Review Me Today!

There is a new blogger at Today.com and he is creating quite a bit of controversy. So I just couldn’t resist, I had to review his blog. The blog is Make Money with Adsense , the blogger is Griz, and if you actually want to make money with Adsense, you should probably read the blog.

Go ahead and read the whole thing, it won’t take you very long.  I think I counted just 2 posts so far for March, and maybe 10 or so  for February.  Now normally I wouldn’t review a 2 month old blog with just a dozen posts, but the posts are long and they are packed full of information.   If you are like me you will come away will a whole new perspective on making money with blogging.

While reading Griz’s blog I came to the realization that there are basically three different types of bloggers, those who blog for money, those who blog for fame, and then there are those (like me!) who think they are blogging for money, but are actually blogging for fame. (I think Griz actually called bloggers like me “clueless”, hence the controversy. ) I think I was slowly coming to that realization on my own, but reading Griz’s blog just got me there a little quicker.  Let me tell you what I mean.

I first started blogging about a year and a half ago.  My intent with my first blog was actually to have it be the website for my offline business.   So I was really happy to be able to get the domain that matched my business name. At the time I had no idea that keywords, or SEO even existed, so the fact that my domain name had no keywords, and was pretty much worthless as far as search engine optimization goes didn’t bother me a bit.  I assumed that I would write some content that people would be interested in, they would come visit my blog, click on my Adsense, and I would be making some money while finding clients for my tax business.

So I installed WordPress on my domain, wrote some content and waited for the traffic to start rolling in.  It didn’t. Not at all.  Not even a little bit. I start reading around the internet and I see people talking about keywords and SEO and how important it is.  But I also read about how the trick to getting traffic is writing great content on a subject you are passionate about and social networking.   I like that better, so I still don’t worry about keywords or SEO and I join various social networks and  I spend a lot of time networking. But as time goes by I start getting this feeling that maybe I was not getting the results I hoped for, especially considering the amount of time it was taking.

I don’t want to bore you so I am not going to take you detail by detail by all the wrong turns I took.  I managed to get a little bit of traffic coming to my blog, and every once in a great while someone would click on an ad and I would earn a penny, sometimes two.  I got really excited when I got a five cent click.  But I started thinking that I was missing something.  At the rate I was going, to even get to the point where I could earn enough to get Google to send me a check was going to take either a whole lot of time, or a bunch more blogs.   I started to realize, that just writing good content wasn’t enough.  Being passionate was not enough.  I was starting to get some traffic, but the traffic I was getting wasn’t buying. If my visitors aren’t buying, I’m not making any money.

Just I was starting to get a clue, I came across Griz’s blog.  That is when it all clicked, (so to speak) and I got it. If you want to make money, you have to have a product that someone wants to buy and you need to attract buyers, not lookers.  People that read your blog and chat with you and maybe drop a card are trying to promote their own blog. They are lookers.  Great fun, great for the ego, but they are not going to make you any money.  People that come from search engines are looking for information, and they are looking for something to buy.  They may not leave you any comments, but they are more likely to click on your ads. I wanted buyers to come to my blog, but what I was doing was attracting lookers.

I am not one to jump in with two feet, so I just made some small changes.  The first thing I did was I went to all the forums I have been active in, and changed my signature.  I had been using My CFO on the Go (the name of my blog, and my URL) .  I changed my signatures to Money, Debt and Taxes . At least now my signature has some keywords. I noticed a little bump in traffic from the search engines.

Then, I didn’t want to start over fresh, so there was not much to be done about the lack of keywords in my URL.  But I could change the title of my blog.  I also went through and changed my categories, and tagged a bunch of posts with my keywords.   I went in to my All In One SEO Wordpress plugin and made good use of all the options. I started getting clicks. And not penny clicks either.

About this time I started thinking that maybe Griz might know what he was talking about.  So I changed my theme to one that is much simpler, and faster loading.  I started actually thinking about keywords, and writing longer posts.  I changd from 5 posts on my homepage to just one.

Because I was busy optimizing my blog, I had less time for all the social networking.  My hard earned traffic went down, but my click rate went up. Not only that, the amount I earned per click skyrocketed.

Now there are still those of you out there who will say that you  should follow your passions, and the money will follow.  Don’t be a money chasing marketer.   Out in the real world of business I knew that just wasn’t true.  After all,  I love riding my mountain bike. I am not very good at it, I stick to the easy trails, but I do love it. You could even say I am passionate about it. But I am pretty sure no one is going to pay me to ride my bike. I am pretty sure that no one will pay to have their logo on my spandex. No matter how passionate I am, no matter how often I ride, there just isn’t a market for a slightly overweight, middle aged female mountain biker.  That is why I make my money doing taxes and helping people get out of debt and manage their money better.  While I love helping people with their money, I am certainly not passionate about it.  However, helping people with their taxes makes a decent amount of money, even without passion.

If you want to make money with your blog, if the dollars you earn are more important than the number of friends you have on any given social network, then go on over and read Griz’s Make Money With Adsense. When you finish with that blog he has links to a few of his other blogs that are worth your time. Follow just a few of his suggestions and you will see your earnings increase.

So Griz, are you reading this?  Are you looking at this blog and thinking that I am still clueless? (I might be )I signed up for this blog before I read yours. Now I know I should have picked a different URL, and maybe even a different topic.  Right now I am focusing on some of my other blogs, but as  I get some time I will start making changes over here and see what that does for my traffic. In the meantime, keep up the good work and write more soon!