Moving Along

How to Create a Blog - Part 13

April 23rd, 2009 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

Hope you are all doing well with your blogs as we continue to explore how to create a blog together on this site.  I wanted to let you know about a pretty cool addition you can make to your site that is a great way to promote your own products or to advertise your affiliate products, etc.  Let’s talk about incorporating peel away ads onto your site.

A peel away ad is an excellent way to get people’s attention.  It is less obtrusive than a pop-up ad that won’t go away.  If I am accosted by a pop up, or pop over ad on a website, I usually leave the site.  I don’t like being forced to click on the box to close it.  A peel away ad, however, sits nicely up in one of the corners of your site and doesn’t show itself unless the visitors to your site roll their mouse over it.  Then, when the mouse leaves, the peel away goes away.  I have a working peel in the top right corner of My Newbie Blog so you can see how it looks.  I am recommending “Peel Away Ads” to you for this addition to your blogs.

Click on any of the peel away links on this site and you can go to the information page to see what the product is all about. This product can open up a lot of opportunities for you to be able to monetize your blog. If you haven’t already, you should join shareasale.com, where you can set up affilaite account and earn cash by selling products that relate to your blog’s content. This is an excellent way to market your blog and start making some money!

How to Create a Blog - Part 12

March 6th, 2009 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

My Newbie Blog is visited every day by people with questions about how to create a blog.  I was thinking back about my own blogging journey and how it has changed over time.  I have spent most of my life working with computers.   My first exposure to a computer was in 1972 at a terminal that allowed you to play a game of sorts where you would type in where what room you thought something was in and the computer would give you clues to help find whatever you were looking for. This terminal was more like a typewriter than anything we would call a computer today.  IN 1979 I went to college and took a class in Fortran.  Fortran was a computer language that worked by using a type pad to make a a deck of cards and then the cards were fed into the main computer.  It was a very time consuming process.  In the early 80’s I had a Radio Shack Color Computer and I could go on Compuserve which was a big deal at the time.

I eventually ended up selling computers and can remember the first IBM’s coming out with the two floppy disk drives.

Seagate introduced a 20 MB Hard Disk and I remember thinking that no one could ever use 20 MB of Hard Disk space.  And then came Windows and you needed at least 40 MB of Hard Disk Space.  And on and on ……………….

What does all that have to do with creating a blog?  I guess I am amazed at where things are now and I am wondering what they will look like 10 or 20 years from now.  I would encourage all of you newbies to keep your eyes open to look for ways to utilize the Internet and be ready to go with the changes that come along.  I am sure we haven’t seen anything yet!

How to Create a Blog - Part 11

January 26th, 2009 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

I was hoping to pass along a little Newbie Blog encouragement and a little wisdom to any of you newbies who find your way to this site or for those of you who have questions about how to create a blog.  The wisdom is this, it takes a lot of time and work to get your blog developed and to the place where it starts generating traffic.  If you are in a hurry or if you think that you are going to be making piles of money quickly, you need to think again.   Any site that promises you easy quick money is not telling you the truth.  It takes time, hard work, and some sort of strategy to make your blog a success.  It is also likely that once you have been blogging for a while you will be changing and updating your strategy.

My encouragement is to stick with it.  There are millions of blogs on the Internet that started with a flourish and then were just abandoned.   If you can stick with it, over time your blog will start to have much better results.  You will also begin to see opportunities to monetize your site over time.  Adsesne is a good thing, but there are not  many people who are really making a living with Adsense.  There are some, but for most publishers it might eventually provide enough income to cover the cost of running a site.  More people are making money by reselling and by offering some type of specialized service.  Both of these options are easier to accomplish once your own blog is well established.

So, continue to blog and learn and don’t get discouraged.  For most of you it will take at least a year before you start to see your blogs taking shape and generating any real measurable traffic.  Take this time to write good content, develop links, and get a good keyword strategy.  You may want to get a few more blogs on line to start acquiring age for projects in the future.  Give it time and watch what happens.

How to Create a Blog - Part 10

January 11th, 2009 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

My Newbie Blog is coming up on it’s first anniversary.  We have been writing articles on how to create a blog since January 26 of 2008.  The site was set up to help people walk through creating a blog step by step.  Along the way we discuss some basic SEO strategies and some of the different ways to try and make money on the Internet.  We have specifically targeted the keywords “how to create a blog” to drive traffic to this site.  Currently, we show up in position 10 or 11 on Yahoo and in position 45 on Google.  The Yahoo return generates some traffic to the site, and we also generate a fairly steady stream of traffic by encouraging people on some of our other sites to take advantage of the information provided on this site.

When this blog was started we were using version 2.2 of WordPress.  Now we are up to 2.7.  This means that some of the screen shots will be different, but the basic information is still primarily the same.  The site will still be able to asnwer your how to create a blog questions.

The site has never down well with Adsense.  I have put ads on the site at different times, but the click percentage is always bad and I have to take the ads back down.  That happens on certain sites, usually because the type of people who are visiting the site aren’t interested in the ads.

We are still hoping to get the site to become a page 1 Google return for the how to create a blog keywords.  We are page 1 for Newbie Blog on Google, but that doesn’t generate much traffic.  Most sites do better after they have been around for about a year.  We are looking forward to seeing what happens to the site in 2009.  We lalso ook forward to what the year holds and if we can help you with your blog please let us know!

How to Create a Blog - Part 9

December 3rd, 2008 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

As we continue to write articles on how to create a blog we want to encourage you about the process of the Google sandbox. We wrote some time ago about a site that we developed called Hurricane Tracking Sites. The Hurricane Tracking site had started out with a flourish, with a page 1 Google result and hundreds of hits in its first few days of existence. It had hung around on page 1 for about six weeks and then just as suddenly as it arrived, it disappeared from the search engines. This is what the Google sandbox does. Last week, the site came back and landed back on page 1 again. I am watching the site to see if it is going to settle in and in the meantime I will post a few articles to the site to help it stay established. Since hurricane season is over for the year there has been zero traffic to the site, but this will change when the season starts again in June. The encouragement is that even though some of your sites may get sand boxed, they will eventually come back. The advantage to developing more than one blog is that even if one of your sites is not doing well, you can just wait out the sandbox by developing your other sites. Hurricane Tracking Sites will most likely end up on Blogs for Sale and will have a lot of potential for the right blogger.

How to Create a Blog - Part 8

November 3rd, 2008 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

We use WordPress for our how to create a blog site called My Newbie Blog.  WordPress is a wonderful platform for a blog.  It is simple to use and it has a large user base which helps keep the software fresh and innovative.  WordPress also has a lot of plugins available which can allow you to customize your blog in many creative ways.

One of the few drawbacks to using WordPress comes out of its innovation.  There are a lot of updates.  When WordPress is developing something new it may come through as a lot of mini-updates.  Each time this happens you need to update your site.  At least you should.  This is a problem if you have a lot of blogs.  If you don’t stay up with the updates you leave your site vulnerable to hackers.

One helpful tool to have is a plugin called WordPress Upgrade.  This plugin makes the process very simple and will save you some time.  The latest versions of WordPress have also made it easier to keep your plugins current.  You can usually get the latest update for a plugin now by just clicking on the update button on your plugin page.

Once a month I have a Site Maintenace day.  I visit all my sites and check on the staus of the WordPress version and see if any of the plugins need to be updated.  I also check the links out and make sure they are current and operating.  If I haven’t posted to the site recently, I will write an article of two or three hundred words on an appropriate topic.  I would encourage you to include a site maintenace day in to your regualr blogging routine.  In case you hadn’t realized it, today is site maintenance day for me.  This is an example of an article I post on my blogs on site maintenenace day.

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