My Newbie Blog (noob) | How to Create a Blog http://mynewbieblog.com How to Create a Blog Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:59:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 en hourly 1 MyNewbieBloghttp://feedburner.google.com Can I Make Money Online? http://mynewbieblog.com/can-i-make-money-online/ http://mynewbieblog.com/can-i-make-money-online/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:59:41 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=509 Can I make money online? This is the question that is asked everyday by people who are looking for ways to make extra money online or who are hoping to quit their jobs and work from home.   And the answer is (drum roll please) yes and no.  Not the answer you were looking for?  Sorry.  Some people will be able to make enough money online to actually have it be there full time job.  Some people will be able to make enough money online to supplement their existing income.  Some people will lose money by trying every get rich quick scheme that promises lots of income with no work.  The people who make money online have to work really hard at it.  It takes hours of often monotonous effort to develop workable Online Marketing Strategies.

makemoneyonline

Most people will throw in the towel way before they ever get to the spot where they can start making money.  There are always stories of people who seem to go from rags-to-riches overnight, but the reality is that most of us will put in a lot of time before we begin to see how we can even begin to make money online.  Having said all that, there is money to be made online.  You can make money online by using Google Adsesne.  You can make money online by joining affiliate programs and earning commissions from leads.  You might make money online by selling articles you have written.  After spending some time checking out various websites and blogs online you will probably find some other ways to make money online.

If you are ever going to make money online, I suggest that you start with a blog.  A good blog is still probably the best foundation for making money online.  There are a lot of articles about how to create a blog on this site.  Take some time to read through them and see if this is something that you would like to do.  Oh, by the way, don’t quit your day job just yet!

]]> http://mynewbieblog.com/can-i-make-money-online/feed/ How to Create a Blog - Part 15 http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-15/ http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-15/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 03:43:40 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=501 Our goal at My Newbie Blog has been and will continue to be to help people answer the “How to Create a Blog” question.  As part of the process of helping you learn how to create a blog we include various techniques and programs that can help you attract more readers and make more money.  With that in mind we want to to introduce you to a great program called AWeber.  AWeber does an amazing job with email marketing.  It is also a great tool for developing and creating a list of potential customers that you can market products to in the future.  It can help you get people to add their names to your list and ultimately your list can make you money as you market ideas and products that you recommend to your readers.  Here at My Newbie Blog we have made arrangements so that you take a free test drive of the AWeber system.  Fill in the form below to get your free test drive started.  You will be happy that you did!

“The Money Is In The List“


AWeber proves it to thousands of businesses every day.

Learn how email marketing software
can get you more sales, too.

]]> http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-15/feed/ How to Create a Blog - Part 14 http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-14/ http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-14/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:55:56 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=496 My Newbie Blog is here not only to help you figure out how to create a blog, but also how to make some money on the Internet.  One of the best ways I have seen to do that is a system that is called “The Mini Site Formula“.  This system encourages the development of a lot of quick and easy websites that generate a small amount of money every day.  When you get a lot of these websites going you can start making some significant income.  Joel Peterson developed this process and this is an excerpt of what he says about it on his website:

You see when most people try to make money on the internet, they go for the home-run. They try to make one single website earn $100 or $1,000 dollars a day.

I’ve been down that road and it’s darn near impossible to make it work.

So instead of swinging for the fences…

I Just Bunt!

I don’t even try to launch a website capable of earning thousands of dollars a day. All I want is a website that earns a consistent $3 a day.

Best of all, I’ve created a system that allows me to launch one of these money-making “mini-sites” in just…

30 Minutes!

Now think about this for a minute:

$3 a day certainly doesn’t sound like much, but because it only takes about 30 minutes to set up these mini-sites, the profit potential really starts to add up.

See for yourself:

Each Website you build = $3 / day…

1 Website = $3 / Day

What if you had 100 Websites?

100 Websites = $300 / Day

What if you had 1,000 Websites?

1,000 Websites =

If you would like to read all about the “The Mini Site Formula“  just click on the link or on the picture below.  I encourage you to check it out for yourself.  It might be the right solution for you to develop a successful blogging business.

]]> http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-14/feed/ How to Create a Blog - Part 13 http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-13/ http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-13/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:54:36 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=493 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!

]]> http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-13/feed/ How to Create a Blog - Part 12 http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-12/ http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-12/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:00:25 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=489 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!

]]> http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-12/feed/ Blog Content Experiment - Part 1 http://mynewbieblog.com/blog-content-experiment-part-1/ http://mynewbieblog.com/blog-content-experiment-part-1/#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:08:53 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=485 As we continue to help people try and answer the how to create a blog question we are going to run a little experiment on the importance of content.  The three big factors in SEO are time, content and links.  There is an ongoing discussion about the importance of content with regards to search engine results.  We have devised an experiment to see just how important content is here on My Newbie Blog.  We started two new blogs today.  They were started within one hour of each other.  They are identical in every way except that they were started in two different domains as sub-domain sites.  The only difference between the two sites is that the domain names in the URL address is different.  For the purpose of this experiment we will refer to one site as “Plus” and one site as “Advantage”.

Here is how the experiment will work.  We will keep the sites identical in both the time and links part of the equation.  The only difference between the two will be that one of the sites will get more content than the other.  We will then track the search engines to see which site shows up first and which site gets the best search engine result.  If the site with more content does better, our assumption will be that content is King.  If the site that gets less content does better, we will probably assume that content is not as important as the other factors.

Let’s say for the record that our pre-experiment belief is that the site with more content should do much better than the site with less content.  However, we are open to whatever result might come.  We will begin the process of getting some (identical) links pointed at the sites and adding some initial content to each of the sites.  We will be writing regular updates to let you know how the experiment is going in the weeks and months ahead.

]]> http://mynewbieblog.com/blog-content-experiment-part-1/feed/ How to Create a Blog - Part 11 http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-11/ http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-11/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:20:38 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=483 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.

]]> http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-11/feed/ How to Create a Blog - Part 10 http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-10/ http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-10/#comments Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:02:52 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=481 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!

]]> http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-10/feed/ How to Create a Blog - Part 9 http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-9/ http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-9/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:22:28 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=478 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.

]]> http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-9/feed/ How to Create a Blog - Part 8 http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-8/ http://mynewbieblog.com/how-to-create-a-blog-part-8/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:24:15 +0000 stephenlawes http://mynewbieblog.com/?p=475 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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