Random Thoughts

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One of the first things that a new blogger learns is that writing a list gets your post read. If you take two identical posts and make one into paragraph form and the other into point form or list form, you list will get read and the paragraph may not.

Why is that?

I believe it has everything to do with our attention span. We’re accustomed to doing everything fast. We type fast, we read fast and we have developed a short attention span. We like to watch TV and movies that have fast frames and constantly changing scenes.  We love to eat fast food or better yet, drive-thru’s.

Essentially we’ve been brainwashed!

It’s true. Every time I visit a website, I scan very quickly. I learned to do this from a job that I had where I had to quickly enter data. I learned to scan a page for the pertinent information and now I can’t seem to get away from doing it. My eyes automatically go to pictures, titles or lists. Unfortunately you’re not going to be altering society to make them read your blog in the format that you like to write so remember this:

1. Write in lists.

2. If you use paragraphs, write short paragraphs.

3. Make use of Bold, Underline and Italic to keep the readers attention.

4. Use subtitles.

I’m really speaking to myself on this. I tend to write my posts and forget to do the proper formatting before uploading. I’ll try to implement these changes and hopefully my bounce rate will improve.

I’ve been unemployed since moving to a new city 2 months ago and if the truth were told, I haven’t spent much time looking for work.  Why is that?  The reason is that I love blogging!  Blogging is something that I have a come to love and as I blog, I learn. What I’ve learned is that there’s huge potential to earn a full-time income online from a combination of Affiliate Marketing and Blogging.  My blog has finally started to earn a very small amount of money and all I need is an increase in traffic and the income will hopefully increase accordingly.  I would like to see 1000 unique visitors per day on a consistent basis.  I have had a few days where traffic came very close to 1000, but I haven’t crossed that line.

How Much Money Do I Need to Make?

That’s a very difficult question to answer.  In order to live, I need quite a bit of money, however I would learn to live on a lot less if I was doing something that I enjoyed.  The figure that I have in my mind as my first goal, is $1200 per month.  I know that’s a relatively lofty first goal, but that’s the number that works for me.  $1200 would cover the cost of renting our apartment, which would free up a few $$.  Obviously I don’t want to stay at $1200, but I’m hoping to be at $1200 per month within the next 3 months.  Is that possible?

I’ve only been blogging for 2 months, so I would have a total of 5 months in and be earning $1200.  I know that’s a rather lofty goal, but that’s the number I will stick with.  Keep checking back and I will let you know if I’m making any progress.

Of course there are other things to think about when deciding to go full-time on the internet.  First, going full-time means that I won’t have any benefits or pension.  Job security is also something that most people think about, however that’s not much of a concern to me.  In today’s economy, what does it actually mean to have a secure job?  Unless you’re highly skilled, jobs come and go and employers come and go.  20 years ago everyone felt that if you were able to get a job working for Ford, Chrysler or GM, you would have a good paying gig for life.  As we’ve seen in the past 3 years, this is no longer true.  Essentially, blogging appears to be one of the most secure of occupations because your success is largely dependent upon your effort.  Your own ability to market and write quality content will determine whether or not you get paid.

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You may have checked out this post to see if I will tell you the secret to making a ton of money sitting at home doing nothing.  I hate to disappoint you, but that’s not what I’m going to do because I don’t know that such a thing exists.  The internet is cluttered with all kinds of promises about making tons of money without doing any work.  You know the pages….”How I made $$x,xxx,xxx this year, working from home”.  The websites have a picture of a 20 year old, sitting in a Ferrari outside a beachside mansion.  While this is somewhat possible, it’s not exactly how life goes. That kid isn’t a millionaire, he doesn’t drive a Ferrari and that’s not his house AND…He’s not going to tell you the secrets to getting rich for $47!

If It’s Too Good To Be True,  It Probably Is !

If you’re brand new to blogging, you may have started your blog solely because you’ve heard that it will make you rich overnight.  I’ve only been blogging for a few months now and have learned an important lesson; It’s difficult to make money blogging!  Sure you can design a decent looking blog and you can follow all the blueprints by reading other successful blogs, but in the end, if your blog doesn’t have decent content then it won’t get a lot of traffic.  No Traffic = No Money so you won’t be buying a Ferrari with your blog earnings anytime soon.

I had some great advice from a fellow blogger that suggested focusing on quality content before anything else.  Giving visitors useful information to read will keep them coming back and eventually the money will follow.   If you remember the movie “Field of Dreams” you will recall the line “If you build it, they will come”.  If ever there was a statement that summed up blogging, that’s it.

Building a Successful Blog Requires Something; Building!

Buildings don’t go up overnight, unless you’re Amish and you’re building a barn  :o).  Other than that, you’re going to have to build your blog over time.  Start with a foundation, put up the walls, paint it and put stuff in it.  Without all of those elements, you won’t have a successful blog.  You need to be in it for the long haul because blogging is not a Get Rich Quick scheme.  It requires dedication, a certain level of intelligence, some technical ability, networking skills and some marketing ability.

Today I went through  my RSS subscription list and purged some feeds that I no longer read.  I was subscribed to quite a few, but found that I only read a fraction of them on regular basis.  I prefer to only subscribe to RSS feeds that consistently provide something useful to read, and also subscribe to blogs where I most often comment.

Check out my list and maybe you will find a new blog to read.  Also, I would appreciate if you subscribed to my feed.

Here there are, posted in no particular order.

ProBlogger Blog Tips

Blogging Tips

Dosh Dosh - Making Money Online

Blogging Experiment

John Chow dot Com

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Blog About Your Blog

TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur’s Journey

JohnTP.com

Blogtrepreneur | Entrepreneur Blog

Caroline Middlebrook

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Marketing Tips For Business Success Through Blogging

university kid

I’m Blogging That!

Save more money and make more money

MyMoneyBlog - Make Money Online

One Man’s Goal

Daily Blog Tips

Blogging4cash - Learn the secrets to Blogging for cash.

PureBlogging

Chris Brandrick

Blogging Tips From Blogging Mix - What’s up in the Blogosphere?

‘Dat’ Money.com

Super Blogging

Matts Nutts Multi Author Social Blog Network

Joe Tech

ProBloggers Matrix

Make Money Online

The Blog Entrepreneur

Winning the Web

Outsourcing is key in todays business world as a manner of optimizing time and saving costs and should be something that you incorporate into your own life. 

Hiring an expert saves time

Have you ever spent hours trying to figure something out that could have been done by a professional in a fraction of the time?  That’s likely a sign that you should hire an expert. 

What do I mean by outsourcing? 

Outsourcing is when you hire someone else to do a task that either you don’t have time to do, you don’t know how to do or you simply think that your time could be better spent doing something else.  For example, I’m not the handiest guy around the house.  I could spend hour upon hour painting our new apartment but have chosen to hire a painter and save myself the time and aggrevation.  Sure I could paint and likely do a fine job, but is it worth it?

How much is your time worth?

You may recall from a previous post that I had some php issues with my blog after I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress.  I’m not familiar with PHP but I’m sure if I had spent a few hours researching forums, I would have figured it out.  Would that have been the best use of my time?  In the blogging world, what can you do with 2 or 3 hours?  That time could be used to promote your blog, generate traffic, network with other bloggers and writing posts.  Depending on your blog traffic, a two or three hour investment could translate into substantial earnings.  I chose to spend $5 to hire a PHP expert online and he fixed it in a matter of minutes. 

Why I will hire another expert soon

You may have noticed that this blog needs a bit of TLC when it comes to appearance.  I’m not an artist and I don’t know how to use the software to create a nice header image for this blog.  Again, I could spend time doing research and eventually figure it out, however I could likely hire someone to make a simple header in a fraction of the time.  Then I can devote my time to writing and generating traffic.

I heard about Google Trends a while back but never saw any reason why I would need to use it until this past week. I have read a number of bloggers over the past few weeks say that Google Trends helps them to find inspiration in writing so I decided to stop by and was I ever glad that I did. My previous post on the Hotmail outage was courtesy of the inspiration received from Google Trends. I noticed a trend of people searching for Hotmail outage and similar search terms so I decided to do a news search myself only to find that many Hotmail users could not login to check their email. I would never have known this because I don’t use Hotmail. Thanks Google Trends for coming through for me during my lapse of inspiration.