Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
More News About Bloghology: Articles in the First Issue
Well, this week was a hectic one. I had all of my articles “written” and interviews sent out for the upcoming issue. But that was only half the job. The other half I finished about two days before the deadline in pure “procrastinate until the very end to see if you can still pull it off” fashion. Half of the writing was editing and proofreading and fleshing out post size anecdotes into true articles.
Testing the 0-60 of a New Blog
I have been trying to start another blog lately. At least, that’s what I am telling myself.
It’s a clean slate right now and that’s a good place to start. I have started many sites but it is hard to make the first move. Is that the right amount of categories? Did I cover everything? Will I have to bolt something on down the road to make sure the site’s complete?
You see, I don’t want new blogs to turn into the mess of categories and tags that this one turned into. It’s fine for this blog. I cover everything here and I’m not too worried about it being perfect. But I know how restructuring a blog after it already has content can go. I did it once. I do not want to try it again.
I have also been trying to build a smart system to interlink blogs. Profit-ware was going to be the first test case. But I think now, I will begin the blog to get the traffic going. The system I am building needs to plug in seamlessly anyway, whether or not the blog has content.
The new blog is going to be about Ebay. A lot of the links pointing to the domain fit. I used to make money on Ebay. I wrote shareware for Ebay sellers once. I still sell products for my day job there. I have even spotted a few niches lately that would not require all the shipping and tracking. This, for those Ebay sellers who just had the bottom drop out of an income stream when Ebay banned downloadable products.
What I saw could make a person about $200 for about an hour’s worth of work. Easy work. So that has me excited to get started. And I’m sure I’ll find other niches there. I always do.
I stopped doing anything on Ebay for a while because it was eventually just easier to be an affiliate marketer. Downloads on Ebay sell for pennies. Shipping products out takes too much time and energy compared to writing a blog post or article and making commission from an affiliate sale.
But I guess now it is my mission to pull some less time intensive niches out of Ebay and write some posts. That will keep me on task and coming back. Plus who knows, I can use the extra cash also, from my test cases. I might even need to test reselling liquidated products, because we need some new electronics. One thing I learned from my Ebay Powerseller past was never to pay retail for anything.
I have some Private Label Rights articles on Ebay also. Now I think I will be just leaving them in queue for the days that I do not want to post my own content. I will use then to flesh out the boring parts. Finding a way to make money = fun. Telling someone step by step how to sign up = boring.
So now it is time to head down that road and see where it goes. There is no time like the present. It will be a case study. Now the domain gets about 5 visitors a day and has a Pagerank of 4. I want to see how fast, with my limited time, I can hit the 200 visitor a day range .The plan is still a little vague, but I can deal with that. Nothing is every perfect. And there is no better way to test it than in the wild.
Citizenbay Pays Every Day People for News
Citizenbay to pay local news contributors
Yes, but no one is going to get really rich doing it. One to five dollars for a story that makes it to the top ten. Lunch money? But news by popular vote. Good or bad. Remember what Steven Colbert can cause on Wikipedia, knowledge by popular vote.
Then again you don’t get a news conglomerate’s hidden agenda. Instead you get the lowest common denominator. Have you ever met the “average person.” I have. They’re scary.
A List of Top Blog Lists
I cover a lot of topics and read a lot of blogs. Up until recently, I had them all in one folder in my feed reader. Then I broke them up into folders. That took some thought and until then, I really had no idea what all my interests are. After that two hour organizing session, a lot of things became more clearer. I saw what I liked listed by topic. After that, I was able to create a few filters for each of my blogs. Now, if I’m in commenting mode, I just go down the river of articles in each filter. I have only headlines showing and open all the links in my browser. It is training me on writing better headlines and opening the link in the browser means I don’t have to retype everything when I go to comment. Read more... (383 words, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)