Choose a niche

I chose 4: Nokia, Apple, Gadgets, and Asus eee PC. For the sake of experiment I purposely chose niches that have different popularity and . Set up a blog/website for each one of them. Tell you honestly I personally have no particular interest in any of these I am not an expert in any of these areas, and I do not have anything special to say. Actually I never even owned Nokia phone or Eee PC, but who cares.

Find right content

Check what is hot in the niche and blog about it. Make sure to have at least 2-3 core posts, longer and more extended entries full of meaning and key words. These will be the top attractors from the search engines and also posts that others will want to refer to. I have 2 posts on Nokia blog about ICQ-agents for cell-phones. Nowadays they alone drive several thousand visitors every day.

Place your ads wisely

I clumped my ads all other the sites, but chose the colors wisely, so ads do not annoy visitors too much, yet they are visible and “attractive”. I experimented with placings and colors for a long time, changing something once a week or one a month. All my blogs have same placing, however same blocks work better on some sites and worse on others.

Wait

It took a while until Nokia blog took off. From 150 visitors a day to 1500 several months later, and to 5000 just a couple days ago (after over a year of setting up the blog). Do not aim for high numbers though. My other blogs have much less visitors. Apple and Gadgets each enjoy only about 200 visitors a day (this figure changed very little since I started the blog also about a year ago). Asus Eee PC is doing better, with about 800-1000 visitors. One thing I learned is that higher numbers of visitors does not mean higher income. Sometimes I could get 10 dollars from Apple with its 200 visitors and just a few clicks, and could not break through 5 USD per day barrier with Nokia and its 1500 crowd. Shuffling ads around a little bit helped a lot.

AdSense is not the key

One of my secrets is that I do not rely on Google ads alone. Basically for the past year Google was a poor source of income for me. One of the reasons is that all my sites are in Russian, and Google is not the most popular service in this part of the world.  Because of this I used the local PPC service, offered by main Russian SE, Yandex. Check to see what alternatives are around, especially if you do not blog in English.

Look around

Pay attention to other blogs. See what they are doing to make your blogs look better and read better. Do not hesitate to make change. Aim for satisfaction. If you feel happy with your blog, let it be for a while. And see what happens. Often time is a best judge.

Thats basically it. Hope it helps! Questions and comments are more than welcomed!

To make it a little easier on myself I will start counting from the 1st of January 2008.

Seems like today another hundred is coming… Now I need to think of the ways to make them stick to my blog.

Just as I mentioned in my previous post, I had a problem cashing it in Russia. Perhaps, I can do it in Taiwan. BTW, I moved to Taiwan last week

Sad thing is that it is pretty hard to cash Google cheque in Russia and former Soviet Union countries. Good thing is that income from Google was only 102 dollars. So even if I do not cash the cheque I do not lose much.

Nevertheless I got some encouraging results from my blogs. I got my first 100 dollars in Google AdSense. It took me just a little over 5 months to do that. It happened to be the slowest gainer out of the 3 pay-per-click ad systems I am using now and one link-selling system. The other ones brought me about 350 bucks over 3 months. Not so bad I guess, especially taking into account that I was almost completely off blogging for the past 2 months.

As for my 1000 USD in 6 months of blogging goal, I am almost half way there, got 2 more months to go. I believe I can still make it.

Same tweaks are used by some web-site optimizers to attract extra visitors from search engines. Just for curiosity I’ve looked at the Google’s results for the word Panasonik. I was surprised  to see quite a number of sites using the word Panasonik instead of Panasonic, even in the titles. And those sites are selling not Panasonik counterfeits, but the real stuff.

Please note that this research was done on Russian sites only and may not be true for the English ones.

I believe this kind of tweak is pretty effective for search engine optimization, at least for some words. For example for the word Panasonik about 8000 searches are done monthly in the most popular Russian search engine, Yandex. However, their use will almost certainly make your web-site a bad reputation. There one is an exception, though. You can write posts just like this one.

Louis wrote me a note asking for a review. I believe it will be good to post it here.

I would be thrilled to have you review my blog. I’m not getting nearly as much traffic as I would like. I’ve been trying to post more often recently. All content is original. Sometimes I worry my posts are too long. Sometimes I wonder whether my interests just aren’t appealing to other people.

Please do make your review of my blog available for public viewing. Thanks. And good luck with your own blogging!

First of all I would like to say that The Repeal of Gravity Blog looks great. It is one of the very few Google Blogger blogs I actually like. Very clean. Pictures fit in very nicely. (more…)

Go ahead and check Create a Morning Writing Ritual post from my favourite FreelanceSwitch to see why morning are important and what can you do to use the morning time most effectively.

His blog indeed looks very much like John Chow’s, and not just because they use the same theme an both of them have cars in the header image. Structure and content wise Jason’s blog is very similar to John’s too. Just like John, Jason blogs about cars. He also has make money online bait. The copy is pretty much straight forward, without any tweaks.

One thing that impressed me the most is that they both have same PageRank of 5. Coincidence? Maybe.

Why would anyone want to imitate John’s blog? I have no idea. Maybe Jason himself can shed some light on this.