So if you have been following along with my little experiment than you know I have been patiently waiting for the experimental software ”WP-Robot” to take flight and at least do what they claim it will do.
WP-Robot claimed that I will earn more money, get more website traffic and save time.
So here is the final score on the claims.
“Earn More Money” the only money I was making using the WP-Robot was through Google Adsense, I reported in an earlier blog I had made about $12. Yesterday I received a polite letter from Google stating that they were taking down my Adsense Ads due to having too much duplicate content on the Blog. Not only can you see big empty blocks (see here)where the ads were they took back the money I had earned due to violating my agreement with Google. Fortunately this did not affect my other blogs and websites.
So that’s strike one!
“Get More Website Traffic” the only website traffic I saw visiting the Blog was you guys. With my fancy tools I saw no other traffic that visited the Blog organically or any other way. This was the big claim of WP-Robot and the one I was hoping would work the most.
And that’s strike two!
“Save Time” saving time, what a joke I spent more time trying to keep the Blog out of the Google Sand Box, it seemed as though it was becoming a full time job. The maintenance and up keep of the WP-Robot with the normal Blog daily to do list was overwhelming and by far did not save me time.
Strike Three, WP-Robot you’re out of here!
Again the only wild card here was the WP-Robot. Not one claim they offered seemed to be true. Unfortunate, yes but I am glad I tested it before implementing the WP-Robot on some of my other Blogs. This could have been disastrous!
In closing I am going to be cleaning up and selling the Blog, I do not feel the need to have two Blogs about blogging. The only way to salvage my financial losses and the Blog is to put it in the hands of someone who will actually put real content there and make it what it should be. The blog has all the right stuff and only needs a good driver, WP-Robot is not that driver.
Until Next Time
Mark
P.S. in the Next few Blogs I am going to tell you which of my venders has been ripping me off and how to avoid getting scammed in the future.
And as always comments are always welcome.
I have been on hiatus for a few weeks perhaps a little longer and have not really paid any attention to my Blogs, not a good idea if you’re trying to keep reader attention. A lot of stuff has happened in the time that I have not been blogging, I found out I have been getting ripped off by one of my venders. I started a new Joint venture and have made some (little) progress on my experimental blog www.blog-for-money.org
The Joint Venture!
I have been working on a joint venture with a local woman on a Blog about cyber and youth bullying. This blog has all the elements that any blog should have and then some from list building to proper keyword phrases. We built the blog up to the teeth and are getting great reviews, even the local new station and a local news paper is doing a story about the blog this week. This is pretty cool and I am super psyched that the blog has become so popular so quick. A real success story I guess. Check it out here. www.Stop-youth-bullying.com and if you’re in the new England area check out the story on WMUR TV 9 Thursday night on prime time news.
Getting Ripped Off by Vendors!
Recently I was going through and checking my vender accounts and trying to see how much money was made last year for tax purposes. While checking traffic stats I found that I had sent over 5500 people to a website for some software that was being offered for a free trial and then a purchase. Yes I am being vague as I am trying to sort the mistake out reasonably with the vender before going off my nut. The vender is telling me that not only did I not sell anything I did not even direct anyone to the website. That’s funny because I see that I spent tons of money and time sending 5500 people to the site. Any way in the past this product has shown about a 10% conversion rate, some of you even bought the product. At 10% of 5500 that’s about a $55,000 dolor sports car, or food, housing or whatever. If anyone is interested I will keep you up to date. But for now keep an eye on your venders.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the ones who you make money for will not pay you for all your hard work!
The Experiment!
The Blog For Money Blog http://www.blog-for-money.org/ has made some weird twists but still has not proven to be a heavy hitter in the way I had hoped. Blog-for-money.org has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 899,856, (this is up a little) and almost all visitors to the site come from the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 215,120 in the US and has one site linking to it. The Blog has still has not turned a profit but continues to make a few cents a day with Google’s Adsense.
Not sure to what end the Blog will have but so far I am not impressed with the experimental software. I have considered either adding an actual writer to the Blog or maybe I should just sell it? Any thoughts?
Well, until next time
Mark
P.S. if you have any comments about the Joint Venture, Getting Ripped Off by the ones you trust or the Experimental Blog please let me know I would love to hear them.
Just a quick update on the experiment, as you know the experiment is to see if WP-Robot will not only run autonomously but get itself found in search engines organically. And we also know that the WP–Robot software is the wild card in the experiment as all the other parts of the Blog do in fact create natural indexing and has been proven to work for me in the past, for example go to Google and put “getting ideas to blog about” into the search bar and you will find this blog listed in the top three of the search results on the first page. The Blog “getting ideas to Blog about” was written by me and posted some time ago and still continues to perform well in the search engines.
The goal in this experiment is to see if WP-Robot will create the same results and thus having a completely self supporting blog machine that will propel me to millionaire status in no time, well there is a problem.
While doing some checking on the experiment this morning I have found that Google once again has sandboxed the main URL. If we keep getting sandboxed it will prove to be a problem since the main part of the experiment is to be organically found on search engines. The worst part is I can’t find it in any of the other search engines either.
At this time I am not sure how to combat being sandboxed by Google other than adding my own content to create some kind of balance between the duplicate content that WP-Robot is creating and what I can add. Unfortunately adding my own content goes against the very nature of what the blog experiment is supposed to be, autonomous and self supporting.
Something else I would like to point out is this, on every page within the Blog experiment each Adsense ad by Google seems to pertain to the blog entry it is attached to. This tells me that Google is indexing the site and as a side note not all the URL’s attached to the Blog have been sandboxed just the main one. I am not sure what this means but me and my team are trying to figure it out.
I am not willing to say either way if the Blog experiment is a success or failure. I can say that the WP-Robot is still doing at least part of what it says it’s supposed to do and the rest of the elements of the Blog are working. So we will continue to tweak and move some things around in hopes of a good outcome.
Now to end on a good note, Blog-for-money.org has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 1,524,402, and almost all visitors to the site come from the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 133,147. This is a small improvement from the last post but not nearly where I think it should be.
Still the only thing that has produced money on the Blog is the Adsense ads; we have jumped from $11.5 to 11.88 since the last post this means that I am still only ¼ of the way to making my money back on the experiment.
That’s all I have to report for now so,
Until next time
Mark
P.S. if you like the post or the Blog please feel free to leave a comment, Tweet or give me the thumbs up on the bar at the bottom.
For part three of the Blog For Money experiment I am going to break down exactly what software and tools I have used, how I used them and how much they cost me. I will also give an update on how things are going on the experimental Blog.
- The first thing I will point out is that most the internal set up for the Blog was learned from using Blogging to the Bank. In BTTB there are hundreds of different little tricks taught about setting up a Blog to getting it found on the internet. I have only implemented about fifteen to twenty BTTB tools in this Blog. I don’t want to get into it to much of what BTTB does as its proprietary but you can be assured using BTTB on the Blog you are reading now it paid for itself the first week I implemented the tools. BTTB Cost $37.00
- I DID NOT pay for website hosting I am using 000webhost.com there is absolutely no strings attached and the website can be hosted with your own URL for as long as you want. Cost $0.0
- Using GoDaddy.com I purchased the URL don’t forget about getting the correct search phrase using the Google Keyword tool for your URL. Cost $12.0
- Using the free WordPress software I downloaded the latest version of WordPress and uploaded it to my own web site. Please note I did not host the Blog at WordPress simply because there are restrictions set by WordPress. Cost $0.0
- I used the free version of Heat Map Theme for this project. I downloaded then uploaded all the templates provided to me from HeatMap to the root files of the blog. The free Heat Map version only comes in blue but it will do 80% of what the paid version will do. Heat Map is a highly SEO’d page with built in Adsense locations and plenty of space for banner ads as I am sure you have seen. Cost $0.0
- The only other tool not mentioned here is the experimental software WP-Robot; again I downloaded and installed the free version of WP-Robot to the Blog. $0.0
So at the moment I am invested $49.00 and I suppose if you wanted to go it alone and not use the Blogging to the Bank program you would only be invested $12.00 not to shabby for a start up cost.
So on to the progress of the Blog. As I mentioned in part 2 I want to explain, for those of you how don’t know what it means to be sandboxed by Google. Google is very much against Black Hat SEO, Spam and duplicate content. As I have found by its nature the WP-Robot creates duplicate content in part. If you look at the structure of some of the Blogs they appear to be more ad like than Blog like. As a result of the Blogs being more like ads (duplicate content) Google threw the whole Blog in the Sand box. Being in the Sand Box also means that your website is not being shown in searches. Not being in the search engine is exactly the opposite of what the goal of the website is. Without being indexed or being able to be found in the search engines this experiment could be over before it starts. I was able to quickly fix the problem.
I was able to combat the sand box by adding quality content from www.ezinearticles.com. If you are not familiar with Ezines it’s a website with articles that you can use written by other authors about the topics of your choosing. There are restriction but not too many. I basically downloaded twenty or so blogs from Ezine and set them to post at a four day interval offsetting the WP-Robot posts which is set to post every three days. Slowly the Blog was released from the Sand Box and is now searchable again.
So if you’re curious about Google Sandboxing and whether or not your website is sandboxed this is all you have to do. Go to Google and put your URL (www.yourwebsitename.com) in the search box and click search. If you do not see your website at the top of the search it means one of two things.
- You are in fact in the Sand Box, this is highly unlikely unless you are implementing Black Hat SEO or posting tons of duplicate content, in other words copying from other websites directly to your own.
- More often than not if your website is not listed after putting your own URL in the search box it means that you are not indexed by the search engine and all you have to do is request that it be indexed by adding your URL to their search data base.
To wrap it up the Blog has been gaining some steam and is now back in the search engines where it belongs. Blog-for-money.org has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 1,653,470, and almost all visitors to the site come from the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 144,909. Not bad for being on the web for 18 days or so and some of the Adsense ads have already made me some money.
So far the only thing that has produced money on the Blog is the Adsense ads around $11.5 this means that I am ¼ of the way to making my money back in just 18 days.
That’s all I have to report for now so,
Until next time
Mark
P.S. if you like the post or the Blog please feel free to leave a comment, Tweet or give me the thumbs up on the bar at the bottom.
Click here to see part 3
“disclaimer” The first thing I want to point out is that this is an experiment and in no way am I telling you to use or am I endorsing the experimental software I am using because I do not know if it works yet. There are several parts of the experiment that I know work but I want to be clear and not miss lead anybody. The reason I point this out is the experiment may have already gone badly. But before I get into that let me explain the experiment.
As you know the purpose of this blog experiment was to create a self supporting blog that could run autonomously with very little interaction from me and still be successful in creating its own website traffic and generate a list that I could use to market to at a later date. The Blog in question is this one, click here to see the blog. As you can see it’s a blog about Blogging For Money. Every part of the blog from the way it’s formatted to the Google Adsense ads is there for a reason and has proven to work for me in the past with other blogs. When all the tools are combined together they create a powerful blog.
The wild card here is the WP Robot that is actually writing the blog posts and creating the tags for me at scheduled intervals. WP Robot is the experimental software and so far has proven to be cool but it has also created some major issues but I will get into that later.
The very first thing I did when putting the blog together was to get myself a highly searched term for my niche “blog for money” and turn it into a URL. (See how to find keywords here) Buy using a phrase that was searched for 33,100 times in the US and 60,500 times worldwide last month alone and turning it into my URL gives me a huge advantage once the page become indexed in search engines.
The Second thing I did, using the WordPress 3.0.4 platform I installed a HeatMap Theme by HeatMaptheme.com (free Version). The HeatMap theme uses 23 Google Adsense ready widgets positions and an extensive options page, and a wide range of Pro Skin color schemes already pre-made and ready to go. (the additional colors are part of the paid version) the reason I use the HeatMap templates is because they are pre engineered to work with Google and have proven to decrease the time it takes to be indexed by Google or in other words I get my content found quicker on the internet.
The third thing I did for the set up was to download and install the WP Robot software to my Blog Admin page. Once installed I was able to put some “Blogging type” keywords into the WP Robot setup page and inserted my Clickbank info and set it to post a blog every few hours for the first few days and then slowed it down to one a day. Once WP Robot was set I clicked the start button and it began to make the posts, pretty cool or so I thought.
Again I am using the free version of WP Robot so my choices of where the Robot gets the information to blog about are limited to Click Bank and Shopzilla. The Click Bank portion works fine but Shopzilla if they know your using WP Robot for their advertising will not give you the needed information to make it work, so if you are going to use or try the Robot out don’t tell them what you need the information for, make something up.
In part three I will explain what it means to be Sand Boxed by Google and how to get out of the Sand Box. I will also point out a few other problems that were created by WP Robot and how to get around them.
Until next time
Mark
P.S. if you like the post or the Blog please Tweet or give me the thumbs up on the bar at the bottom.
Recently I have started an experiment to test a few products for their “claims” of making me a millionaire.
As you know I am and have been very successful with the products that I use and promote on this site and all my sites. You may or may not know but when John (my business partner) and I started in affiliate marketing we decided that when we promote a product it’s only because we have used them and found success with them. We will never sell or promote a product that does not work.
Having said that there is a huge process in figuring out what products works and what products do not and sometimes at a decent cost to us, to be honest sometimes very expensive. In this latest experiment I am actually going to be testing three different products together. Two of the products I am testing I already know work and live up to their claim and the third will be the wild card.
The end result of the experiment will hopefully be a self supporting Blog that will generate its own blog entries, traffic, comments as well as self index with Google and other search engines and do this all completely autonomously. This is a big test and I think if it’s done correctly I should be able to put a few bucks in my pocket along the way.
Also I should note that I have spent very little money setting up this experiment using free versions of the software that’s available. Part of the reason for this is, in my opinion if the free versions do what they are supposed to than the paid or upgraded versions of the individual software will work better but until I know I will not waste my money.
Over the next few blogs I will get into the nuts and bolts of how I have set up the experimental blog and where it is. I will explain what I know has worked and what is not working. So far the results are minimal as the experiment has only been running since Jan 22 2011.
I would love to hear your comments and tweets about the project as we go along, what you think and what you have tried in the past, or if you think I have missed anything.
Until next time
Mark
P.S. if you like the post or the Blog please Tweet or give me the thumbs up on the bar at the bottom.
Click here to see part 2
Is there any other reason to Blog? Sure there is, to send a message to your readers. In this Blog I will show you how to get quick results fast, and it’s free! Not only is it free you might make a buck or two along the way.
First of all if you don’t want to make money on the internet than you have to ask yourself why you are here? You should understand that there are many reasons for wanting to get lots of website traffic to your blogs. Some people only want to be heard and others want to get a message out and yes others do just want to make money.
So the question is why do you want to write and maintain a Blog?
Using Blogging to make money is only one of the reasons I Blog. I have several Blogs that are completely to help the reader, self help blogs if you will. I have a whole Blog dedicated to Animation and the software that drives it, I co-author a Blog that helps parents deal with cyber bullying and several others like this. So there are many reasons to blog and not all include making money. But all blogs do have one thing in common, whether you are blogging for riches or to get attention. That one thing is that every blog needs traffic, or in other words they need readers. Cause let’s face it without readers it does not matter what your goals are, you will fail.
I admit that this is a trick I learned from Blogging to the Bank; but it’s not like you would not have figured it out any way. The very first thing you should know about getting website traffic is being able to be found in search engines. Being found in search engines means that you have to have your site indexed by the search engines themselves. This trick will cover both being indexed and being found and they are free, this works on both websites and Blogs.
First you need to see if your website or Blog is in a search engine. The easiest way to see if your website is in a search engine is to search for your URL, if it comes up in the search than it is there. By search for your URL I mean actually put your domain name in the search bar i.e. www.yourURL.com in the search bar and hit search. If it is not there then go to Google and add your URL to their data base.
Ok now we will look at the second part of the trick (getting indexed). If you are using a Blog you already have an advantage here because most search engines already give a lot of attention to Blogs because of the software they use to run them. When using Adsense with a website your pages are indexed more often than they normally would be so the ad shows pertinent information all the time.
We will want to set up and use Google Adsense in our web pages and Blogs. The reason for this is because Google Adsense ads are driven by the content that’s on your webpage or Blog. This means that when you place an Adsense ad on your site Google indexes the page first. This is in order to get the proper ads placed on your page. In other words when you see the ad on your Blog or website the information in the ad will be similar to the information on your page. Not only will the information look like you put it there but you get paid if someone clicks on the ad, that’s right they pay you to get your page almost instantly indexed for free.
Ok we will want to start an account with Google Adsense and create an ad. Go to Google Adsense and enter all the information about you and your site then create an ad, make sure you choose the appropriate size and color to match your website or Blog. Setting up your account and putting the ads on your site are pretty straight forward and is explained at the Adsense page.
Once the ad is placed on your site almost every time you change the content of the Blog or website your site is indexed. As a result of being constantly indexed and having good content on your sites you will get the much needed and deserved website traffic.
As a side note be sure to use your most powerful keywords and phrases so when you are indexed it will result in even more traffic to your site. Click here for getting powerful keywords and phrases.
Until next time
Mark
P.S. if you like the post or the Blog please Tweet or give me the thumbs up on the bar at the bottom.
Well if you’re following along with my Blog than you may know that I am in a holding pattern with my Blog. My web hosting service and I are at odds about the amount of website traffic I can have and what I am actually getting. Apparently they feel as though I have too much and as you might expect I feel it is still not enough.
I attribute the success of my Blog to Blogging to the Bank by Rob Benwell. I am going to point a few things out with regard to how well I feel it’s working.
If you haven’t noticed the little globe near the bottom of my page it’s a visitor counter. I did not put it on the page to count visits as I already have a counter at the bottom of the page, I put it there because I thought it was cool looking and I get to see where in the world all of you are after your visits. I put the Globe up about the same time I started using the Blogging to the Bank program.
Prior to implementing what I learned using Blogging to the Bank I was maybe getting 15 to 20 visitors a month. After checking the stats on the Globe in 3 months time I am averaging 200+ people a month I have done nothing but implement what I learned using Blogging to the Bank and putting together a few post some of which were on autopilot and posted themselves, a little secret learned in Blogging to the Bank.
The other interesting thing I noticed is that I was averaging about a 10% Opt in rate so I was averaging about one person a month opting in to my list prior to using Blogging to the Bank. I am still averaging about 10% Opt in rate but now it’s about 20 to 30 Opt Ins a month just from this one Blog. You may not think that’s much but that’s about 300 people a year signing up to my list, just one list and if you have 5 blogs going like this one in your niche that’s 1500 people in a year’s time.
On a side note did you know that you will average $1 per person on your lists a month in income? That means if you have a few lists that add up to 1500 people that’s $1500 bucks a month in your pocket. That’s 18 thousand bucks a year. Not bad!
This was a long post but I think you will agree that having traffic equals making a nice list and having a nice list equals making money. Check out Blogging to the Bank by Rob Benwell you will not be sorry!
Until next time
Mark
I just want to take a minute and tell you what has happened recently to my Blog. I have been working real hard to make my Blog “Internet Marketing Strategy” as popular as I can and in doing so I have been getting a ton of responses to each blog entry. As I have found my efforts have been paying off, but not all in a good way!
With each entry I make I have been getting an excellent amount of website traffic to each and an abundance of comments on each as well. As a result my website hosting company has shut me down twice. I can honestly say that that is a first for me.
A while back I started using Blogging to the Bank by Rob Benwell. By making simple little tweaks to my blog I.e. turning on and off some WordPress features and linking with Blog posting sites I have been able to create enough buzz at my blog it was shut down.
The first lesson here would be to have a quality web hosting service; we are currently in the process of purchasing our own hosting computer so this won’t be a problem in the future. I am not saying that you have to do this if your blogs or website becomes popular I am just a control freak and don’t want to pay someone to do something I can do for myself.
The second lesson here and probably the coolest is that I was shut down for having too much traffic and constant comments to my Blog. I mean really has that ever happened to anyone you know? Not me for sure. I have only implemented about half the information from the Blogging to the Bank program to my Blog in about a month’s time and these are my results.
Any way the long and short is this, until I put my Blog on my own host computer witch should be soon I am limited to the amount of content I can put up and have commented on.
Wishing you the very best this New Year
P.S. 
an aging actor oh so furious
Mark
Adding text to image will greatly improve your chances of being found on the internet. Some search engines rate the web pages they index solely on image text alone.
I am going to show you how to add text to images using Dreamweaver I am not sure how much of a difference there is between Dreamweaver and other website creators but I can’t imagine they are all that different.
This is very simple, in the picture below you can see I have the image I want to ad text to selected. In the “Alt” box found in the properties tool bar you can add your text. I recommend using your keywords here in a small phrases or sentence. Once you have added all the text you want simply upload the index back to your web page.
You can see an example of how your text will look here by scrolling to the bottom of the page and hovering the mouse over the picture.
Another thing I have found is that just about any part of your webpage that is in .jpg or .bmp format can have text added to it.
This is like any other part of SEO, more is not always better. A good way to check this is with an SEO tool like SEO Power Suite or keyword density checker to see if your keywords are being used too much.
To your continued success
Mark
