Make Money Blogging. A Beginners Story
The Beginners Guide to Making Money. Part One:
In The Beginning Was…The Sandbox.
Today we have a discussion between two bloggers: the New Blogger (NB) who wants to make money from the internet, and the SEO Guru (SEO), who wants to help him. Let’s follow their conversation:
SEO: Hi NB, how’r you doing?
NB: Could be better…
SEO: Oh? Wassup?
NB: Well, I set up a new Wordpress blog a few weeks ago. I decided what I wanted to blog about. You know? What would make money online. I checked out the keywords and long tail keywords for my chosen niche, following a great article on Keyword Sniping. And while I was there, I grabbed one of Court’s great SEO Wordpress Themes and set it up, making sure my meta tags were correct, of course.
SEO: Sounds cool…
NB: Then I made 20 unique posts, all relevant to my main keyword and all containing different long tails also. I made sure I didn’t put too many keywords in each post. I used synonyms too. Then I back-dated half of the posts and forward dated a few, so that they would seem like natural posts. This is a real blog, after all. Then I added the blog to Google Webmaster Tools, installed Google Analytics (and MyBlogLog to look like a ‘proper blogger’).
SEO: Yeah, you did good there too…
NB: But I need backlinks, right? So, next I rewrote some of my posts completely and submitted them to Ezine Articles and Go Articles, complete with keyword links to my main page and the page the article was targetting.
Whew! Was I beat after all that!
SEO: Yeah man. You did well…
NB: Sort Of…
SEO: Ok…
NB: My blog was indexed quite quickly and I found two of my posts on Google’s page 4 for their keywords, and my stats showed me I was getting hits for other keywords too, so I decided it was time to make money with Google Adsense. I found out the best places to put adsense, to Increase Adsense CTR, stuck it on, and sat back and waited for ‘the magic’ to happen.
SEO: Ah… I see…
NB: Then, a couple of days later, I searched again using my keywords… and couldn’t find my blog anywhere! It’s still in Google’s index, but it’s not in Google Search at all! And when I check my stats, I’m getting no more organic searches. What do I do now?
SEO: You’ve been sandboxed.
NB: Sandboxed? WTF is that?
SEO: Here’s a great post about the Google Sandbox. Take a read, and scroll down to the comments while you’re there, you’ll find even more good advice.
NB: Great article! Seems I could be in the sandbox for weeks, months or even years! Guess I monetised too quickly; set off a few ‘warning shots’ to Google with my optimised blog and keyword targettng too.
So what can I do to put this right? The article said ‘wait’, and build authority while I am doing so. Any suggestions?
SEO: You need to get yourself out there and socialize man. Show your blog is an actual blog written by a real blogger, someone who knows what they’re talking about and who is not a spammer. And while you’re in the sandbox, build some good quality backlinks. But make them look natural.
NB: Okay, I’ll get going on that right now. I’ll make some blog comments. I’ll Stumble a few people and del.icio.us them too. But that won’t get me any quality backlinks, will it? How do I go about that?
SEO: Hmmm… this could take some time…
To be continued…
@ Zania: Interesting chat and I love the way you laid it all out. but it’s all a bit like my favorite TV show… it’s never enough. You got me interested and then BAM! I get the ol’ to be continued…
What a tease. Anyway, look forward to round two… and one hell of a way to make a keyword rich post loaded with anchors and link backs… awesome job… you should rank pretty well for this post… I’ll throw a Stumble in to help.
Nice one…I always wondered about this sandbox I hear about. I don’t know much about it, I’ll go read that post you linked to though..
thanks.
@PB, thanks (and for the Stumble)
I like a good story, especially when it’s in serial form.
Just hope it has a happy ending…
@JK, thanks.
And do check out Yan’s post (and blog).
It’s definitely going somewhere good.
Hey Zania
Never before I read an article in the form of conversation and as PB said it, you laid it out well. It’s such a novel idea and this kind of article is really enjoyable to read, beside it sort of force (should I use the word ‘force’?) your readers to follow the conversation since the majority of us tend to scan the post for convenience sake.
I’m glad you thought of me when you wrote this article and it’s so true that many beginners are clueless about this ‘Sandbox’ thing and I was not an exception. It was only when PB coined the term to me I then woke up from that dreadful dream.
I really look forward to the next session hopefully with a happy ending. You rock, Zania.
Yan
PS: Ah ha, I wouldn’t miss your response anymore as I could see that you have that option of notifying me to the followup response to my comment. I tend to forget which sites I have leave my comments when I do my daily blog commenting and this option certainly helps me.
Hi Yan,
Glad you liked the post. I thought I would take a novel approach for a change
Seriously though, I’m glad you found it readable. There’s no denying that this information is all on the internet already, but as you say, most people scan (and often don’t take it all in). I thought that this might make a change for them.
Yes, I thought of you when I wrote this post because your article on the Google Sandbox is really good, and as you discovered, so many people do not understand it (or have even heard of it). So I hope a few more of them take a look.
And I got the subscribe to comments plugin on your advice, when you commented here last time and suggested I install it
Thanks
Gosh you did remember what I said. Thank you for that and really appreciate your compliment on the article. In fact, it is the most popular post to date. I conclude that the majority of the bloggers fall into the trap at one time or another. It’s the question of whether they are aware of it or otherwise.
I guess the only viable option when in sandbox is to do lots of blog commenting especially on dofollow sites to gain more authority in the eye of search engines and speaking from my own experience, that’s the quickest solution to get out of it.
Yan
PS: Now I know the author of this blog is a very opinionated and beautiful woman. I wasn’t so sure about your gender before. I’m so sorry as all a while I thought you were of the opposite sex and zania is just another pseudo..
Yan,
that is exactly what I am going to write about next… well, sort of anyhow…
As to my gender. Yes, I’m female… and opinionated, lol!
Easy mistake to make though. So many bloggers hide their gender with a pseudonym (especially in adult strangely enough…).
Thanks for the compliment by the way.
I’m a feminist, but I’m never averse to the odd bit of flattery
Hmm me NB to a T - except that I never added Adsense and still got sandboxed, bought a pre-owned domain - got sandboxed - and I can’t go out and comment on blogs because some a*hole askimeted me presuambly because I kw anchored by user name -I look forward to the continuing saga on this one!
Hi Lissie,
The good news is I don’t think you are akismeted any more. You just had to wait for me to turn up here and moderate the comment (I do with all of them). You weren’t in my spam box, so maybe things are not quite so bad
Do you know, sometimes it seems like we can’t do anything right in big g’s eyes. I have a couple of blogs which have been in the sandbox for months for no reason at all (not a hint of monetisation to be seen, good, unique content, all the ’social stuff’ done etc)…there again, they are on blogger…
As for the continuing saga, I’m writing it now. Well I’m trying to anyway, my pc keeps overheating - perhaps its another of those curses we get from trying to make money online
July 27th, 2008 at 1:48 am
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July 27th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
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