Am I doing something wrong?

Hi everyone.

So, I decided to start a blog (Blogger platform) about 6 months ago with the intent to monetize it 1 month after it was set up. I did that... and now have $4 in my Clicksor account after 5 months. Granted, I didn't update often, but I did what I could, and wrote all my content myself. But 4 freaking dollars, REALLY???

Does it usually take that long to start off earning online?

I recently moved the afore-mentioned blog to a self-hosted Wordpress platform, and have lost all search traffic. All the traffic I'm getting now is coming from 301 redirects from my Blogger blog (and that's only around 50 UV a day). I'm getting .01 - .03 USD in my Clicksor account daily... which sucks obviously. I used LinkReferral, LinkCollider and other such sites to promote my Blogger blog. Got 150 Twitter followers via Twiends. I haven't done all that stuff for my self-hosted blog now, since I thought it didn't affect my Blogger blog's traffic/exposure much anyway.

I tried getting into the writing-for-money business, and signed up for freelancer, odesk, etc. but couldn't find any work there either. All jobs posted there, even fresh ones, had at least half a dozen people clamoring for the employer's attention (several of these people had many positive ratings) and so I hardly stood a chance of being hired, being a newblet there...

Now, I tried to get approved for Adsense on my self-hosted blog, but the reason I get when they disapprove my account (and tell me to resubmit at a later date) is that my blog has copyrighted content. I'm pretty sure my blog does NOT contain copyrighted content. Does modification of savegames, and manipulating data running in Android memory count as copyright infringement?

I'm at the end of my rope here, and so decided to ask for help from my fellow BHW'ers. Is my English so atrocious that I can't get a measly article-writing job? Am I doing something wrong in regards to my blog's monetization or linkbuilding?

And before I'm told to use the search function and read read read, let me say that that's all I've been doing for a few weeks now, and have nothing to show for it.

First of all, "earning online" is not just something that happens magically and automatically when you kick up a blog - it takes lot of work and planning to be executed correctly. If you just decide to start a blog about anything with making money in mind, you should either find a low competition niche (that might not be something you're familiar with) or be prepared for a competition between tough and impossible.

Given the context, I assume that it was mobile/technology blog as well? How many daily unique visitors were you able to drive to your site - 50? You do know that the top sites in that niche have tens (hundreds?) of thousands on unique visitors - every - single - day. So how well did you do? Was your blog even indexed (no, really - I've seen guys that wonder why their facebookyoutubehotmailyahoo.blogspot doesn't get any traffic...), and if it was, how highly it was ranked? I guess not that good, so you had zero to none organic traffic?

Just ditch any LinkColliders and autosurfs and all that crap - get decent backlinks from wherever you can; other blogs, guest blogging, even article directories if you wish. That way you start to rank higher in SE's, and eventually your site has risen enough to start getting organic traffic, and then you rise even more. Depending about stuff like competition, link value, position of the moon and such, you should see results within few weeks - and for not that competitive keywords (see below), you should be in the top 3 in a month or two, tops.

Personally I go for niches that others deem not worthwhile; you know, <100k searches a month. Sure it doesn't make me a millionaire either, but hey - at least I'm not struggling with any really tough competition. But even these just don't happen by themselves, it still requires dedication.

So to answer your question: yes, you're doing something very wrong if you get 50 UV's (from traffic exchange!) after six months. Hard to give the exact reason, but it most likely is something like too competitive field, where you're just not ranked anywhere to be found. But we've all been there (I don't really want to even think about my first IM project - which still was success, in a way), and none of us made it big the first time. What you need to do is figure out the problem you're having, and act accordingly. I guess it's just poor planning with keyword(s) and such.

Agree with Outkast. Some things just take time to realize. I write my own articles and don't usually count how many were posted. I just make sure to write at least one every day.

Thank you for your detailed and helpful reply Oukast.

You're right, it was about android, medical students and some other stuff. I did choose an extremely competitive topic to blog about but then, I didn't know about niches and whatnot at that time, and no returns if you don't take action eh? I've now learned that keyword research and choosing a niche are VERY important when starting a site/blog. So the project wasn't a total waste.

And actually, I did build some backlinks. The LinkCollider stuff was towards the beginning. A few weeks ago, I used to get 250 pageviews or around 120-160 UV per day (ALL ORGANIC SEARCH TRAFFIC). 6 of my posts were regularly in the top 10 searches for google. Even now, when I've ditched the free blog for a self-hosted one, the free blog shows up as number 1 in google for around 3 different posts.

So, I don't think my first attempt was a TOTAL fail, was it?

Since having switched over to my self-hosted blog, I've removed all links/mentions of copyrighted content from my blog. Adsense still won't accept me with the stated reason being "copyrighted content".

Processor said:

You're right, it was about android, medical students and some other stuff. I did choose an extremely competitive topic to blog about but then, I didn't know about niches and whatnot at that time, and no returns if you don't take action eh? I've now learned that keyword research and choosing a niche are VERY important when starting a site/blog. So the project wasn't a total waste.

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Niche-wise that's like n+1 different ones, and personally I don't like it when people just stuff in random articles like (I assume I found your blog) tips to fix Win7 boot up times, and the next one is about some sort of eye surgery. I can understand very broad range of "niches" in a lifestyle blog, but if you really want to aim for both of these niches, make two blogs - it's just better for the visitor, and they're also more easier to manage and thus rank independently.

So, I don't think my first attempt was a TOTAL fail, was it?

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No, not at all - you've most likely learned a lot. But the difference with many search results and many search results lies in the search volume. For example, one of my blogs has ranked #1 for the search term "lumi a920" (the Nokia Lumia 920 phone), and sure that's a nice typo, but last time I checked there was like under 10 searches for it. Sure it's a very new term, but what I'm trying to say is that just because you rank good, doesn't mean it's bringing any traffic - because there just simply isn't any.

The term given by you gives, even in broad search, just 590 searches a month, so yeah - it's very easy to rank that. Local US is just 91. Even dropping the pdf from the end doesn't give it much of a boost, 2900/480. And as you have noticed, this amount of traffic is next to useless.

Ah! Here you've taught me another thing! SEO optimization must be done independently for every NICHE instead of for every article? I though people were wasting their time building so many blogs, when they could have just one, lol And yeah, that's the one.

So, I guess the next step is to find a low competition keyword, remove the existing content on the site, and start over, concentrating on the one keyword?

I wouldn't remove the old content since you get at least some attraction. Maybe you can shift their focus later on to your new keywords?!
Like you have an article on Windows boot times and you find that some medicine niche is where you want to go. Then you could add a paragraph on how important it is to boot fast for the doctors and link some new content.

Processor said:

Ah! Here you've taught me another thing! SEO optimization must be done independently for every NICHE instead of for every article? I though people were wasting their time building so many blogs, when they could have just one, lol And yeah, that's the one.

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You should also consider your sites from users' point of view: if they're looking for information about Win7 boot time, but instead find site where the articles seem to be about eye surgery, then most likely will skip the site very fast - maybe even see it as spam because of irrelevant content, especially if they see that you have lots of articles with no relation to each other at all.

Sure you can optimize for each article like that, but what's the point if you could just optimize the main site - your articles will flow along. This might not seem to make that much difference in the very beginning as you only have few articles, but after few weeks you're going to have tens of articles, and if they all are from different niches, then it's all just one big mess.

Having multiple blogs for different niches is far from being waste of time. Sure it takes time to play around with all them to get them all rank #1 or at least high up for different keywords, but in the end it's worth it. Personally I'm running 10 blogs now, all completely unique content updated still on weekly basis - new ones more often - but managing them is way more easier, and if/when I want to get rid of some of them (aka. sell them), then I can just transfer the domain and site data to the seller without having any issues with it.

So, I guess the next step is to find a low competition keyword, remove the existing content on the site, and start over, concentrating on the one keyword?

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Given that you still don't have that much content, just starting from scratch is not too big of a loss really, I'd do it. Or as said, you can keep the articles, and maybe point them to your new blog for that niche. Not that big of a boost, but still.

Oukast said:

You should also consider your sites from users' point of view: if they're looking for information about Win7 boot time, but instead find site where the articles seem to be about eye surgery, then most likely will skip the site very fast - maybe even see it as spam because of irrelevant content, especially if they see that you have lots of articles with no relation to each other at all.

Sure you can optimize for each article like that, but what's the point if you could just optimize the main site - your articles will flow along. This might not seem to make that much difference in the very beginning as you only have few articles, but after few weeks you're going to have tens of articles, and if they all are from different niches, then it's all just one big mess.

Having multiple blogs for different niches is far from being waste of time. Sure it takes time to play around with all them to get them all rank #1 or at least high up for different keywords, but in the end it's worth it. Personally I'm running 10 blogs now, all completely unique content updated still on weekly basis - new ones more often - but managing them is way more easier, and if/when I want to get rid of some of them (aka. sell them), then I can just transfer the domain and site data to the seller without having any issues with it.



Given that you still don't have that much content, just starting from scratch is not too big of a loss really, I'd do it. Or as said, you can keep the articles, and maybe point them to your new blog for that niche. Not that big of a boost, but still.

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Thanks once more for the great advice Oukast. I'll definitely split my content up. Now, to register a new domain since they're so cheap now