Life.Currenttoday.com - 2 Cents

I started this blog in the last week of Feb. 27, 2006. It is now May 17, 2006.

When I started, it was because I had heard you could drive a lot of traffic and make a lot of money with a blog. I have had online businesses before. I usually had to pay for traffic. I had become quite an Adwords expert. The idea of free traffic had enough appeal to get me started blogging.

I use BlueHost.com. I chose it because it was the cheapest I could find that had a crazy package. It has 50gig storage, 999gig bandwidth, and free domain and sub domains. Back to the point, my host had lots of free, one-click to install, software.

I installed and removed them one at a time, not really knowing exactly what I was wanting. Then I came upon Wordpress. It was easy and I liked it. So, here we are. You’re looking at over 2 months of blogging right now.

When I started, it was all about finding an income source. It’s still about that, but I have discovered something that is fun for me to do, and that has almost doubled its income each month.

In February, I went crazy getting started. I made a whopping $3.57 that first week on adsense.

In March, I spent a lot of effort learning my way around Wordpress. I had to know how to do PHP and especially Javascript in a WordPress post. I first used javascript in a post making a BMI weight calculator. Then, I shared how to easily get javascript in a Wordpress Post.

Then, I started seeing that just about everything I was posting was in the top pages on Google, and in fact all the search engines had me in their top pages.

I’m on the first page with ‘javascript wordpress’, ‘wonderful relationship’ , ’sudoku create’, ‘bmi weight calculator’, and on and on. In fact, it’s incredible the ways you get found in the search engines–ways I never expected when I was writing a page. Sudoko has become my highest traffic. But before that it was ’stupid christians’. I was really surprised by how many people search for ’stupid christians’. But, there I am, on the first page in the search engines.

Several years ago, I did a lot of search engine optimization, but I had never had such easy success as I was having in WordPress. I finally figured out why I was having so much success with the search engines. I’ll share that in another post, or write an e-book (ha).

Anyway, with only my Adsense income:
$3.57 in Feb,
$9.52 in March,
$18.89 in April,
and now, as of the 17th, I’m over $1.00 per day, I’m headed for over $30.00. I’m at $18.19 at this moment.

My pages viewed is doing the same thing. It’s not doubling, but its adding about 5000 pages each month. This month is heading toward 21,000 pages viewed. It’s right at 12,000 pages right now.

So, at the present growth, this thing should become my full time job in under 1 1/2 or 2 years.

I couldn’t do it with the adsense alone. I’ve actually made over $100.00 selling games from free traffic to my game site from this site in the last two months. You can see all the ways I’ve monetized my blog at the top, the side, in the content, and at the bottom.

My whole point with this article is how I have evolved in these short 3 months. This is actually fun. Sure, I’m still doing this with the money as a goal. But, it’s really fun tweaking a page and seeing it on the first page of Google. Particularly, when it is on the first page ahead of 60,000,000 web pages! That’s just cool.

Do, you think the lottery pages are a competitive group? Right now, if you type ‘lucky powerball’ in Google, I’m the first one on the first page. And none of this is to mention the directory traffic and direct link traffic. Also, don’t forget the feeds traffic like technorati, wists, de.licio.us, furl, and others. Having those links on my pages is really viral.

Well, so far, I’m writing all my own material. I don’t know if you have to do that or not. It seems to me that original material is the best material. I’m sure you could reach a point where it may not be practical.

Well, I’ll try to come back and update this as things change over the next months. I’ve added two new money sources in the last two days. Things are changing quickly.

Hope you have success with what you are doing as well.

Here is more about online marketing.

Regards.

I’ve been blogging with WordPress now for just over two months. I actually posted my first article on Feb. 20, 2006.

It didn’t take long to realize the significant traffic this would generate, not to mention actually being fun for me. I had almost 12,000 pages viewed the first full month, in March. April just finished up with right at 16,000 pages viewed.

So, now I am learning how to use WordPress to make things work like I want. That means learning some PHP as well as learning how to hack javascript into a post. Also, getting things to look like you want means some knowledge of style sheets too.

I hadn’t ever used PHP very much. In fact, most of my programming skills are from finding an example and tweaking it to suit my needs. I know just about enough of a lot of languages just to get around a little.

So, the way WordPress is arranged using PHP inline with HTML makes it really easy to grab things and position them as you want.

When I set up the search that comes with WordPress, I realized it was tied with the settings for the number of posts that are viewed in a category or archive on one page at a time.

So, to get the search right, you want 10 to 20 posts on each page. Otherwise the visitor will think there is only one hit for their search in your articles. The problem is: I don’t want that many posts on the non-search pages. I was getting around to creating an ‘if’ statement in the PHP to make the search page the only one that displayed more posts. But, I tried the Google Search bar instead.

I know you’ve seen the Google Search Bar on sites for years. I never really thought about it until now. It allows the visitor to select your web site in the search. It’s really cool. I like it much better for the way it displays the search results like a search engine. And it’s fast too.

You can put it anywhere you want in your site. I have it at the bottom of all my posts except here also in this post just to point it out.

It has a really easy wizard to click your options and allows you to input up to three websites to include in the search results. It’s an incredible search tool for your blog, or any site you have.

I just put it up tonight. I already love it.

If you aren’t using the Google search on your site, just click the link here: