As you know, I follow Splork’s blog Lost Ball in High Weeds. Splork calls himself ‘a frustrated internet marketer’ and I can understand why. He does make money on the net, but he sometimes goes through a lot to make it. Nevertheless, as I said in my post about Splork, you can gain an awful lot from reading about his successes and the projects he considers to be not so successful. You can also gain a lot of further information by reading the comments on his posts from guys who do well as internet marketers and offer their advice.

Recently Splork has become pretty hacked off with making so many sites, lenses and hubpages, with relatively limited results. In his frustration with the whole ‘make money online’ business, he began to make blogs at Wordpress.com - the free blogging platform. This particular site does not allow affiliate links or links to your commercial activities, but Splork said that it was quite relaxing not to have to think too much about making money from his posts and just write about things he was interested in for a change.

I can certainly agree with that. I enjoy writing, but sometimes having to concentrate on SEO and keywords which will bring in the hits and the cash can feel like real hard work, especially when you have a host of niche blogs to produce on a regular basis. And if you don’t produce them, the money could well stop.

One answer I have found is to build single page static sites with loads of written, good keyword content as well as pictures and long tail keyword text links to sponsor sites - but this is for my adult money making activities. It is a new project I have been creating in the last week (and still working out all the details) and, although it has produced a couple of decent sales so far, it will be a while before I can relax and let these sites stay on the net on their own, without further work. I hope to have hundreds of them, specific niche interlinked.

However, although these sites look promising and should make me good money, building them is very time consuming. Each one on its own is quick to build, but there will be so many of them. And while I am making them, my upkeep of all my blogs which do bring in the bucks is falling behind. But I cannot do everything at once.

And what do I do to relax between site building? I go online and write my more mainstream blogs like this one. For me, that is a form of stress release from trying to make a living online. Sad, but true nevertheless.

It was whilst I was reading Splork’s latest post, Keyword Benefits of Wordpress.com, about how making blogs on Wordpress.com can help your money making projects (if you are careful) that it really hit home that I could be doing this myself.

I already have a blog on Wordpress.com. I set it up about 18 months ago to keep in touch with my family in the UK after I moved to Spain. The blog isn’t optimised for SEO and the title and post titles are crap in keyword terms. When I began writing it, I had no idea about making money online and was pretty dense about the whole issue of categories, tags, html, and everything else. The blog was purely to tell ‘our story’ in ways my family would understand. In the beginning, half the time I didn’t bother to tag a post, or chose decent categories. I just wrote what I thought would interest my family and anyone else living as an expat. I didn’t even bother to check the blog’s page rank and, in the beginning, I didn’t even know that page rank existed.

Today that blog still has less than 30 posts. It is page rank 4. It could probably be higher if I posted more often and had backlinks, but hell, it’s my personal blog, not a money making niche. When I checked the stats the other day I found that the blog has had over 25,000 hits. Not much compared to online entrepreneurs it’s true, but for a blog which I thought only a few people were reading, it’s a bit of an eye opener.

What were all these people searching for? Things like sofas, cheap air fares, buses in Spain, cheap water heaters and property renovations. All those things I had written about in passing, because those were the things I was dealing with at the time. And on my ‘best day ever’, I had nearly 3,500 hits on some pictures I had posted of our village fete! I ‘googled’ the title I had used on that post (a pure chance strike at a good keyword) and found out it was still on Big G’s first page.

And I have had all those hits going to waste. Not a single link went from that blog to my money making sites because the links weren’t posted there (which isn’t surprising as most of them are adult), while at the same time I was giving links away to Spanish forums and info sites which were probably raking in the cash from my visitors who clicked on their adsense and affiiliate links.

Not any more. I have just stuck a link in my sidebar to one of my mainstream commerical sites (which is actually to do with Spain anyway) and I will make a few more posts and see if I can make a link to another couple of sites in alternate posts (must be careful here though).

And I think that the next time I feel like setting up a blog just to write in, I am going to use Wordpress.com too. But this time I am going to set it up properly and check out my stats and work on the long tail keywords and then start making the odd link to my blogs which do help me make a living on the net. For someone who likes writing but gets fed up with the day to day grind of trying to make money online, it seems like a good thing to do. You may not be able to post affiliate links there, but why not link to your commercial blogs and sites - a few can’t hurt can they? After all, most people link to sites designed purely to make money without even realising they are doing it. I used to, and I’m sure I can’t be the only one.

Thanks for pointing this out to us Splork!

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