What is a Blog ?

We all can easily find out the dictionary meaning of a Blog by heading to a site like Wikipedia and typing in "What is a Blog" but does that really describe it. I think if you asked 10 different people they would all probably answer it differently.

Source: wikipedia

A blog (short for web log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

That's how they describe a Blog and I guess in its simplest form its correct however here is what a Blog is to me.

1. Something to do when I am bored
I don't know how people survived before the Internet, and I am not sure how I used to spend my time before I started Blogging.

2. A way to communicate
I've got a lot of stuff to say, I have recently discovered, what better way than to launch it into cyberspace and tell the world.

3. Another method of making some money
Its starting to become possible to make a few bucks and sometimes more out of a Blog. This month this Blog alone will have earned me around $200 dollars and that's pretty good money for doing something that you enjoy. Most hobbies you have to pay for - this one pays me!

4. An experimental Platform
I use this blog as an experimental platform and have picked up many valuable skills that I can use on my other Websites. There is nothing like having a blog and trying to increase its popularity for giving you a good grounding in SEO and Internet Marketing Skills.

5. A place to Advertise
I shamelessly use this Blog to Advertise my other websites - sorry!

6. A place to store all your digital photos
Obviously not this site, however I do have a blog where I just post photos of the kids, its an online photo album that I can share with everyone or anyone.

7. Somewhere I can improve my writing skills
I am really starting to enjoy writing articles and something must be working because when I do a spell check these days there is rarely a mistake - my writing and spelling must be improving all the time.

Well that's all for now - what is a Blog to you? It would be great to hear your perspective.

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Blog Readers - Unfortunately not your Average Joes!

I have come to realise lately that one of the problems with having a blog like this one is that you are reaching out to people that have many similarities to yourself.... this is not unfortunately going to help you make money.

You may wonder what I am on about, however to try and provide an example of this we need to look at one of my other sites, this site earned more than 3 times the amount of Google Money last month as this Blog. Now the funny thing (or not so funny maybe) is that my blog here had a similar amount of hits, and the adverts on my blog are in more obvious places than my other site.

The other site mentioned also needs minimal maintenance, verifying a few adverts that get entered is all that is required, compared to the writing of over 20 articles for this blog.

I believe this is due to the visitors, most of the people that visit this blog are web savvy and know how to find exactly what they want on the net, compared to most of the visitors to the other site that I mentioned are just your average Joe surfer, and unfortunately for average Joe, he/she is less likely to find what they want.

This makes them more likely to click on a Google advert that may be more topical to what they are trying to find than the site they have just clicked into.

Knowing what we know, the challenge is to find a way to monetize our blog according to the audience that we have. One of the ways to do this is to encourage visitors to sign up as referrals in some of the different programs that are out there.

Another alternative is to reach out to other audiences, by placing articles on sites like hubpages aff: you can potentially reach a different profile of reader, one that is maybe more likely to click on your ads.

Also of course you could have a blog that appealed to a less tech savvy audience, therefore increasing the conversion rate to your advertising.

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

How to climb the Technorati Ladder - Link to me and I will do the same for you!

It appears that to rate well on the Technorati website you need to have as many blogs as possible link to your blog.

For example a blog similar to this blog which previously had only 2 blogs linking to it, will be near the 2 million position, however thanks to some reciprocal links this blog which now has 4 or 5 blogs linking to it has moved to around the 750,000 position. My plan is climb this ladder and I need your help (if you have a blog) to do it. This is how I propose to do this.

Firstly please place a link to this blog http://millionnzdollars.blogspot.com on your blog site, then leave me a comment that you have done this, and my promise to you is that within 24 hours as long as you are a reasonable blog site (e.g nothing dodgy please) I will place a reciprocal link on this page. That way you help me and I help you. (disclaimer: obviously if I get an overwhelming response it may take me a little longer - this is a "best effort" promise.)

You can see how my rank has risen (or stayed the same unless you help me!) by clicking on this link...

http://www.technorati.com/search/millionnzdollars.blogspot.com

This will have the result of helping my blog get better traffic, and helping your blog get better traffic, most search engines look at the amount of links out there when working out the page ranking for a site.

This is a simple case of you scratch my back and I will scratch yours, it may also save both of us spending unproductive time surfing other peoples blogs to earn credits to get people that may actually have no interest in the topic of our blogs but are forced to read them!

The link will be permanent and apart from a few minutes to set up, relatively painless. Think long term!

I look forward to adding your links to my site, now off to try and drag in a few visitors........

Day 6 we take a look at Making Money on the Web

There are a number of people out there making a good living from their websites. Here are two of them.

http://www.stevepavlina.com
http://www.problogger.net

Steve Pavlina is American and has a personal development site, thousands of people read his articles every day. The other link is a guy name Darren Rowse, Darren is Australian and makes a good living out of blogging about how to make money about blogging. I have just been reading his site, and he has gone through a great deal to get to this point, there is no quick and easy way it appears.

For my own story now, I started like this.. first of all I came up with the idea for the kind of website where instead of Employers posting their jobs, people looking for work could advertise themselves. This ended up with the birth of the http://www.jobhunters.co.nz website.

Initially I thought that the best way to earn money from this would be to eventually charge employers to be able to contact the applicants. (and this may still happen in the future). I did however place some Google ads on the site, in the hope of earning enough to help pay for the hosting costs.

The surprising thing was that due to the initial popularity of the jobhunters website, the Google ads not only paid for this but also enabled the setup of the http://www.aussiejobhunters.com website and more recently the http://www.eurojobhunters.co.uk website, (this happened along with assistance from my web business partner Mark from Perth, Australia.)

Once those sites were set up I decided to start up the jobhunters blog, this was in an effort to add some value to the jobhunters websites in terms of relevant articles for employment throughout Australia and NZ. This Blog initially doubled the daily visits to the NZ website in about a month. It has since levelled out although continues to help with both visits and search engine recognition of the sites.

Other methods used for advertising the jobhunters websites included advertising them for sale on trademe, classified adverts on smilecity and placing links to the site wherever I could.

There is certainly money to be made from websites, and hopefully eventually this blog which is really about the million dollar experiment in NZ will also start to pay for itself. The key seems to be don't give up, as a lot of people start out trying to do this, but don't stay the distance which could be a couple of years or more.

If you are looking to do something similar yourself my advice is...

Create your website.
Find well priced hosting
Join Google AdSense
Launch your website
Promote, promote and promote.

It will take a lot of time, but hopefully will pay off long term if and only if you are prepared to stick at it, take any knocks on the chin and understand that this is no get rich quick scheme.

Overtime however an income can be earned that can be turned into a passive income eventually.