Early on, there was a time when I had no aspirations for making money with my blog.  However, I did have a thirst to find more traffic, visitors, relationships, and community for my blog.  My aspirations quickly changed as I searched for more knowledge on how to improve my blog.  During the search for information on how to get better results I remember coming across several blogs about blogging and making money online including Darren Rowse’s Problogger and Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneur’s Journey (those are the first two I remember).

After reading through those two blogs and many others I decided that blogging could be a significant source of income.  I devoured heaps of content and even though I never wrote it down I always had several money goals floating around in my head.

My Money Goals Timeline

In late 2007 I decided to monetize my blog with some simple goals in mind.  Those goals were:

Goal #1 – Make enough money to buy a cup of coffee (from Starbucks) – make your first $5 – GOAL ACHIEVED 1/15/2008

• I made my first pennies on October 27th, 2007 with Google AdSense.  I made 8 cents just 4 days after installing AdSense code on my blog.  I was well on my way!
• By the end of 2007 I racked up a whopping $1.48 total through Google AdSense and in addition started using some Amazon Associate Affiliate links, sold my first book,  received a commission of 41 cents from Amazon (I wouldn’t receive another Amazon commission until April 2008), and finishing 2007 with a grand total of $1.89.
• On Januray 14th, 2008 I had my first $1+ day with Google AdSense and on January 15th I’d achieve my goal by accumulating $5.36.  However, Google does not make a payment to you until you clear $100.  I believe Amazon makes a payment after you clear $10

Goal #2 – Make your first $100 – GOAL ACHIEVED 4/22/2008

• It wasn’t long after I made enough money for my first cup of coffee that I would clear the $100 mark.  In mid February 2008 I wrote two landmark articles (for me) that would cause a landslide of traffic.  The first article (with the help of StumbleUpon) pushed me from an average of 100-200 page views a day to over 7000 page views in one day and trickled down over the next couple weeks.  At the end of February, I wrote a second article that found the front page of Fark.com.  The first day on Fark I received over 5000 page views and the second day over 25,000!  Throughout the rest of March my total daily page views fluctuated between 1K and 5K.  March was the first month I cleared $100 in Google AdSense earnings and I’d receive my first Google AdSense check on April 22nd, 2008 for $168.52

Goal #3 - Make enough money in a month to pay for gas ~$150 - GOAL ACHIEVED! 9/31/2009

• I cleared the $100 mark per month in February 2008.  However, there would be a drop off in my blogging efforts for a good part of 2008.  I slowed on my social marketing efforts and my content production was not as regular.  My statistics for the first time started to decrease rather than increase.  By June 2008 I rededicated myself and started producing more content however I concentrated more on SEO and less on social marketing.  My numbers started increasing and by January 2009 my AdSense total for the month was regularly over $100.
• In early September 2009 I decided to rethink my Google AdSense placement and reviewed my entire blog.  I noticed I was not utilizing AdSense on all my pages and received a decent amount of traffic on category pages and tag pages.  I added AdSense to these pages made a few other changes including adding a link unit and removing AdSense from the sidebar and the end of articles.   All these changes resulted in my first month over $150.  My September 2009 monthly total was $158.51.

Goal #4 - Make enough money in a month to make car payments ~$500 – NOT YET ACHIEVED est. 4/30/2010

As of today (2/16/2010) my monthly average is around $250.  My traffic is steadily increasing, but at the current rate I’d have to double my traffic to clear the $500.  I’m pretty sure I can do this much quicker with current traffic levels and I’m just under monetizing my blog.  I think a few changes might get me over the hump without an increase in traffic. Here are a few things I plan on doing this month.

• Add the Ninja Affiliate Plugin to my blog – This will add affiliate links to my blog based on keywords.
• Revisit Commission Junction for better affiliate programs then Amazon Affiliates.
• Try adding Chitika Advertisements to the blog.
• Optimize the placement of Google AdSense on my blog
• Update my theme with Advertising as a key element of the theme

Goal #5 – Make enough money in a month to make mortgage payments ~$2000 – NOT YET ACHIEVED est. 6/30/2010

This a more long term goal, but I already have an idea on how I will achieve this number.

• The idea of a product has been bouncing around my head for quite sometime now.  If I can summon the will power to launch a product by the beginning of June 2010 I believe I can clear the $2000 mark with the help of a good product launch.  As time goes on I’ll share my ideas, experiences, and results.

Goal #6 – Make enough money in a month to quit your day job ~$5,000 – NOT YET ACHIEVED est. 12/31/2010

A second long term goal that I have some ideas about.

• While multiple product launches this year are not out of the question I have some ideas on marketing my product to bring in more customers using a hybrid online/offline approach.  As time goes on I’ll expand upon these ideas.

Focus On Your Blogging Goals

So that’s it!  That’s my money timeline.  It’s been bouncing around in my head since the first day I monetized my site and today is the first day I laid it all down on paper (or typed it to the monitor).  Hopefully this helps you set your own money goals.  As I’ve mentioned before in my February 2010 goal article, it’s a good idea to break your goals down into smaller chunks and that is exactly what I did by creating an initial more achievable goal of $5 and finishing with the enormous end goal of $5K a month.  I also set deadlines and charted a few short ideas on how I might be able to achieve my unfinished goals.

Well, if you read through my money timeline then you can see that I’m half way there and hopefully I’ve accomplished Goal #6 by the end of 2010.

How about you?  Do you have money goals?  Have you set yourself a timeline?

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If anyone is still following this blog I apologize for not getting posts done last week.  As you all know I’m very behind on my thirty day challenge.   This past week has been tough with several fires at work and trying to finish off a contract project that I’ve been working on for the past month.

I’ll do my best to try and get back on track, but next week I’ll be on vacation in Alaska for the next 8 days.  I’m going to try and get some work done, but I’m not too sure if our cabin will have internet.

If you don’t hear from me for the next week then you’ll know I don’t have internet.  I’ll do my best to catch some halibut and salmon and avoid the grizzlies.  I’ll speak to everyone real soon!

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Today we’re going to setup a hub page to get more backlinks ad off-page authority to our blog.

Anytime you create new content piece of content you should let the world know by using social bookmarking.

Day 12 is approximately ~23 minutes

How To Create A Hubpages Site

(video length ~21 minutes)

Hubpages is another web 2.0 platform that we can use to link to our WordPress Direct blog. You need to be careful with Hubpages and err on the side of conservative. Caro recommends you only use one backlink in your first Hubpage.

A hubpage is a web page about a particular topic. They recommend 3 links at the most in your hubpage.

Go to HubPages and create a new hubpages account if you don’t already have one.

1. At the Edit Hub page the first thing we did was add an RSS feed to the page by clicking the button in the right column. The page does not refresh, but you will see that the RSS feed appears on the bottom your editable capsules.
2. Caro creates several capsules on her hubpages including, a photo, RSS feed, and plain text.

Caro finds that her Hubpages gets more comment/feedback then her Squidoo Lens. We’re using both mainly to produce authority links to our blog. Be very careful not to upset the HubPage people with too many links. This is reiterated several times throughout this video.

In th second part of the video Caro creates the profile for her account.

When you add a photo hubpages asks you to crop the image. You can resize the image by clicking shift+ctrl and then use your mouse cursor to resize. Caro does not show you how to resized the crop box in the video.

Don’t worry about your HubPage score.

You can add another tag in the bottom of the right column.

After you publish your hubpage use Social Marker to bookmark and let the world know about your content.

Squidoo, Ezine, and Hubpages all have different rules. Make sure you follow the rules.

One Final Thing

I don’t remember Caro adding a backlink to her wordpress direct blog. It may have been included in the text she copy pasted or maybe I just missed it in the video. In any case don’t forget to add a link in your HubPage that point back to you blog. Caro recommends only 1 on your first HubPage, but also mentions as many as 3 might be safe.

Steps To Take Today

• Create A HubPage just like Caro did in today’s video.

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Today I built my first Squidoo Lens.  I must say it does help to have a little html background for this one.  In Caro’s video she mentions that it’s not that big a deal, but some of the things she just copied and pasted kind of blew by me and I had to watch the video in slow motion to catch exactly what was going on.

How To Build A Squidoo Lens?

It says build a Squidoo Lens in three steps, but that’s not really the case.  Make sure you get signed up and have a Squidoo account.  Creating the account is very straight forward.  Go to create a Squidoo Lens and fill out the first (I believe) 3 steps (very straigt forward).   When you get to the module area it might get a little confusing.  Here are my pointers:

• The default view has a bunch of modules.  You can delete and add modules any way you’d like.  After watching the video I noticed that Caro (as she mentioned) only used 4 modules and deleted the rest.
• HTML – adding html is simple if you know the tags, however, not all the tags worked.  I wanted to add header tags h1, h2, h3, etc., but it wouldn’t register.  I did a little research and found the following: Your Lens title is an h1 tag, module titles are h2 tags, and module sub-titles are h3 tags.  Apparently you can’t use header tags in the text area (although I didn’t try an h4).
• I’m not too sure how Caro added her affiliate image, but here’s what I did.  I added the image by pulling it from my dogadoptionsrescue.com server by using the following tag <a href=”http://locatereviews.com/1324519995″><img src=”http://www.dogadoptionsrescue.com/wp-content/uploads/585adeb70258014.jpg” /></a>.  The <a tag creates the anchor to my affiliate site and the <img tag links to the affiliate image on my server.
• One final pointer is I created a different affiliate link by going to the Thirty Day Challenge website and creating a trackable link using the TDC Stat Tracker.  This way I will know how many referrals come from Squidoo and how many come from my Dog Adoptions website.  The unfortunate part is I won’t know which site a conversion is coming from.

Overall, I just need to play around a little more with Squidoo to get comfortable.

Market Samurai Finding Content

The updated version of Market Samurai is pretty much a no brainer.  It’s pretty straight forward and an easy way to find more information and I can now use it to create some RSS feeds for my Squidoo Lenses.

After all this if you’d like to take a look at my Squidoo Lens head on over to  Dog Adoptions and let me know what you think.  Leave me a comment in my guest book, click through to my Dog Adoptions blog or be a pal an purchase my dog adoptions affiliate so I can grab my first sale.

That’s it for today.  I’m heading over to SocialMarker to let everyone know about my new lens!

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Today we get to learn how to build a Squidoo Lens. We’ll learn how to sign up for an account, build a lens, and the importance of keyword optimization in the content. Guru Bob is also going to show us improvements on the “Find Content” feature in Market Samurai.

Squidoo is one of the best platforms for hosting content and getting indexed in Google. I like Ed’s analogy of a spiderweb we’re using the different content platforms to build a spiderweb to try and catch our traffic.

Day 11 is approximately ~24 minutes

How To Create A Squidoo Lens

(video length ~17 minutes)

Week 2 is very much about creating quality links to promote your blog. We’re going to use powerful web 2.0 content platforms starting with Squidoo.

Signing up for a Squidoo account is just like every other form on the internet. Just fill the form and sign up!

• After you sign up you come to a page that asks you about building a lens. If you already have an account you can get to the same place by going to the upper left of your dashboard and clicking the “Make A Lens” link.
• Step 1: In the My Lens is about field use your keyword phrase
• Step 2: What’s Your Goal for your page? Caro says to choose whatever we want here. She usually goes with the default option here. I want to get the word out about Dog Adoptions (easiest option)
• Step 3:Try to use your main keywords in the URL…if it’s not available try using dashes.  When you’ve completed this section click next.
• Step 4: “And 3 More Good Ones” – use 3 from your secondary keywords or categories on your blog.

Funny it said there were only 3 steps to creating a Squidoo Lens.

• When setting up your lens – I’m assuming this is a first time thing you can setup your bio by putting a short blurb along with a photo.
• Once your bio is setup you need to set up a minimum of 3 modules to get up and running.
• Click the Edit button next to “Introduction, Content, and Discovery Tool”  Use your keyword for the title and add copy you’ve created to the description area. – use material that’s you created – original copy.
• You can check to see if your content is original by going to http://www.copyscape.com to check and see if your material is indeed original.  You may want to do this if your using some content from other articles.
• Caro also uploads a relevant photo.
• Caro recommends less links.  Take a few keywords and link to your main ranking vehicle (your wordpress blog).  You can also link with some of the category keywords as well.
• You can add your RSS feed to the lens as well

The actual purpose of the Squidoo Lens is to build quality links to your blog. Although Caro does add a link back to our affiliate product on here Lens and uses the Vintage Electric Guitar Price Guide image for her link.

Remember you only need 3 modules.  You can remove the modules or add different modules you’d like to include.

***Caro’s main recommendation:  Make sure you don’t include to many links in your lens.

The final step is to make sure you use Socialmarker to let the social bookmark sites know your new lens is available.

Caro submits to 10 Social Bookmark sites.  Make sure you don’t bombard the Social Bookmark sites.  Do your best to make sure you offer quality content.

When you submit to Social sites you always want to make sure you’re submitting quality content.

Find More Content Using Market Samurai

(video length ~5 minutes)

There are now some new features in Market Samurai.  First new content sources and second your can create your own RSS feed for your specific keyword.

New content platforms are now available on Market Samurai.

• Wikipedia
• Youtube
• News/Miscellaneous
• Yahoo News
• Yahoo Answers

After you do your content search Market Samurai generates an RSS feed that you can use in areas such as the RSS module in your Squidoo Lens.

Steps To Take Today

• Create Your Squidoo Lens
• Submit to SocialMarker
• Check out the RSS Feed and new content areas on Market Samurai

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I’m sure RSS directories is a great way to increase the number of people reading your feed. Unfortunatley, we have not setup a feedburner account to track the number of feeds to our blog. Maybe that’s in an upcoming lesson.

TDC RSS Submitter

The guys at the Thirty Day Challenge have setup an easy to use RSS Submitter to get our feeds into the RSS Directorie. I submitted my feed using my secondary keyword phrases and a short text summary during the submission process.

Here’s the information I used:

Blog URL: http://www.dogadoptionsrescue.com

Feed URL: http://www.dogadoptionsrescue.com/feed/

Your Main Keyword Phrase: Dog Adoptions

Additional Tags: Dog Adoptions, Rescue A Dog, Small Dog Rescue, Puppy Adoptions, Dog Centers

A Brief Description: A dog adoptions blog about…can’t remember exactly what I put here.

Because we are not using feedburner I went ahead and submitted my own Puppy In Training blog to the feed to see if how much my feed count increases in the coming days.

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Now that we’ve done everything up to now in 10 days it should only take you a couple hours to repeat the exercise.  If at this point you don’t like your keyword phrase it should only take you a couple hours to rinse, wash, and repeat. (it takes me a lot longer because for some reason it takes me a while to do the keyword analysis stuff).

Day 10 is approximately ~8 minutes

Submit Your RSS Feed To RSS Directories

This RSS submission service will help us get indexed and ranked a little bit quicker.

• Go to your TDC Dashboard and click the TDC RSS Submitter hyperlink located on the right side.
• Fill out the fields in the form and click submit.

The TDC RSS Submitter will submit your blog to several of the RSS Directories.

Short day today.  Maybe I can do some catchup work!

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Today we’re going to see if we got indexed by Google and also start telling the rest of the world about our blog article with comment marketing.

If you look back to our article on Day 8.5 and Day Day 8.75 you can see most of the statistics and indexing we’ve already received from Google (some great results I might add).

Most of today we’ll concentrate on marketing and getting the word out on our blog.

Be A Part Of Google Groups

All we need to do here is go to groups.google.com and find some groups related to our keyword phrase “dog adoptions”. I see one group that I’m going to join and focus the majority of my effort on for this section of my comment marketing. rec.pets.dogs.rescue should be a pretty good group to start out.

I wanted to leave some commments in a couple of the threads I found in Google Groups the only problem I’m having is the threads are really old. One that I wanted to comment on was last active in 2004.  Should I comment on a thread that is that old or is it time to search searching for some other groups like search by “dog rescue”, “dog shelter”, etc?

For now I’m not going to leave a comment in the Google Groups area.  I’m sure Ed, Dan, and Guru Bob will have plenty of other ways to garner backlinks in future lessons.

Commenting With Squidoo

First thing we want to do is find all the Squidoo lenses (a lens is basically an article on Squidoo) that are related to our keyword: dog adoptions.

• I went to Google and entered the following phrase: dog adoptions site:squidoo.com
• The results were 101 related articles – remember these are listed in order of importance so the first lens has the most authority according to Google.
• The top Squidoo lens for my search term was a survey. I went ahead and filled out the survey with relevant information and added a comment with my dog adoptions link. Here’s the lens I commented on: Y U Love Your Rescue Dog. Scroll to the bottom and check out my comment!

Are We Indexed?

As we saw in Day 8.5 and 8.75…yes, we have been indexed and in a big way. I’m sure once we get the latest Google Analytics data we’ll see that we are getting some traffic from Google already.

I tried the same technique: site:dogadoptionsrescue.com in Yahoo and MSN and as of now we are not indexed in either search engine.

Google was our main goal, MSN and Yahoo are secondary, but we should push forward and keep up with our comment marketing strategy.

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The videos are getting shorter and shorter so maybe I will catch up at some point in time. I’m only 10 videos behind as it’s currently August 19th and I’m only on Day 9.

Today we talk about creating backlinks and how to check if we’ve been indexed in Google. One thing to remember is when creating backlinks through comment marketing make sure you are adding to the conversation. Don’t just add a silly one liner like “Great Article”. If you don’t have anything meaningful to add move on until you find an article or forum post where you can make a contribution.

We need to start being a part of our communities. Use ethical ways to be an active contributing member of your business community.

Day 8 is approximately ~20 minutes

How To Get More Backlinks

(video length ~14 minutes)

MAKE SURE YOU CONTRIBUTE TO THE COMMUNITY! Don’t go out and just spam a blog or forum. As Ed says you need to get along with the neighbors by contributing to the conversation.

Ed takes a look at where he’s showing up in Google search for his keyword phrase. Similar to what I talked about in my last article Day 8.5 – A Little Bit Of Statistical Analysis.

Google Groups

The second place Ed goes is to the Google Groups. Through Google Groups you want to try and find good groups that fit your niche. You can do a search by your keyword.

There are heaps of groups and places where you can add links and contribute to the community. Add your link to your signature along with your keyword.

Make sure you check on any rules associated with the group.

Google will rank these forums by order of authority. It’s best to get your backlink in the highest authority forums. Don’t worry about no-follow…a link is a link right now.

Unfortunately, Ed didn’t go into detail on commenting in groups we’ll figure it out on our own.

Squidoo

• Go to Google search and enter the following: your keyword phrase site:squidoo.com. For instance, I’m going to enter: dog adoptions site:squidoo.com
• You can see how many phrases there are and which phrases are most relevant.
• Go to any of the relevant Squidoo lenses and check to see if they have a guest book (place to leave a comment). Now make sure you leave relevant information to add to the conversation in the lens.

We should try to do this for 5 minutes a day and gather 1-2 links. 40-50 links will go a long, long way as we’ve seen from our Market Samurai repot.

How To Find Out If Your Site Is Indexed

(video length ~4 minutes)

One of the keys is you want Google to find your site through these outside links. When the google spiders are crawling websites they will find links to our site (hopefully), crawl the link, look at the anchor text, and find our site.

Guru Bob says we just want the search engines to know we are there. Ranking doesn’t matter right now. If you keep a close eye on your keyword phrase you may notice lots of fluctuation in your ranking and it’s totally normal for you to completely drop out of search for a couple days then re-appear.

We can check Google, Yahoo, and MSN the same way just type the following into the search field:

• site:yourdomain.com
• You’ll most likely notice that Google probably found the home page, contact page, article page etc. That’s what we want.

As long as we are indexed we will now show up in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). If you’re not showing up keep bookmarking, comment marketing and eventually the spiders will follow one of those links to your website.

Time to get cracking on day 8. I haven’t written this in a while, but here’s our to do list:

Steps To Take Today

• Make sure we’re indexed in Google – if not take further steps as mentioned above…eventually we’ll get into the SERPS. (YAY, we already are).
• Start comment marketing. Lets concentrate on 1-2 comments a day using Squidoo or Google Groups. I’m sure we can get creative and think of some other ways to create backlinks.

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I wanted to document this momentous occasion by taking a few screen shots of my success with Google search.

Broad Match Search

• Go To Google.com | Enter the broad keyword phrase: Dog Adopt ions
• The results: Number 10 on the Google results list (First Page of Google results!)
  

  

• The search phrase is in the bottom right corner.
• You can tell the result is on page 1 by looking at the page numbers under Gooooogle.  Page 1 is the only page without an underline.

Exact Match Search

• Go To Google.com | Enter the exact keyword phrase: “Dog Adoptions” - don’t forget to include the quotes
• The results: Number 5 on the Google results list (First Page of Google results again!)

• You can see in the upper right corner that it’s showing results 1-10 and if you count down the list Dog Adoptions is number 5!
• Notice that the number of searches has increased to 62,300.  Originally the search number was 56,000 which was very high for the Challenge.  Last time I looked the number was 61,800…now we’re up to 62,300.  I guess it goes to show you that you can still break in to the top 10 even with a decent amount of searches.  What might be more important is the top 10 competition analysis we did on Day 3.

Anyways, I just wanted to document this stuff before we end up out of the rankings and in the Google Sandbox.

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