So, if you are interested in buying this site (which includes everything – domain, design, content, subscribers etc.) from me, drop a comment here or use the contact form on my site. Price? You decide.

I’ve setup 2 domains for 2 offers I am going to be trying out. The 2 offers I found via TrafficSynergy, and no, they are not insurance or cash loans! Just remember, some offers are already so overcrowded, that trying to get your foot into the door and make any money off them can be a painful and very expensive process. Rather don’t waste your time!

Once I have the sites and up and running, I’ll go into a little more detail on the actual setup. Oh, and if I make ANY money, I’ll definitely let you know!

So simple, yet so clever! It uses a combination of context matching and the category you choose for your blog when you sign up.

Have a look at the bottom of my sidebar and you will see it in action. Sign up to Blogrush and start earning credits to get your links displayed on these widgets all over the web!

I came across a nifty adsense integrated, seo-ifyed WordPress theme over at Dosh Dosh called Prosense. It is not the prettiest theme you will find, but it is clean and neat.

Traffic tip: Creating something simple and useful, like a free wordpress theme is a sure-fire way of gaining tons of inbound links, traffic and RSS readers.

Keyword tools

Why use them? If you are starting a niche blog like I will be soon, you need to find out how much SE traffic you possibly can tap into. Why SE traffic you ask? This is the money making traffic. Regular blog and RSS readers form part of your community that grows your site, but its the SE traffic who buy your affiliated products and click on your ads.

Here are 3 free keyword research tools I use:

Overture

Who hasn’t heard of Overture!? It normally is the first stop for most SEO people. It lists related searches that include your keyword and the estimated number of times that keyword was searched on in the previous month.

Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery from Trellian was created to compete with Overture. They only list the top 100 keywords but it is simple and easy to use. They offer a paid for service that will give you more features, if that is something you are after.

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is a huge seller in the SEO market and his free keyword suggestion tool is top notch. It cross references a couple of keyword tools as well as offering a host more options. I suggest trying out his keyword tool before heading over to Overture or Keyword Discovery.

There is one more tool that might be of use especially if you wanting to get into the Adwords game as well as research keywords and that is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It doesn’t give you any figures of how many searches are made, but what it does do is show you a small graph on the months Search Volume as well as how much Adwords Competition there is per keyword.

Content for the blog will in the beginning most probably come from online resources but the most important factor I think is the amount of offline information that is not readily available but as I said, if the brand of the blog is used correctly, this information can “come out” – so to speak – and could be brought online. This is the mini goldmine I’m hoping to leverage. <evil laugh>

It will definitely take some work from my part to get the blog up and running with the initial content as well as setting up the channels that will make it possible for me to leverage some of the juicy offline content.

3 questions for you

• How much money have you spent on the launch (say in the 1st 3 months) of your money making blogs?
• What keyword tools do you use to find out if this niche is worth getting involved in?
• I know this has been done before, but would you be interested in me writing about my entire process from start to launch of this blog? (That’s if I go ahead with it.)

What MFA sites do is buy Google Adwords and offer those tiny 0.01c and 0.02c clicks we hate seeing. They then take this Search Engine traffic that you have worked so hard to get and convert those 1c clicks into 50c, $1 and upwards clicks!

So how do you get rid of these ads?

Create an account at Ads Black List. Ads Black List is an awesome service that will give you a list of all those nasty domains that use MFA and LCPC ads.

AdsBlackList.com is a unique project designed to enable you to dramatically reduce the amount of MFA (made for ads) and LCPC (low cost per click) sites which appear through the use of PPC systems such as Google Adsense™, Yahoo Publisher Network™ and Chitika eMiniMalls™

You supply it with your website and a list of keywords. Use keywords that you rank highly in the SERPS for. The service is free and it works 100% for me, although there are more benefits for members that wish to pay for the service.

Filtering your Adsense ads

Next you need to copy the list you have just generated at Ads Black List and implement it in your adsense account. Login to your Adsense account, click on Adsense Setup > Competitive Adsense Filter and paste that list.

And that’s it! Let me know if you notice an increase in earnings over the next few days and weeks.

I’m not going to go on about backlinks, but that is one of the many reasons why you should get your site listed on some of the more popular sites. For South African’s, there are 2 sites that have become an almost must for you to sign up – amatomu and afrigator.

amatomu and afrigator sitting in a tree, C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y

Both amatomu and afrigator use your RSS feed and publish your latest posts on their sites. They also offer stats on your blog along with the ability for people to interact with your blog by voting for your blog and posts. Once again this builds that ever important blog personality. There is also a very active community that revolves around these 2 services with also ties in with our South African verson of Reddit – Muti. So sign up and join in the South African blogosphere!

MyBlogLog

Another service that has seen a massive following over the last couple of months is MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is built around every site having a community of readers that visit your site. Along with these communities, you can add readers that interact with your site as contacts and friends and build a mini community around yourself!

Have a look at my profile on MyBlogLog – JBagley. You can see I have a couple of contacts that I have added, a few admirers – people that have added me as a contact but I have not returned the favour (yet!) and messages on the right that people have left me. I do not have a massive community, but it grows steadily every day, and this way more and more people get to know me and the blogs I run. I have also met some South African bloggers on MyBlogLog that i would never have met elsewhere!

Blogcatalog

Blogcatalog is very similar to MyBlogLog in that it builds communities around you and your sites. I have tended to use MyBlogLog a lot more because they have more members than Blogcatalog, but Blogcatalog does have a very nice interface and I have seen an increase of people using it of late, and I can’t see why you can’t use both! Visit my Blogcatalog – JBagley

So spend a couple of minutes registering your sites and adding the widgets to your blog. Then join in the conversation by leaving messages on blogs that use these services and you will be surprised how people will react to you joining in. You will make more friends, create a community of loyal readers and as I said previously, bring traffic and backlinks to your site!

It really is simple to get setup. Simply head on over to Feedburner.com and enter your blog’s URL. Feedburner then gives your RSS feed a unique feed address which you can choose to publish as is, or by using a wordpress plugin, can redirect your original feed to your newly created Feedburner feed.

Feedburner services

Firstly you are able to track the number of RSS subscribers your feed has. From that you can analyze your feed and find out which RSS reader your subscribers are using. One of the most interesting stats that have surfaced over the last couple of months (thanks to Feedburner) is that Google Reader is now the biggest and most popular RSS reader!

Not only can you analyze your stats, you are able to offer your readers a number of ways to subscribe to your feed. When a user clicks on a link to your feed, they are taken to a page that allows them to subscribe to their feed in their preferred RSS reader. Feedburner also offers your readers that don’t use RSS to subscribe to your feed by email. This really is an awesome feature to offer on your blog.

Feed optimization, also called FeedFlare is the another awesome service Feedburner offers. You can now add options to the bottom of each post in your RSS feed that gives your subscribers the option of emailing, tagging and sharing your content. You can also have a message added to each of your posts, if you feel it is necessary. (Some bloggers like to add a disclaimer to their posts, just to remind people that their content is copyrighted. )

Feedburner WordPress plugin

If you are running WordPress and Feedburner you have to add the Feedburner plugin by Steve Smith to your blog. What it does it redirects your current feed to your new Feedburner feed so that you can track all your subscribers, and not just your new subscribers.

RSS feed tips

Once you have burnt your feeds with Feedburner and hooked up the Feedburner plugin, I suggest that all your links to your feed should not be the Feedburner RSS link, but your blogs default RSS link. For example, my RSS feed points to http://www.problogging.co.za/feed/ – which then redirects to the Feedburner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/probloggingcoza) using the plugin. It’s just looks like you are publishing your own feeds, and with all those tools Feedburner offers, makes you look like you have added a host of functionality yourself!

So go ahead and subscribe to my feed, by clicking on the world’s biggest RSS button below. If you prefer email, enter your email address, and every time I post something new here, you will receive my content, fresh to your inbox.

BuzzWord #3

OPML

A file containing a list of RSS URLs. Often used for sharing feeds amongst users.

Some stats you might find interesting: (According to Technorati)

• Currently tracking 66.6 million blogs
• There are over 175 000 new blogs formed every day
• Bloggers update their blogs to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day – 18 a second!

So why use Technorati?

It’s a great place to find blogs on topics you are interested in. You can also find out how popular some blogs are by the amount of blogs that are linking to them. In terms of search, I don’t really see the point of using Technorati over search engines like Google and Yahoo, as blogs usually rank very well in the SERP‘s anyway. One very nifty feature is being able to see the amount of “buzz” certain search terms are getting on the blogosphere. The graph below is for the search term Britney Spears. As you can see, the last 3 days has generated a lot of blog posts about Britney. The reason being is that she shaved her hair off!

There is one other reason why people use Technorati, and that is for vanity reasons! All the top bloggers love to see how popular their blogs are by viewing Technorati’s top 100 popular blogs. This ranking can also be used for advertising purposes, as some ad networks look at these stats when determining the price of adverts.

So there you have it. Technorati. Not the most useful Web 2.0 site, but definitely has some purpose. While you at it, why not favourite this blog? Drop a comment if you have, and I’ll return the favour.

BuzzWord #2

SERP’s

Search Engine Results Pages – the page of results you get from entering a search term into a search engine.
In terms of SEO you aim to be the number 1 result on this page.