I’ve been busy with the seasonal cheer so thought I would jump in with a quick post to say hi to try and get back into the blogging spirit after being away for a while. I hope you’ve all had a great holiday and I’ll be posting my December Income Report within the next few days and also posting my aims for 2013.I had a great time in London celebrating the New Year and took the video below of the fireworks:

Speak soon

Once you’ve built a few niche sites and got to know your favourite WordPress plugins you will use them time and time again, and so I thought I would share my favoured plugins with you all. This isn’t an extensive list and there are bound to be ones that I don’t include, but this is just a sample of those that really add value to a site and can make your life easier.

All in One SEO Pack

This does what it says on the tin and offers out-of-the-box search engine optimisation for your WordPress blog. One of the better feature is the ability to override post titles so they are displayed differently in search engines which is great for testing without changing your posts url.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics is the daddy of monitoring your sites stats especially since Google is where most of your traffic will be coming from. You will need to set up an Analytics account with Google and then you will be asked to paste some code into your site so that they can track it. Simply enter your analytics code into this plugin to authorise your site and it will start tracking.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to index your site and alert them when you make any changes.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu

This hasn’t got much to do with SEO and niche sites but it’s the first plugin I install on a new WordPress site as it removes the sidebar menu and provides a horizontal drop down menu instead which helps with navigation in the admin area of your WordPress installation. It really is a must.

Pretty Link Lite

This is a way of shrinking or masking your links which is great for affiliate sites allowing you to display a friendly url as well as being able to track them.

Quick Adsense

This allows you to insert your AdSense code into posts/pages/sidebars with minimal effort. Paste your various advert codes into the plugin and then say where you want them to go. This allows you to experiment with their positions putting ads at the end of posts, the beginning, or even the middle and specifying their alignment so they fit in snugly with your text.

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2

This increases blog traffic by strengthening on page SEO, increasing the number of indexed pages, and auto converts search terms into post tags so that more of your pages are indexed. This also displays incoming search terms on the footer of your post or on your sidebar which can mean more visits but also helps you with keyword research and perhaps what words you should be looking to optimise or write new content on.

SexyBookmarks (by Shareaholic)

You will have seen this on quite a few blogs (and this one) and it adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, or homepage. I would click on this far more often than any other bookmarking plugin and you can easily select which social bookmarking links to display.

Strictly Auto Tags

Tagging is a great way to get more pages indexed by search engines and can also increase site traffic but it’s all to easily to forget this and not add any tags to your articles. This plugin will scan your post and add the most relevant and appropriate tags but in a really smart way. Hit ‘publish’ and the tags are automatically added.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

This enables people who comment on your site to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries and if you’re running a niche site you want to get as much returning traffic as possible. You can also have this as ‘opt out’ as well as ‘opt in’ so that the box is already ticked when a user comments meaning they are more likely to be subscribed to that comment stream. This may annoy some but it’s easy to either untick or unsubscribe.

Tweet old post

When running a niche site you will probably set up a twitter account for it too but it’s not always easy to keep this updated so why not use this plugin to keep your twitter stream (and your followers) populated with links back to articles on your site? You can specify the age of posts, exclude categories, add additional text, add hashtags based on the tags on your post, and lots more. Then just set the intervals you would like to publish your tweets at.

This blog really is a bit boring isn’t it? It’s typical that I can put so much time and effort into making other websites but when it comes to my own I opt for the default template and zero character.

I have tried to have a play with the theme and if you have visited over the past couple of weeks you will have noticed some different themes in use but they didn’t really do anything for me. I think I just need to sit down, decide what I want from this site, and actually put some work into it which sounds easy when I’m just typing here.

How nice does this site look? Clean, simple, and concise. I think my problem is that I don’t actually know what my blog is about. It started off as a personal blog, then a blog about Ramsgate where I was desperate for content and visitors, and now it’s shifted to me reporting on my online ventures with niche sites. With over 7 years worth of archives it’s hard to know what to do.

Most of my spare time online is spent researching passive income and finding ways I can increase my earnings outside of my 9-5 job and I think this is where the site has to go next. So the plan is:

• New site structure
• New theme
• Better content

If I can monetise this site then that will be an added bonus but I will do this in a smart way so as not to be too in your face.

Is that a deal then? Watch this space.

As you will know I’ve been playing around with niche sites and trying to increase my passive income (please excuse the buzz phrases) and a sideline of this is that I’ve become slightly addicted to checking my Google AdSense income. AdSense is my main revenue stream (see my May Income Report) and I’m only a few clicks away from seeing if my sites have earned me any money. We’re not even talking a huge amount but in my mind I’m thinking ‘How much have I earned for free today?’ and can’t help myself.

What has made it worse is that at the start I had some pretty successful days but a lack of effort on my behalf and also a drop in advertisers has meant that I’ve usually been disappointed this month when I’ve had a look. I also used a free AdWords coupon to boost my traffic so saw some increase in that but now it’s dropped down again. I really can’t complain though and knew that this was always the case.

The solution is and has always been to continue to write new content and also to create more sites to strengthen my position so that I’m not relying on one niche site, one set of visitors, and one set of advertisers who, through Google, wish to appeal to visitors searching for my site.

I’m happy to say I’ve got some more content written for my 2nd niche site and feel ready to start getting some backlinks for it and getting it listed on directories. We will then have to see what impact that has and hopefully I’ll be able to give you some figures for my June Income Report.

It’s been 7 Years and 28 Days since I set up this blog and I’m celebrating this with my 2000th post. *Bells and Whistles*

A lot has changed in that time, and although I’ve ‘quit’ blogging several times in the past I’ve always come back. OK so I don’t keep it updated much any more and I don’t post much personal info as I did in the beginning, but it’s still here along with a massive archive and lots of memories.

There’s not much more to add than that…

I’ve been experimenting with niche sites and the whole idea of passive income through Google Adsense. Lost yet? Basically you need to find an area where there is not much info but plenty of demand, then create a website, monetise it (through adsense), and then watch the money roll in…

That’s the idea anyway but the hardest part is finding an area to focus on that hasn’t already been written about and that doesn’t already have high rankings in Google., If you do find an area though then you have to create a website, create good content, establish links and authority, and then work to get more visitors to your site and boost your ranking in search engines. If you can get to #1 for your keywords, and get lots of visitors, then by association a percentage of them will click on your Adsense banners and earn you money.

It sounds oh so simple doesn’t it? So far I’ve made my site, written lots of content, and am already getting visitors and clicks, but now I need to focus on increasing the authority of my site.

At some stage I’ll let you know what the site is and hopefully by that time it will be established enough to earn me some sort of income (passively) and I can let you know what the figures are like.

To truly earn larger amounts via Adsense you either need a mega-huge site, or need to have many smaller sites running at the same time and collectively earning you revenue. At this point I have only focused on the one site but am now researching more areas to add to my Adsense portfolio.

Hope you’re all fine and dandy

photo credit: Vince Kusters

I’m really not too sure what to write about…

photo credit: jo.sau

It’s dream most of us probably have had from time to time and wouldn’t it be great if something you loved doing made you money in the process too?

Three of the most common ways of making money from blogging are:

• Advertising (adsense, selling advert spots directly)
• Affiliate schemes (writing articles about products and linking to them earning a percentage of sales)
• Selling products (eBooks are pretty big right now, and perhaps you could write one and sell it?)

Of course these don’t work with any blog or website, the thing you need is visitors, and specifically visitors that are interested in what you have to say. Getting visitors relies on many factors, such as keywords, trends, content, backlinks, etc and even if you are an seo guru it still won’t guarantee the amount of visitors you need to make a decent living from your blog.

I’ve been reading quite a lot into this subject and if this is something that you are interested in then you might want to check out these blogs from people that are actually blogging for a living:

• Viperchill
• Blog Tyrant
• Problogger

The above bloggers are the exception in that they make huge amounts of money from blogging, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a bit of the action.

If you want more info on this subject then here is a great article that further explains ‘How Bloggers Make Money From Blogs‘.

photo credit: Laughing Squid

Now that I’ve decided to get back to blogging it seems that I’ve immediately hit a wall that is familiar to every blogger, and that is what to blog about. I don’t want to blog about just anything and would ideally like each blog to actually be of use and so you can expect less of the typical  ‘this is what I got up to’ blogs (that’s what Twitter is for!) and more of … well something else as yet to be decided.

So I am in need of inspiration and really don’t want to bore you when I’m blogging. I think I’ve learnt quite a bit about ‘pro-blogging’ from my time away and what really draws readers in, and obviously this post isn’t in that category, but hopefully some of my future ones will be.

I’ll leave with a few questions for you.

Should you set yourself a target when blogging?

Do you always know what you are going to write about when you site down at your computer?

How long should a blog post be?

How often do you post?

photo credit: Trois Têtes (TT)

I’ve been sorely tempted to get back into blogging on this site again, purely for the reason that I log in every so often to have a peek at the visitor numbers and they have been steadily dropping which is no surprise considering the lack of new posts. I don’t think I’d like to see this blog die.

I’ve not been absent from the web, and have been tinkering with a few new sites, none of them personal blogs though, and what has struck me is that I perhaps took my high number of regular visitors for granted and only after trying to build readership for other websites have I realised that I had a pretty good thing going on here.

There are a few reasons why I stopped blogging though:

• Not enough time
• I didn’t want to share my personal experiences
• I didn’t have anything else to blog about

I suppose all these are linked together but I have missed ‘blogging’ and so I am tempted to come  back and post a bit more. Of course this could all be a flash in the pan and this could be another ‘last post’, but I doubt it.

I have realised I can have a personal blog without blogging about my complete personal life as there are somethings that I prefer to share with only those closest to me. The rest though might appear here.