Blogs For Bucks: I Got 99 Blogs But Male Enhancement Ain't One.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Blogs For Bucks: I Got 99 Blogs But Male Enhancement Ain't One.

«‹›5 »

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

I work for a transportation company here in Detroit on the side, and I've been thinking of setting up a blog which targets keywords for transportation searches which would hopefully result in getting business. I want to make the blog about the city, which is sort of in the shitter in the eye of the media. So I'd like to do Top 5 Italian Restaurants in the metro area, What's going on in the city? (Weekly), "Things to do with the kids." Things like that.. I would obviously be targeting lots of keywords in the post titles and posts, but I think it would be nice to 1) add content to the site and help with page range and 2) maybe generate some revenue from ads (which I honestly hadn't thought of).

Maybe I will give it a go now that I read this thread!

# ¿ Nov 3, 2011 15:48

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 20:51

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

sim posted:

Starting a blog is a great way to generate traffic for another business. Also, if you're going to be highlighting other local businesses like restaurants, you may want to consider approaching them directly about advertising and sponsored posts, once you've got some traffic at least. List type articles like you mentioned are an easy way to target keywords and get eyeballs on your page, so a site that focuses on those has a lot of potential.

Yeah I thought about pairing up with local business too. I'm a doorman (as my day job) the nicest hotel downtown and I consistently send people to the good restaurants so I'm sure they'd be more than willing to help out.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2011 16:06

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Can someone dumb down the way to pick keywords to use in posts? I get the idea of not posting like a spam bot, but what exactly should I look to do in order to maximize traffic to the site? I'm not quite following.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2011 17:55

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Okay, I've got mine all set up and have two posts so far. Can anyone check it out and let me know what what I'm doing right and wrong?

http://blog.athensdetroit.com/

The main goal is just to drive hits to the actual business site, http://athensdetroit.com but if I start gaining traffic and get a little bit of income from ads that would be cool too.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2011 20:30

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

sim posted:

My car blog was chugging along at about 500 hits a day, but with the the official announcement of the car yesterday, traffic has spiked by more than 300%! No new links coming in, no new keywords, just suddenly there were thousands of people searching for the same thing instead of just hundreds. Pretty amazing how owning a certain set of keywords basically gives you a net to catch any huge groups of fish that suddenly come along.

Also updated the OP with more blog links and advice from this thread.

Is it assumed that we are all linking to each other or is there a reason why we shouldn't? I got in on the porn blogs in like 2006 and made some cash and we had a big link circle which was awesome cause it shot our PR from 0 to at least a 3 or 4 which helped getting link backs from other, more established, sites. Maybe times have changed and having a bunch of lower level sites linking to each other hurts instead of helps?

So let me know and I'll get everyone's link on a review blog that I'm working on. If I can get this in the OP that'd be great. -Kitchen Appliance Reviews- This will be my main blog because I can actually generate revenue from it.

Edit: If we do a link circle maybe we can update the OP with anchor text that'd we'd prefer?

Moniker fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Nov 16, 2011

# ¿ Nov 16, 2011 21:07

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

AreYouStillThere posted:

So this may be more obvious than I am making it, but I just started up my blog a week or two ago and I'm still pretty clueless. I only have a few blog entries, but all of a sudden I have all these people who are obviously commenting to get their stuff backlinked. Formulaic responses with a link to their blog in it. At first I was like well at least SOMEBODY is looking at my blog but...well I'm wondering if I should approve these comments or delete them.

They're probably bots, not people.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2011 00:24

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

automatic posted:

Well we are coming up on that time of year again. Update and pimp your links as much as possible over the next 3 months, most affiliate marketers selling retail poo poo do a great deal of their business in the next couple of months. Personally I make something like 50 percent of my income in Nov/Dec/Jan.

This is great advice. I follow this thread like crazy now. One thing I'm having trouble with is finding other sites to trade links with, do guest blogging on, and over all to help promote with. How do you find ways to get your links out there? This question is intended for everyone, not just automatic.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2011 19:38

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

automatic posted:

Honestly, find people in your niche and just email them. It is like cold calling in sales- same concept but a little easier. Search similar terms in google and find people who are succeeding and see if they will trade.

In the porn-blog business people were very arrogant and didn't want to trade very often. Maybe I'll have better luck in this field.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2011 20:27

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

In everyone's experience, how long does it take to actually start seeing some search engine traffic? I've been submitting links like crazy (with out spamming them, obviously) and I'm seeing a little bit of traffic from those, but the only Google traffic that I see is from the spiders. Obviously the site is brand new so I don't expect it, but I'm just curious.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2011 17:51

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

I am showing up on the first page for Yahoo and Bing for my targeted key word. No sign from Google yet. :arghfist:

# ¿ Nov 23, 2011 23:30

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Does anyone use any tools for finding a niche?

It'd be awesome if there was some sort of tool that allowed you to type in a search term and it would show the top ten results (first page of google.) Then scour the web for back links, page rank, etc... Then you'd know what your competition is. I'm sure, being the newbie that I am, that I am not the first person that has thought of this. Does anyone know of a tool like this?

# ¿ Nov 27, 2011 17:26

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Mother fucker that's amazing.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2011 02:58

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Disciple of Pain posted:

I have a homebrew blog that I write as a hobby.

I recently redesigned it and need to step up and keep writing more.

http://www.onegallonhombrew.com

I'm trying to monetize it a bit more and I'd like to put a CPM banner on there. That means I get paid a small amount per impression, right? I'm starting to generate some bigger traffic numbers from stumbledupon and a lot from search engines - this has generated some Amazon affiliate monies (although not enough for them to send me a check yet).

Despite not touching the site since September, it has probably gained 50% more unique views every month. I'm hoping that more content and promotion and link building will take it to the next level and make this an legit small source of income that can help fund my hobby, if nothing else.

Anyone want to share links that doesn't already?

The problem with link sharing is that (from what I've been told) it doesn't really help unless the sites are closely related in content. I've tried trading links with a few guys on here and no one seemed interested. I can't see how having 12 people with 12 incoming and outgoing links could hurt our SERPs but maybe it would.

The best bet is to offer to guest post on other, more related blogs in exchange for a link plugging your blog at the bottom. Another good idea is write a solid 550 word article and submit it to ezine articles, and a ton of other article databases. A list of them located here After you submit those, work on answering some questions on Yahoo answers. You can't add anchor text, but it's still back links to your site.

I've had my site up for less than a month and I'm finally starting to show up on Google. I am on the third page for my targeted keyword right now and slowly working my way up. It's great. It's a ton of work, but it's paying off.

Unrelated to your post:
Also I am in the process of buying my first dog, so I decided to document it with a website. I targeted a search that doesn't have much competition and ended up buying Top Ten Smartest Dogs.com I think this one is better than the Kitchen Appliance blog because it's actually something that I like writing about and it's almost unlimited content because dogs are hard work!

# ¿ Dec 3, 2011 06:38

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Disciple of Pain posted:

I would have never guessed that answering questions on Yahoo would be that great of an idea, but I can totally see how it could be beneficial now that I think about it. Those things are always on the front page of google (I just personally avoid them when trying to find info).

Yeah, when you answer just make sure to give some quality answers. You have to get to level two in order to be able to put a link into the post, so if you answer some questions and make sure they're quality, they'll almost always get voted best answer and that will really help you get to level two very quickly. Don't just do a huge back link campaign on Yahoo though.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2011 15:06

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

VideoTapir posted:

Is it better to use a domain name that closely matches or contains your likely keywords, or something clever that people might actually remember?

Keep in mind I don't know poo poo but here's my opinion.

The domain name that matches a specific phrase, such as "best-cable-tv-alternative.com" with very little SEO will always rank higher than a site with much more SEO and a lot more back links. However, they're sometimes harder to remember. I bought Top Ten Smartest Dogs.com because it is a phrase that gets a lot of searches and very little competition. I figured I'd rather rank higher for that phrase than fight for some other phrase with equally as many results. However, it's harder to remember. That's the downside.

My plan, however, is to rely on social networking to keep people reading, keep them informed, and to keep myself relevant. Instead of buying followers and likes, I'll seek out a targeted group of people and hopefully at least keep a click or two here and there before I get a lot of pages indexed.

But yeah, to answer your question, I'd say whatever is more important to you. Personally, I'd rather have a .com TLD that matches a keyword that I'm targeting than something easier to remember.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2011 17:26

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

VideoTapir posted:

I notice all his examples of more abstract domains are basically web services, not single-topic blogs.

What he doesn't really explain is whether you really see much of a boost in SEO with one type versus the other. However, one of the commenters pointed out that low-content gateway pages are still ranking highly.

He explains it well in an abstract pie-in-the-sky fantasy sense without consideration for whether you're talking about a blog or information page, or web service. But I think I did get the answer I was looking for (keywords in the domain...maybe if I get traffic later I'll go with a different clever domain and set up a "we've moved" gateway at the old URL), so thanks.

There's a reason why most niche finding software also searches for domain names available to purchase. They rank way higher. They might not rank number one, but they'll be in the top of the first page almost always. Do a few common searches. "Natural Dog Food," "viagra samples" (A lot of sites rank higher than viagra.com), "how to tie a tie," etc. They rank way higher. I think your plan is a decent one. You can just do a 301 redirect when you get traffic.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2011 05:08

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

I made my first conversion. :cool:

Someone clicked through and bought an AM/FM/CD Player Clock Radio. I've never advertised one of those so it was luck, but hey, money is money!

# ¿ Dec 12, 2011 18:10

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Is there anyone that would be willing take a few minutes and look over my site and possibly tell me why it hasn't been indexed by Yahoo/Bing and also tell me anything else I can do in order help my SEO?

# ¿ Dec 12, 2011 22:33

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Second sale. :cool:

I'm at a smooth two bucks! haha

# ¿ Dec 16, 2011 15:37

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Sperg Victorious posted:

For AdSense and Wordpress sites, what is the popular WP plugin to manage the ads?

I'd invest in the Heatmap theme. It's absolutely amazing for SEO and ad placement.

Edit: In terms of free, SEO Ultimate is good.

Moniker fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Dec 16, 2011

# ¿ Dec 16, 2011 16:23

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Yes! Third day in a row, third conversion in a row! Sold a Kindle Fire! Woohoo!!

# ¿ Dec 17, 2011 15:39

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

beadgc posted:

I'm very interested in starting a blog and I'm sure I will post a whole bunch of questions further down the road but for now I'm just researching SEO.
When using the Google Keyword Tool and viewing the results, what does competition imply? The key words and phrases I'm thinking about using are marked as "Low" and "Medium", this is good I presume, but what does it actually mean? Is it a sign of how difficult it would be to get to the top spot for the search terms you want to target?

I aim for high searches, low competition and a high rate per click.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2011 22:22

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

rocinante posted:

If you use a theme like Heatmap, making a few modifications might be helpful. Just read this article that suggests some recommended modifications for 100k blueprint users, and it seems like any ad optimized theme could suffer from similar issues. http://www.potpiegirl.com/2011/08/100k-blueprint-warning-read-this/

I removed my footer from Heatmap and I went up a full page on Google. I'm not sure if that's a coincidence or not but it happened literally 24 hours after I did it.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2011 16:08

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

So I had some issue with my robots.txt and Bing/Yahoo. I got that fixed and now my rank on Google dropped dramatically. I had a page that had finally crept to a ranking of 10/11, bouncing between the first and second page and now it's not even ranked at all! I had to resubmit my sitemap and everything in Webmaster tools in order to get my issue fixed, could that be it? How depressing!

Edit: It's like Google is indexing it for the first time. There is no preview available and no meta information. It's literally just the site name "Top Ten Smartest Dogs" and under it shows a link to the page. Yesterday it was "Top Ten Smartest Dogs," meta text, then a link, and it had a preview picture. Has this happened to anyone else?

Moniker fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Dec 21, 2011

# ¿ Dec 21, 2011 15:29

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Gadarene posted:

I'm considering buying the Heatmap theme, was this difficult to do? Is there anything in their ToS saying the link has to remain?

Literally every option is customizable in the options. It's the best.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2011 13:40

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

I'm ranking 4 and 5 for my targeted keyword on my dog site. :confused:

Lets see if this continues/brings me some traffic!

Edit: Ever since this happened I've noticed weird stuff in my stats. Should I change my robots.txt to block out unwanted bots?

My unique visits per day:

My robot information:

Is there something funky going on or is this normal? I highly doubt that I had 2200 visitors overnight?

Moniker fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Dec 27, 2011

# ¿ Dec 27, 2011 05:30

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

beadgc posted:

Is there anything stopping me from setting up a site with some affiliate links, a store or similiar for an american company like Amazon, even though I live in Sweden? Does it matter where the site is hosted or where I registered the domain?

Is there a suitable guide anywhere for somebody who has never bought a domain, paid for hosting or used wordpress before? How do I set it all up? I'm not completely lost when it comes to computers but I'm not sure where I'm supposed to begin here, but I'm really anxious to get going with my first blog.

I'm eventually looking at starting a second blog, what type of hosting should I look into if I want to maintain two blogs sometime in the not to distant future?

Edit: Added a few questions

This is all in the OP, really.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2011 18:37

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Is there anything against me starting a lot of blogs in the same type of niche? For example, I have my site Top Ten Smartest Dogs, what's to stop me from starting 10 or 20 different blogs that have to do with dog training, dog food, dog breeds, dog toys, etc... then linking them all to one another? Do people do this?

# ¿ Dec 31, 2011 17:33

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Bodhi Tea posted:

People do this, yes.

The only problem that I'm aware of is if you interlink them in an obvious way, Google might penalize you.

If you manage to get a few of your blogs on the first page for the keyword, you'll be set.

Hmm. That's something to think about doing for sure. I'm ranking two different pages on the first page for 1 keyword and I'm working on driving the others up as well. Traffic Travis ftw! What do you think an "Obvious way" would be?

# ¿ Dec 31, 2011 17:58

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Doghouse posted:

So I was looking at this thread here in SA mart about hosting. Is there any reason to buy more than the cheapest, most basic plan if I want to just have a simple blog?

I would go with the cheapest that allows add on domains do you can run multiple blogs from the same hosting until one takes off.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2012 00:13

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

So a long time ago I was banned from adsense (My account, not site.) and I deserved it. I was clicking ads like a dummy. I was 15 though. I recently signed up under my girlfriend's name, her parent's address, using a proxy, and a different computer. I hope this is good enough for Google. I guess it's my only shot, so what does it matter anyway? I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of money because Chitika and Adbrite pay HORRIBLY.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2012 21:01

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

cartooncart posted:

What's Traffic Travis like? I'm pretty sold on getting the free version so far.

Its cool. I think the full version is available for free online (not warez, it's directly from Traffic Travis)

# ¿ Jan 5, 2012 11:35

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Would anyone be willing to look at http://toptensmartestdogs.com and see if they see any type of ad placement that violates the TOS for Adsense? I think I only have three per page, if that, but are affiliate links added into that mix? Or are those not included?

# ¿ Jan 5, 2012 23:44

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

FCKGW posted:

Google's TOS states no more than 3 Adsense ad banners/boxes and 3 Adsense link units. In fact, Google's adsense javascript won't even allow more than 3 to be shown. You can have as many other affiliates on your page as you want, however having too many may affect your Google rankings. Your site is fine, you just don't want the number of ads to outweigh the amount of content.

Your Adsense ad colors don't match though, you may want to fix that.

Yeah I'm fixing that right now. Jumping between computers is so annoying. I created them quickly and did not do a good job. I'll update the colors and hope for the best. I'm nervous that I'm gonna make money then get banned.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2012 00:11

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

FCKGW posted:

Most people getting banned for adsense get banned for click fraud, not for simple TOS violations. I wouldn't stress too much about it.

I'm just stressed about being banned 10 years ago and now changing ownership of my site to my girlfriend. I don't know if that's against their TOS some how.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2012 00:47

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

cartooncart posted:

If you were banned a few years ago, can't you just ask for their forgiveness?

That way you don't have to stress over it, because they might tell you if your websites are good or not.

I did. They said no. They never let anyone come back from invalid click activity. It sucks because I was just young and immature then.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2012 06:02

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

So after monetizing with Adsense and getting it all squared away with style and such, I'm pulling an average of a dollar a day. It might seem silly but I was making a penny a day with other advertisers.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2012 16:11

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Question,

If I am looking for a phrase in a domain but it's not taken can I buy a partial url and make the page name the ending? For example, "How to play basketball" is my phrase. However, howtoplaybasketball.com/net/info/org are taken, and so are all variations of it. Can I do something like https://www.howtoplay.com/basketball and will it help?

I found a niche that has 6,900 searches monthly and a $6.97CPC value! But obviously every domain is taken! I'm trying to find a way to do get it in the url!

# ¿ Jan 12, 2012 01:51

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Raskolnikov2089 posted:

Is there any benefit to registering multiple URLs for a given set of keywords, then redirecting the traffic to your blog?

That is, say my niche blog url is bestgardengnomes.com because I see 2000 global searches/mo with a CPC of 1.87

But I also see other good keyword groups with high CPC and global searches like "top 10 garden gnomes" and "what garden gnome should I buy"

Aside from limiting the competition, is there any advantage to registering top10gardengnomes.com, then redirecting the traffic to bestgardengnomes.com.

I think Google will not give you any benefit. It will act as if those are the same domain?

The best bet would be to create the other two, do some SEO, write some original content and maybe embed some links to the other two sites. This way they're related, and can help each other out? If you optimize correctly, you could have all three sites on the first page, and get most of the traffic. Who cares what site it's to?

# ¿ Jan 12, 2012 18:59

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 20:51

Moniker: Mar 16, 2004

Nozz-A-La posted:

Is there any negative to using a hyphenated domain name? I think I found a pretty good niche but the main phrase I'm looking to focus on has already been taken by a generic spam site.

My kitchen appliance site ranks second or third for the phrase kitchen appliance reviews and it has hyphens in it

# ¿ Jan 16, 2012 19:17

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Blogs For Bucks: I Got 99 Blogs But Male Enhancement Ain't One.

«‹›5 »