Archives for September 2009

How To Make Money With A Simple Blog Business

September 10, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Well, after all the boring stuff – thinking of a topic, researching, setting up a simple blog and promoting it – it is now time to start earning some money out of your new simple blog business!

As said previously, the strategy is to set up a blog and optimise it so that when people search for your topic, they find you. You think make money from Google Adsense when they visit your blog. But what is Adsense? Basically, Adsense is a tool that allows you to place advertisements on your blog. Google uses fancy software to make sure that the advertisements are relevant to your blog. For example, if your blog is about golf, your readers will see golf related adverts. How do you earn? Whenever someone clicks on any adsense advertisement, you get paid. Therefore, the more people who click on your adsense ads, the more you get paid. Nice, eh? Thousands of people earn their money this way.

Integrating adsense into your blogger blog is very very easy. Here’s some excellent reading for beginners:

For best results, I recommend that you set up your adsense “ad blocks” in these three places:

  • The top of your blog, just below the title
  • The sidebar
  • The footer. This works best if you have set your homepage to show only one blog post

By doing the above, you’ll maximise the chances of people clicking on one of your adsense adverts.

How do you get your money?
You are able to check your earnings at any time in your Google Adsense Account. Google will only pay you when you reach a certain minimum limit ($100). It may certainly take you over a month to reach that limit but if you follow the steps I have outlined here and in the other posts of this series, you are guaranteed to get more and more visitors and see your earnings rise and rise. Google will then send you a cheque or transfer the funds electronically.

How much can you earn?
Depending on the topic you are writing about, you’ll make anything from a few (US) pennies to one or two dollars every time someone clicks on your Adsense ads. This can quickly build up if your site has a good number of visitors. The more you blog, the better it gets!

So that’s it – a simple step by step guide to starting a simple blog business. Any questions? You have no excuse – get your own simple blog business.

PS
You can use KeyWordSpy to estimate how much each click pays for the topic you are writing about. The amount that you will earn is approximately half the amount that Keywordspy estimates the click to be worth.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , ,

How To Promote Your Simple Blog Business

September 7, 2009 by 4 Comments

If you’ve been following the series so far, we’ve managed to have a good thought about what we want to blog about. We then did a little research and finally set up nice new blogs. Before we start making money from our blogs, we need to let the world know about them – or else the will die, painfully.

If you recall, the simple blog business strategy revolves around getting visitors from our blog from search engines. Therefore, when telling the world about our blogs, the best way is by high quality backlinks. If done right, this will give you a high ranking on the search engine results pages and you will start getting visitors. Ideally, you should be spending two or three hours a week doing this. Here are just a few ways to get you started:

Yahoo Answers – This is a pretty simple and effective approach. Just head over to Yahoo answers and answer related open questions, putting your blog as the “resource”. The trick is to make your answers very high quality. It takes only a few minutes to post an answer but if you do this 2 to three times a week, you’ll have lots of great backlinks from an authority site.

Comment On Other Blogs – Most blogs let you comment on each post on the blog. Just find related and interesting blogs and post your comments on the articles you read. Make sure you actually read the posts and leave a meaningful well written comment. Most comments left on blogs will not really help you rank better in the search engines but they will popularise your blog and connect you with other bloggers.

Squidoo – Squidoo is another effective way of promoting your blog. Set up a squidoo lens and put up a bit of quality content – you can steal this from your site. Make sure you link back to your own site. Also, optimise your squidoo address to be relevant to your blog. For example, get something like: squidoo.com/yourblogname

Your Other Blogs And Sites – Place links to your new blog from other websites or blogs that you own/run. If it is your first blog, create another free blog on WordPress.com and link to yourself from there.

Submit articles to article directories: I’d say the three main directories are EzineArticles, GoArticles and SearchWarp. The articles that you submit should be keyword optimised (just like your blog posts) and should be unique. Make sure you link to your own blog – the author Bio area is perfect for this!

Submit your blog to social aggregation sites like Digg, Netscape, Stumbleupon, etc. Even if your articles don’t get a high rank on these sites, the backlinks you get are very helpful!

Directories – Submit your blog to as many online directories as possible. One particular directory, DMoz, is of note – make sure you submit there. It is hard to get listed (your blog needs to be high quality) but a link from Dmoz is very valuable.

There are probably 100s of ways to promote your blog but the above are some of the most simple and popular. Keep doing this effectively and in 30 days or so you will start seeing consistent and growing numbers of people visiting your blog from search engines. Here are 52 other ways to promote your blog.

PS
To track how many visitors you get and where they come from, use a simple and free tracking tool like StatCounter.

Ok, that’s it for today. Next, we’ll get to the part where we start making money! Do not miss out. šŸ™‚

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With:

More Online Jobs

September 7, 2009 by Leave a Comment

More Freelance Jobs

Project Manager – PSD to eCommerce is looking for a talented project manager to handle all the client communication and project management for the company. You will be required to be somewhat knowledgeable with how the PSD to HTML slicing industry works, and how the pricing works. It is a bonus if you understand the eCommerce industry to (Magento, Shopify, wp-ecommerce), but it is not required, you must be willing to learn though.

Mobile phone programmer – Butterfly Works is interested to find someone who can program and test a game to work on mobile phones in East Africa. We will design the game and send you the specs, it needs to work on all phones with a color screen from different manufacturers. We wish to find someone with experience in programming who also knows the mobile phone usage in East Africa specifically Kenya. The game is about peace keeping and is aimed at young people. If you are interested please contact us with your bio and previous experience, thanks!

Copywriter wanted – Seeking a freelance copywriter for a small web site job. Please send url, examples and your rates to apply or contact me for further info. Preference for those based in Australia.

Content Writer – Need a writer to produce 5-10 fairly extensive articles / blog posts (1,500-2,000 words) on the topic of birthday parties for kids. There may also be ongoing blog work available, but the initial work is for 5-10 posts. We have a template structure for the posts that you’ll be able to follow. Need to be able to do extensive research – link to quality / relevant content. And potentially do some social media marketing as well.

Blogger needed – DigMyDrive is a new Website that allows members to ā€˜give their takeā€™ on topics in specific driving categories. We are looking for bloggers to take on each category, posting 3-5 blogs per week on newsworthy topics or topics relevant to category members.

Experienced Flash Developer – Digital Aisle, the leader in interactive touch screen applications, is seeking an experienced Flash Developer.

Interface design – We are looking to build a music sharing website and need an excellent designer. We only require the HTML / CSS / PSD deliverable. You must love design, and be obsessed by perfection in design. Please send a long copies of your previous work and expected pay.

Freelance web designer and developer – We are a new social venture (not for profit) looking for a designer and web developer to develop an on-line marketplace.

Weekly newsletter article writer – Generation X Finance is an established personal finance blog that targets readers in the 25-45 age demographic. Topics generally include investing, saving for retirement, banking, taxes, and tips on saving money. In addition to the regular blog posts Generation X Finance has an email newsletter that goes out weekly. Each newsletter will generally feature a short 250-500 word original article covering some relevant topic. In addition to the short article there are links to three of the most recent blog posts with a brief introduction.

Finally, Some Hot Freelance Jobs


Need help?
How to get an online job.
How to avoid online scams.

This post is a weekly feature – we post a list of online, work-from-anywhere, jobs every single week. Be sure not to miss the next list of jobs. Subscribe to Like Chapaa today, or sign up to receive free email updates.

Filed Under: Online Jobs Tagged With: , , , , ,

Kenya’s N-Soko Vs Craigslist

September 5, 2009 by 2 Comments

N-SokoSo this week saw the arrival of Craiglist to Kenya. I’ve waited for Craiglist to come home for years and now it’s finally here. For those who aren’t familiar with Craigslist, it is one of my all time favorite websites. Craigslist is basically an online classifieds site. Its claim to fame is that its (mostly) free model has largely destroyed the paid classifieds market in the US and elsewhere. It is also run very admirably. Can you imagine one of the biggest web brands with a total employee count of <20 (last time I checked)? Paul Graham, in How to Start a Startup, mentions Craigslist in an interesting way, “I advised startups never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution. Another way to fly low is to give users more power. Let users do what they want. If you donā€™t and a competitor does, youā€™re in troubleā€¦. The ultimate way to be nice to users is to give them something for free that competitors charge for. During the 90s a lot of people probably thought weā€™d have some working system for micropayments by now. In fact things have gone in the other direction. The most successful sites are the ones that figure out new ways to give stuff away for free. Craigslist has largely destroyed the classified ad sites of the 90s…”

So, the mighty Craigslist landed in town…just when the local giant, the mighty Nation Media Group, was launching its own online classifieds service, N-Soko. Now, I did not get a chance to have a look at N-Soko (because it was pulled down – shame!!) but Moses Kemibaro had a look and writes, “N-Soko, …even though it has the backing of East Africaā€™s largest media business, is on the backfoot. Whilst N-Soko is a great initiative in terms of creating a local online classifieds brand, the whole execution of the web site is lacking. It feels disjointed from the homepage as you open up separate browser windows for each category of classifieds. It quite simply does not feel as simple, user-friendly or as well put together as the spartan looking Kenya CraigsList.”

Now, currently, the N-Soko site shows “Site Under construction”. From Moses Kemibaro’s post, it is fair to assume that the N-Soko site had been up when he had a look at it. So, what happened that it was suddenly pulled down and slapped an “under construction” sign? And, Moses mentioned that some ads were already live on the N-Soko site. Pray, what happened to those? I don’t know, readers, this is just not good. I’m all for local creativity and enterprise but you got to do it right.

In my mind, NMG just put something together and launched it in the tried and tested Kenyan style of “good enough”, ugh. And it would have worked too – N-Soko would be heavily pushed by the NMG and would be successful, no doubt. But Craiglist came along. I’d bet that part (or all) of the reason that the NMG site is now “under construction” is the entry of Craigslist into the equation. This marks the first contact in what I hope will be a hot battle of two great sites. The wars for online Kenya are just getting started. šŸ˜€

We’re living in interesting internet times.

Filed Under: Internet Culture Tagged With: , , ,

How To Start A Simple Blog Business

September 4, 2009 by 2 Comments

Okay so we’ve thought about the topic we want to blog about and even did some keyword research. It’s now time to create our simple blog business. The easiest place to create a blog to make money from is www.blogger.com. So go on over there and create your blog in five minutes. Once you have filled in your information and accepted their terms of service, you get to the point where you get to pick the name of your blog. Nice, eh? You’re almost there.

You’re going to base the name of your new blog on the keyword that you selected. Remember? For example, I’d choose “classic cars” so I would want my blog’s name to be:

classiccars.blogspot.com
or
classic-cars.blogspot.com

Those are probably already taken, though. What to do? Simple, let’s add a word infront to make it unique:

flashyclassiccars.blogspot.com
goodclassiccars.blogspot.com
best-classic-cars.blogspot.com

I hope you see that the possibilities are endless. Just pick a name and go on. Don’t get stuck choosing! It doesn’t really matter much whether your name has dashes (-) or not.

Ayayai, we have a spanking new blog. What shall we do first? Write our first blog post, of course! This is the part where most people fail. It is really very easy but it requires consistent work and focus. You need to spend between 2 to 3 hours per week doing this. Is that too much? Yes, it is a little bit of work but it WILL pay off. Just do it and stick with it. If you can consistently write optimised posts for your blog you willl attract the attention of Google and other search engines and you will get visitors to your blog. You will then be able to make money using adsense. (We’ll discuss how in a bit, no worries).

First things first, what type of things do you write on your blog? Remember the keywords? Specifically, the keyword list, like this one:

Google Keyword Tool

Well, you’re going to write a letter two to three times a week related directly to one of those keywords. You can fake your way to a great blog by pretending you’re writing a letter to a friend. Easy? That’s all that blog is, in a nutshell. Assuming you picked a topic that you just love, is writing letters about it that hard? Each letter you write is going to be about one of the keywords that you found. So, for my cars example, I’ll have to write about old cars, used cars, sports cars, etc etc. Get it?

For each of your blog postings:

  1. Should be 100% valuable and interesting to anyone who may read it.
  2. The title should be the exact key word that you are writing about.
  3. Should be between 350 to 500 words long and should contain your exact keywords repeated three to four times.
  4. Should have the exact keywords in the first 50 and last 50 words.

That’s it! Go forth and start blogging šŸ™‚

If you write 3 or 4 ‘letters’ a week you will start getting visitors to your blog and you will then be able to start earning money from your blog. But you need to start getting those visitors. That’s the subject of the next article in this series. Make sure you don’t miss that!

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: ,

Ever Thought Of Building An Online Community? [Interview]

September 3, 2009 by 2 Comments

For the readers that donā€™t know, our interviewee today, Francis, is the founder of The Young Professionals Google Group, a java guru, and a successful internet entrepreneur. He sells e-books as well as advertisements on his Google group. Bwana Francis is also the chairman of the League of Young Professionals – a club in which I am a member.

Q. You’re quite an achiever, tell us about you
I am a software developer by profession and a social entrepreneur by choice. My passion is to see how we can tap the incredible power of web 2.0 technologies (specifically on communication and collaboration) to create great communities and then harness their power and influence to create capacity to solve problems, produce ideas and valued products. There are various tools and applications that individuals, groups, organizations and businesses use/ can use among them message boards, blogs, websites and web portals, mailing lists, news sites, SMS solutions, social sites like twitter and facebook etc

YP Google group is just one of such tool we are using to create a community of passionate young professionals who have a shared purpose of developing themselves and building a better Kenya.

To illustrate the enormous power of such technologies and the online communities around them, one needs to look at the role they played in the election of President Barrack Obama. Voters were reminded via SMS to go vote, could follow the updates of their candidate on Twitter & Facebook, huge amount of campaign money raised online as well as having vibrant discussion of issues on blogs, message boards and mailing lists. We do also have fortune 500 companies who have companiesā€™ weblogs for their staff to blog about the personal life and their companiesā€™ products. The ascendance of free and open source software can also be attributed to this.

Q. How did it start?
It started when I was doing my BSC in computer science. I become passionate about programming by seeing it is possible to create applications which can be used to solve a real problem. Once I got into web technologies, through curiosity and experimentation I looked at the available tools that could be used to achieve the goal, and a Google group and facebook group were the entry points. With time, I and the team I work with, shall be churning out a more integrated platform of all the technology to build great web portal

Q. What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
Most of the challenges were intrinsic (within), and I mean the prejudices and bias that the environment taught me as I grew up. Mostly everyone believes after campus you should be employed and not to experiment with ideas and risk. To overcome such I had to unlearn what I have been taught so that I could absorb new ideas and perceptions.

Secondly, IT is a field that requires specialized technical expertise some of which is rarely taught in schools. For example, to build my programming skills I had to proactively learn the java programming language for over four years through self study.

Q. What are the challenges of being an entrepreneur in Kenya?
There are two sets of challenges, one uniquely specific to internet industry and secondly the challenges of any business startup or initiative.

With regard to 1st, the % of Kenyans who have access and use internet regularly is around 8.6% of the total population as compared to countries like USA who have above 46% usage. So a large percentage of the population doesnā€™t access any product, service or platform that is internet based.

With regard to the 2nd, among the top challenges I can pinpoint that cuts across all industries in Kenyan context are firstly getting funds to finance your venture, secondly fierce competition from established and large global companies and thirdly building a successful business requires a large investment of your time and needs patience and commitment

Q. What was critical to your success?
Itā€™s hard to single out one or a few since I believe itā€™s a whole set of skills which I could call the winning combination, but they generally fall in 3 domains.

  1. My ability and the passion to learn. Generally I buy & read at least 2 books (mostly on business & management) a month.
  2. Technical expertise. My programming skills are very good and I never cease to try to become even more qualified. I am always sharpening my saw, learning new skills and craft I need to get something done, being more competent either in programming or any other roles
  3. Emotional Intelligence. Mastered myself, can manage myself and my relationship with others. Can easily understand my emotions and the behavior of others.

All the three orchestrated together, I can say they are what is critical to my success.

Q. What about the competition and marketing, do you need to advertise, print flyers participate to conferences or is it mostly word of mouth?
Mostly through word of mouth and email marketing.

Q. Do you think that in order to ā€œmake it bigā€ online you have to live in a Western country? Or does Kenya offer more or less the same opportunities?
Definitely that is a myth. Making money online is possible since I am making quite a lumpsome. You just need to have the right product, well priced and packaged and target the right audience.

Q. Where do you see yourself and your business (es) in the next 5 years?
I believe we shall have built the required competences and products to provide communication & collaboration solutions, be it to political parties, large organizations, community groups, NGOs, Small and Medium Enterprises and well as having flagship enterprise applications for mass usage.

Q. If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
Not really, same direction but different routes. With experience I have come to know which works and which doesnā€™t work. Definitely I would avoid the latter, while only keeping the former.

Q. What advice do you have for internet business entrepreneurs in Kenya?
I will quote Charlotte Bunch who once said ā€œWe do not need, and indeed never will have all the answers before we act…… It is often through taking action that we can discover some of them.” Lets not be afraid to try and fail, itā€™s through trying, failing, having false head starts that we can only make great reaps ahead.

That’s all for today readers. If you’d like to hear more of Francis, please join the YP Google group and The League of Young Professionals. You can also reach him at the following:

Email – francis.mwangi.chege[at]yahoo.com
Alt – francis.mwangi.chege[at]gmail.com
Phone +254 721 663 208
On Twitter – https://twitter.com/francismwangi
On Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/profile.php#/profile.php?id=1579110764&ref=profile

PS Francis has a very good deal on a package of 800+ ebooks.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: ,

Keyword Research For A Simple Blog Business

September 2, 2009 by 1 Comment

We’ve been thinking about topics that we could be interested in, right? Now it is time to put up a blog around one topic that you are interested in. The basic idea is not to put up just any blog; it is to put up a niche blog to serve an already existing ‘market’. So, first things first, we need to find a market, or a group of people who would be interested in reading your blog.

How can we do this? There are probably many ways but we shall focus on one. A simple way to find out if people are interested in what you write is to use Google (or any search engine). If people are searching for the stuff you want to write about, then people are interested! How do you find out if people are searching for what you want to blog about? Simple, take your topic (e.g. cars) and run it through a free keyword tracking tool such as Google keyword tool or Wordtracker keyword tool. You will find out how many people search for your topic and, more importantly, you will get a list of related topics. For example, this is what you get when you search for cars:

Google Keyword Tool

Let’s assume that you want to start a blog about cars. As you can see above, cars is a very popular topic with more than 151,000,000 searches per month so you’re on to something good. The idea is to find a topic that has a good number of people searching for it. Once you find such a topic, you then set up a blog about that topic and work hard to get your blog in the search results that are displayed when people search for your topic. If your site is displayed on the front page of Google when people search for, say cars, then people will click and visit your site. If many people search for your topic, you get many visitors. In the case of cars, you get millions of visitors šŸ™‚

Sounds simple, eh? The basic idea is simple but the execution requires hard work, patience and commitment.

Now, getting your site to be listed in the first results page of Google when people search for a word like cars or money, etc is very difficult. Why is it difficult? Because these words are so lucrative that bigger better financed sites are after them and it will be nearly impossible to beat them in the short term. It is always better to try and go a niche deeper. Perhaps ‘sports cars’ or ‘classic cars’. These phrases still get searched a lot but are easier to tackle. Always try and find a niche.

Don’t worry if you cannot find a “good” topic. The important thing is to be able to write several blog entries about it and that your general topic (e.g. cars) has a lot of related topics (e.g. classic cars, old cars, vintage cars, etc). These ‘topics’ are called keywords and you’re going to be writing blog entries on each one of them (more on this later) so make sure there are a lot of them available! Don’t get too caught up in choosing a topic. Pick one and move on; so that you can start earning sooner.

Next we’ll build up our blog and start writing. Make sure you don’t miss that!

Filed Under: Blogging, Make Money Tagged With: ,