Desty Online -- Online and Offline Businesses, Online Marketing » Blog Business http://www.destyonline.com Bringing offline business practices online. Turning bloggers into Businessmen. Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:57:21 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 en Don’t Play Around with Adsense and Your Sites http://www.destyonline.com/dont-play-around-with-adsense-and-your-sites/ http://www.destyonline.com/dont-play-around-with-adsense-and-your-sites/#comments Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:53:12 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/dont-play-around-with-adsense-and-your-sites/ Earlier in the week, I had planned to make several changes with Desty Online, new theme, adding adsense, and writing articles based upon Google’s search trends to see if I could capitalize on current trends and turn that traffic into $$$.

While I was able to get some traffic from Google Trends, I didn’t have Adsense installed that day, so I didn’t know if that traffic was clickworthy. I added adsense the next day, missed the traffic, and got 1 click. whee…

The downside though was that in two days with adsense on Desty Online, my entire set of sites with adsense got smart priced! It couldn’t have came at a worse time! I had just posted a very popular funny video on my funny video site, and the traffic started to POUR in! I’m not kidding. I haven’t seen these numbers outside of a stumble upon spike. The numbers kept increasing! And the clicks started to pour in as well. The sad thing was that they were .01 to .03 cent clicks! It killed me!

So I wiped off adsense from Desty Online Friday, and now on Sunday my $per click is starting to return to normal.

There is actually a great business lession in all of this. When you have what you consider seperate businesses, but they are linked by a common infrastructure (adsense in the case of websites) be ready for a period of downtime as those changes take place. That downtime will effect your other sites, so don’t start a new push for traffic on those other sites. Smart pricing is not a fun thing! You waste your time, efforts, and valuable traffic.

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]]> http://www.destyonline.com/dont-play-around-with-adsense-and-your-sites/feed/ I’m Not a Fan of Using YouTube Through Adsense http://www.destyonline.com/im-not-a-fan-of-using-youtube-through-adsense/ http://www.destyonline.com/im-not-a-fan-of-using-youtube-through-adsense/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:30:13 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/im-not-a-fan-of-using-youtube-through-adsense/ I’m sure you guys are tired of me talking about my funny videosite, The Masked Dispatcher’s Funny Video Collection, but Desty Online is about my experiences with online business.  I have been working off of Court’s Internet Marketing School site for tips on how to get better rankings with the search engines.

While I do target some keywords for Desty Online, it’s mainly a web journal about my experiences, so I’m not seriously using his thoughts and ideas for DO, but I am going full bore with the Masked Dispatcher.

WordPress Theme Change, Again

Court has adapted a Wordpress theme to take into account his tips from his Keyword Sniping.  It’s a really good looking theme and does great things for search engine optimization, so I downloaded it and am currently using it on Masked Dispatcher.  I’ll be using it for my Wordpress BANS when I finally get it going.

YouTube Based Ads Through Adsense

I had been given some great advice by Michael Martine for my funny video site.  You see, Michael was running a video of the day site before there were embedded videos.  Michael suggested that I use the video units from Adsense.  The video units create a video player that shows videos in a certain genre, that you select, and displays adsense ads in those ads.  It’s a great idea, when they work.

The problem I’m having is that the player isn’t showing 100% of the time.  When they don’t, you get a link “watch the latest videos on YouTube.com”, no ad.  If I’m throwing some traffic at a video and have been getting a 10% click conversion, I need those ads to be up all the time!

I’ve taken the video units down and replaced them with the 468×60 half banners again.  Maybe sometime in the future, the video units can be more reliable.

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]]> http://www.destyonline.com/im-not-a-fan-of-using-youtube-through-adsense/feed/ Preplan Your Holiday Articles and Get Them Out Early http://www.destyonline.com/preplan-your-holiday-articles-and-get-them-out-early/ http://www.destyonline.com/preplan-your-holiday-articles-and-get-them-out-early/#comments Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:25:04 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/preplan-your-holiday-articles-and-get-them-out-early/ I was reading my various RSS subscriptions today when I ran across Three Ways to Keep Your Articles Fresh by Sara Christensen over on Blogging Tips.  What hit me close to home was her debate about writing a holiday themed post because everyone else was.  I thought it was funny, because I had already posted a funny video on Masked Dispatcher about the holidays, but it was an April Fool’s Day video.

Getting Ahead of the Game with Holiday Articles

Around the holidays, people do holiday related searches.  It’s a good idea to attempt to cash in on that traffic, but what if you’re behind the wave?  If you don’t post your article in-time, you may have already missed alot of potential traffic.

Notice that at Wal-Mart always has their Christmas products up around Halloween, and every year it seems that they put it up even earlier.  Alot of people want to get their shopping done early, so why not capitalize on that?

Timestamp Your Holiday Articles if You Must

This is a great opportunity to use your Wordpress feature, the TimeStamp.  If you don’t want to confuse your readers at Christmas with a Valentines Day related article, just change the date to an earlier date and publish.  Why earlier?  Get that article out there an indexed by the search engines!  If your site can pull off season or holiday related articles, get them out ASAP.  Google doesn’t care when you posted your article, just that you have it and that it’s keyword sensitive.  Holiday articles, if done correctly, can be timeless.

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]]> http://www.destyonline.com/preplan-your-holiday-articles-and-get-them-out-early/feed/ How to Make Money Online from College with Blogging: Content and SEO http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-make-money-online-from-college-with-blogging-content-and-seo/ http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-make-money-online-from-college-with-blogging-content-and-seo/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:12:43 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-make-money-online-from-college-with-blogging-content-and-seo/

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Making money while at college using a blog is fairly simple to start. To create a blog for free, you can simply use Google’s Blogger and get a blogspot sub-domain. What you put onto the blog and what you focus on will greatly determine how successful you are at making money online.

Plan Your Blog First

Before you even set-up your blog, you need to take pen to paper and create a master plan for your blog. What are you going to write about? While you can blog about anything you want, the tighter, the more focused you can be with your subject, or niche, the better chance you’ll have of making money online with your blog.

Once you have your topic, it’s time to determine a set of words, or keywords, that you’ll want to focus on with the majority of your articles. When developing these words, you’ll want to first brainstorm on words related to your topic. For example, say your blog will be about World of Warcraft. Your first task is to think about what keywords someone might use to look for something on the various search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc).

  • World of Warcraft
  • Blizzard
  • Warcraft
  • WOW
  • Alliance
  • Horde
  • Paladin
  • Warrior
  • Priest
  • Shaman
  • Rogue
  • Warlock
  • etc

Now that you have your keywords, you need to narrow down to the words that you would think get searched for the most for your topic, in this case the topic itself, World of Warcraft. Go to blogger and create your free blog using those words as the domain. You’ll have to experiment as worldofwarcraft.blogspot.com is already taken. Try an extension of this, such as worldofwarcarftresources.blogspot.com (open at the time of this writing, you’re welcome!). Use the major keyword as the title of the blog and you’re in business!

Writing Articles

Start right off the bat and write an article to introduce yourself. You don’t have to use your real name, but sometimes it helps to establish the man (or woman) behind the avatar. In the case of World of Warcraft, you can mention how long you’ve been playing, what classes you like to play, and even what server and character you run, if you’re willing to get that personal. Again, use your major keyword not only in the article itself, but also in the post’s title (Tridarth Welcomes You to the World of Warcraft!).

Try to write at-least one article per day. If you have a rush of ideas and want to write more than one per day, that’s fine, just save those extra articles as drafts and continue to publish one per day; having a backlog of saved articles will save your butt when you hit a dry spell, get sick, go home from college for fall break, etc.

Search Engine Optimization, huh??

What we’ve been doing in this planning stage is a process known as search engine optimization, or SEO for short. SEO is a process where you are optimizing your blog for the best possible searches and referrals from the various search engines. The more friendly your site and articles are, the search engines will have an easier time in determining what you are writing about and will send readers your way when they search for those keywords you’ve been working on.

There’s a TON more to SEO, but that’s what you really need to know from the start.

Make Money Online Using a Blog

You have your blog in place, articles have been written, blog and articles are both focusing on pre-selected keywords and traffic is, slowly but surely, starting to trickle in. Now is the time to optimize your site to make some money.

Google Adsense

Entire books and blogs have been dedicated to Google’s Adsense program. Adsense takes it’s que from the keywords you use on your site and in your articles to present specific ads that are targeted to your audience. You, as the publisher, get paid per click of the ad, but don’t click them yourself, or Google will boot you right out of the program!

There are two schools of thought when it comes to putting ads on your site. Some say to have ads on the site from day one, that way people are already used to them. Others say to wait till you have traffic to place the ads.

My suggestion is to put the ads up from the start. Repeat visitors will see and already know of them, so no big loss; if you have a dedicated readership base, some could get upset that you’ve suddenly decided to cash in on them. On the other hand, search engine traffic is usually your best source of Adsense revenue.

Optimize Your Search Engine Optimization for Articles

Your blog is setup, you’re starting to see some traffic, or are you? How can you see how many visitors you’re getting? Use Google’s Analytics, a free tracking service from Google, to track your visitors, what they’re looking at and, if they came from a seach engine, what keywords they used to find you.

Installation is easy. Follow the directions to add a new domain, get your code, head to your blog’s dashboard and select template. Next select edit HTML, scroll down to the very bottom of the page and copy & paste the code before the code < /body>. Then click finish back on the Analytics site. It will take a day or two in order to get traffic information, but once you start seeing data, you’re set.

Now, use this information to check what keywords you’re getting traffic from. If you’re getting alot of traffic from the term “world of warcraft paladin” then input that into Google and see where you’re ranked. Your goal, of course, is to rank on the 1st page, as close to the top as you can get. Write more, and more targeted articles with this specific keyword in mind. Don’t spam the keyword, but do focus on it and see if you can increase your rankings, then rinse and repeat.

Making All that Money While Still in College

In the end, you’ve created a web site (for free) that provides a valuable resource of others interested in your niche. The amount of people, and money, you draw is totally dependant upon how popular the topic is and how heavy the competition is for that topic. After that first reader makes that 1st click on an Adsense ad, guess what?

You just made money online while at college from blogging!

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]]> http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-make-money-online-from-college-with-blogging-content-and-seo/feed/ A Choice of Two Different Business Models http://www.destyonline.com/a-choice-of-two-different-business-models/ http://www.destyonline.com/a-choice-of-two-different-business-models/#comments Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:49:47 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/212/

I’ve gotten alot of great comments from my review of my new commercial site The Masked Dispatcher but I’ve run into a snag when it comes to the actual business model for the site.  As I invisioned, the site would be a search resource for iTunes; I had problems using iTunes myself and thought that a simple search site would be a good idea.

Too Many Things to Do

When creating an online business, no matter what it’s about, you’ve got to keep it simple.  If it’s not simple, then visitors will leave.  I thought that posting videos to songs, a paragraph about the artist, and links to either songs or artist’s catalogs would be enough.  I wasn’t looking at the big picture.  People who use iTunes are used to it and, more then likely, would search iTunes first before going online to search for music.

The second problem regards non-iTunes users.  To buy the music, they would have to download iTunes.  It’s too much to ask.  Seriously, if you want to buy music online, would you want to wait and download a program, set it up, then go back to the site and buy your music?  Online business is supposed to be faster than that.

Two New Competing Business Models

Before I had written my article about the previous business model and asking for a review, I had emailed several affiliate marketers about the site.  In all honesty, when you go past my thoughts and plans for the site, at the basic level the site is a sales / landing page for an affiliate network.  I was disappointed in the lack of responses I got from the emails, but I did get one reply.

I hate to burst your bubble man, but you’re trying to do too much.  Think about it, all the songs that Itunes has and you’re wanting to put them into a blogger format?  Do yourself a favor and forget about it unless you’re into torturing yourself.  Instead, you can do one of two things:  setup a music news site where you take other’s articles and put your own spin on it, or just make a funny or sexy video site.  You’d use adsense or whatever to make your bucks, maybe throw in a CPA ad as well when you start getting traffic.  Either should be pretty easy to pull off.

Two Different Business Models

I think the advice is sound, the question becomes which business model to follow?  My problem has always been, even when I was growing up, I didn’t like choices.  Did I want chocolate ice cream or strawberry ice cream; that I was easy, I wanted BOTH!

So, I refuse to make a choice, and I’m taking both choices for business models.  First, I’ll start publishing music news and entertainment articles on the current site, and even throw in some iTunes affiliate links should someone already using iTunes wants to save time and buy a song or album.  Second, using revenue from this news blog, I’ll create a video blog.

Online business is always an exciting experience.  When working on a failing business model, someone comes along and shows you a better way. :)

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]]> http://www.destyonline.com/a-choice-of-two-different-business-models/feed/ Archives — Your Best Source of Passive Income http://www.destyonline.com/archives-your-best-source-of-passive-income/ http://www.destyonline.com/archives-your-best-source-of-passive-income/#comments Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:45:17 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/archives-your-best-source-of-passive-income/

The holy grail of blog based revenue is passive income.  Passive income created from a blog is based upon traffic and their actions; what brings the traffic to create this passive income is, of course, quality articles or content.  There are times when, despite your best efforts, you cannot find or make the time needed to create quality articles for your blog.  An accident, an illness, holidays, or other life events come into play when it comes time to start the writing process. (more…)

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]]> http://www.destyonline.com/archives-your-best-source-of-passive-income/feed/ The Masked Dispatcher Alpha Goes Live! http://www.destyonline.com/the-masked-dispatcher-alpha-goes-live/ http://www.destyonline.com/the-masked-dispatcher-alpha-goes-live/#comments Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:41:31 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/the-masked-dispatcher-alpha-goes-live/ I’ve been working on my new project in my spare time, weekends, late at night, etc.  It’s no where near what I want it to be, but I have enough up to try and get some feedback.

The Masked Dispatcher, your gateway to digital music downloads is live! 

 masked-dispatcher.jpg

The site is purely a service oriented venture; I know that when I’m looking for stuff on iTunes, the program is slow and not very user friendly, so I asked the question that all great businesses start with:

Is there a better way?

My goal is to be continually adding songs to the site.  Right now all additions are being done manually because I want to have the following in each post:

  • a sample of the song (or a video sample)
  • background on the artist

I would like to eventually automate the entire process, but that would require someone with mad skills in coding, not me.

Please check out the Masked Dispatcher and let me know what you think.  Seriously, let me have it.  I need to know what’s wrong so I can fix it.  I’m using the same wordpress theme as Desty Online because of the featured articles but I would like to eventually get a customized theme.

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]]> http://www.destyonline.com/the-masked-dispatcher-alpha-goes-live/feed/ How to Build a Business Through Blogging from Your Dorm Room http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-build-a-business-through-blogging-from-your-dorm-room/ http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-build-a-business-through-blogging-from-your-dorm-room/#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:59:56 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-build-a-business-through-blogging-from-your-dorm-room/ In the related article about how to make money online from your dorm room by blogging I mainly went over the technical aspects of creating a blog using the free Blogger service Google provides. I didn’t talk about what to actually do with your blog. An easy business to start with your blog is to blog about your college and college life itself.

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]]> http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-build-a-business-through-blogging-from-your-dorm-room/feed/ Good News, Bad News on New Blog Project http://www.destyonline.com/good-news-bad-news-on-new-blog-project/ http://www.destyonline.com/good-news-bad-news-on-new-blog-project/#comments Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:29:34 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/good-news-bad-news-on-new-blog-project/ As I mentioned before, I’m working on a new blog in what I consider an untouched niche.  The actual blog is up and running, but only on a very basic level.  I found a temporary wordpress theme, but I hate it.  I’ve done zero theme modifications, as I’m still working on finding a good theme to base everything on.  Over the past 2-3 weeks I’ve only posted 3 articles, 2 of which were lists. 

I admit that I really haven’t spent much time working on the blog.  I have searched and found a few blogs in the niche and have been commenting on their articles.  It’s from those comments that I’ve been getting a very small sliver of traffic.  Using Google’s Analytics to track my traffic, I have noticed that the biggest view on the blog, beyond the main page, has been the About Me page.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise.  Desty Online’s About Me page gets quite abit of clicks as well.  I have written articles about About Me pages in the past, and when I do, more people read the page.  Also, the main draw that I’ve created for the blog is the Brand.  It wasn’t until I created a brand that I was able to witness, first hand, the power of a brand.  I use it when I comment, it’s the title of my blog, it’s the background of the blog itself!

This is where I’ve been bad.  Bad, not in a naughty way, but in that I haven’t been capitalizing on my brand.  If you were to actually visit my new blog and checked out my About Me page, you would see this.

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

You guessed it, I haven’t WRITTEN an about me page! :(

The simple reason I haven’t written one is that, I guess, I still see the blog in the alpha phase of development.  The “physical” structure of the blog isn’t set in stone yet.  I’m kinda promoting it on the other related blogs, and the brand itself is powerful enough to bring the curious in, but I’m doing ZERO to keep them.

Yes, I’m bad.  I need to get my butt in gear and make things happen.

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]]> http://www.destyonline.com/good-news-bad-news-on-new-blog-project/feed/ How to Make Money Online from Your Dorm Room — Blogging http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-make-money-online-from-your-dorm-room-blogging/ http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-make-money-online-from-your-dorm-room-blogging/#comments Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:01:59 +0000 Desty http://www.destyonline.com/how-to-make-money-online-from-your-dorm-room-blogging/ Over the last year, creating a blog on how to make money online has been all the rage.  The problem is that while these blogs start up with a bang, they quietly shrivel up and go away after three months or so.  What happens is that these new writers read a blog about making money online (like John Chow, Problogger, or Shoemoney) and think to themselves, “Hmmm, this looks easy.  I’ll start a blog and make thousands online.”  What looks easy from the surface actually takes alot of long and hard work behind the scenes.

How to Start Making Money Online from College with a Blog 

Starting a blog is actually very easy, just alittle piece of advice.  Write about something you actually know something about.  If you don’t know anything about making money online, don’t write about it.  If you’re the master of playing World of Warcraft, blog about that.  If you are the king of MySpace, write about MySpace.  Get my drift?  Go with what you know and are good at.

After determining your topic, now it’s time to choose a platform.  Blogs far and wide will tell you to register your own domain and run wordpress.  While that is excellent advice, that’s not the path I’m going to suggest for you.  My suggestion is that you start with a simple blog using Google’s Blogger platform.  I want you to determine if you can start and keep up with a blog before you start spending any cash on it, and hosting your own blog takes money.  It doesn’t cost much money, but if your college days are anything like mine were, I was too busy trying to scrimp and save so I could afford cable, gas money, and the weekly pizza feast.  If you’re iron-willed enough to use what little cash you have for hosting fees, go for it, I just remember money being in short supply.  Dreamhostis the hosting provider I personally use; they have nice rates and a one click install of Wordpress.  Anyway, back to Blogger.

Blogger

Use your Google Account information as a sign-in.  If you don’t have a Google Account, create one here.  You’ll sign in, go through two more steps to create your blog, and now it’s time to start blogging.

When I first started blogging, before I got my own domain, I used Blogger:

dashboard2.jpg

At this point you want to start to optimize your theme.  There’s not much you can do beyond putting widgets into your theme on the sidebars and switch themes.  Use Google’s Adsense and other ad-services that allow interested readers to generate some ad revenue.  I’m telling you right now, you won’t make much money at the start.

The best thing you can do at this early stage is to start routing your RSS Feed through Feedburner.  This will allow you, in the future when you switch from Blogger to your own domain, to make a few clicks in Feedburner to have your old subscribers switched over to your new site, and they’ll never have to do anything themselves.

You need to focus on writing articles for three months.  Visit other blogs; commenting on articles may direct some traffic your way if your comments are good and on topic.

After three months, you’ll have a good idea if blogging is for you.  If so I suggest to sign-up with PayPerPost, take a few opportunities, and use the income from those articles to register a domain and setup hosting, and transfer your blog from Blogger to Wordpress.

You’re well on your way to making money online with your blog.  It will be slow going, but reading the following blogs will give you further ideas on how to make money online through blogging:

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