ok, not really. Having a blog with 1 post and a couple of ads a money spinner it does not make, but it's a start. I also added a Ciao banner ad to the top of the page, but having ads does you no good if there's no one click on them, I needed traffic.

Setting up a blog and adding posts and ads is easy, getting people to look at it isn't, at the time of writing and since I setup the stats 4 days ago I've had about 30 visitors to my blog. I'm actually quite pleased with that, but it's taken a lot of work, submitting to directories, link exchanges, participating in forums and generally getting involved in the blogging community. I will go into more detail in Part 4 tomorrow.

See you then
Martin

Monday Madness

Monday Madness

1. From jstar: Holiday in Europe or Asia? Europe
2. From sherle: How do you try to change a behavior pattern you don't like about yourself... whether it's chewing fingernails, overeating, smoking, or picking your nose? I just stop. I stopped smoking last year, I thought it was time to give up so I did.
3. From tricia: Have you ever successfully completed a Sudoku puzzle? Yes, many.
4. From caylynn: What website do you visit the most often? It changes depending on what I'm interested in at the time, but at the moment its http://www.guitarnoise.com/.
5. From michael morgan: What was your favorite thing about high school or college? Going home.

Martin

The first days of my quest - Part 2

Part 1 / Part 3

The story so far...

I'm skint and it's the first couple of days into my quest to make extra cash and so far I've signed up to a couple of sites, the first was a cashback site and from there a survey site. So where did I go next?

Paid Surveys

Well that first survey site Test & Vote got me thinking that there must be more of these, so I launched trusty old Google and did a search for "paid surveys". There were a lot of results to say the least, so I started signing up to all that I could find (I'll list some of my favourites at the end of this post). All the survey sites I found either offered points for prizes or cash, I tried to limit my sign-ups to the ones offering cash. The amount of cash offered varies on each site from just £1 upto around £80 per survey. Signing up to these sites is a bit of a job in itself as most of them require you to provide a fairly detailed profile, this is so they can match you to the right surveys for the demographic they are targeting. After signing up I now have to wait for them to email me when new surveys come up, so far in the last few days I've only had about 4 surveys and they've been low payers so not making much there onyly £2 - £3.

One of the best sites I found was Ciao.co.uk, although not especially for the surveys (as of yet not received any surveys from this site), but because of the facility to write review on almost anything and get paid for them. How the site works is for every review you write other members can rate it on how helpful they found it, then you get paid based on a corresponding scale for all positive responses, this is usually just a couple of pence. To make any real money from this site you do need to write a lot of good quality reviews and get plenty of positive feedback and to get this you need to rate other peoples reviews and leave plenty of comments. I've only written 1 review so far, but have already earned a small amount of money, I will be writing more reviews very soon to build up my stash.

That's it for today will be back tomorrow with part 3.

Thanks for reading
Martin

Paid Survey Links

http://www.testandvote.com/ Points for Vouchers and Prize Draws
https://www.indiefield.net/register.html Cash
http://www.valuedopinions.co.uk/ Cash
http://www.globaltestmarket.com/ Points for Cash

The first days of my quest - Part 1

Part 2 / Part 3

Disclaimer: Contained in this post are links to various sites that I have found that can in theory make you money. Most of these links are refferal links that I will get paid for if either clicked on, or the linked site is signed up to. With each link I will put a description and an opinion as to whether it is worth using, I will not recommend a site just to get a refferal fee, I will only recommend it if I think a site maybe useful in making money for others. Please do not feel that you have to click on any of the links, only use them if you think they maybe able to make you some money. Also note that most of the links are for UK based companies unless otherwise stated.

The first stop on my quest was a site called Free Fivers, this an internet shopping cashback site, that gives you varying degrees of cashback depending on the site you go to. As soon as you register you are given a free £5 credited to your account, although you can only receive payments once you've earnt at least £25. I'm not sure if this site is going to help me much at the moment as I'm not really buying anything online now, but if you buy a lot of stuff online I can see it being able to create a small income. If you are looking for insurance right now then going through this site will get you a discount as well as up to £75 cashback, so if you are in the market for something anyway you may as well get money back for it. You can also earn money by refferals, you get another £5 for each person you refer, so if you know a lot of people who shop online then it could be quite a money spinner. So far I've only made about £7.

Next up was Test & Vote, I found this site from a link on Free Fivers so I got some cashback for signing up with them. Test & Vote pays you in points that can be turned into Amazon Vouchers for completing surveys and doing product tests that you need to be selected for. There are a number of tests that you can do straight away so you can start earning points immediately, these are fairly quick and simple. The most points are earned by being selected to do one of the big surveys or a product test, selection for these is based on whether your profile matches what they are looking for. If you get selected for a product test you also get to keep the product. So far I've earned about 12000 points, you need 40000 for a £20 Amazon Voucher, I'm not sure if this is worth the time and effort, but I'll wait and see what comes in.

Comeback for Part 2 on Monday.

Thanks

Martin

My first blog

As this is my first blog, let me tell you a little about myself; My name is Martin, I'm 30 years old, I live in the UK with my girlfriend and we have a 4 month old baby daughter. Now to explain the title of my blog ("My quest to make money on the internet"), as you've just read I have a 4 month old baby, this means my girlfriend is no longer working and her Maternity Pay finishes soon, so we are going to be skint! Now we've all read the sites that promise you can make £5000 a week working from home, well I'm not gullible enough to believe that, but I am hoping that I may be able to make an extra couple of quid on the side.

So, in this blog I am going to log my progress in the world of internet money making schemes and hopefully pass on my experience of what works and doesn't work. If I do make any money I will try and list some of the sites that I use so that anyone else who fancies making a few quid can hopefully do so as well. I've already made a start in my quest but I will detail that in my next post.

For now, goodbye

Martin