Rice Blogger

I have another personal blog which started monetized only about 6 months ago does not even qualified for its first Google Adsense check payment until today. I get them because I had other website which ensure that I receives Adsense Payment every month.  The point being, it is pretty hard to earn money from blogging, and it may not even be profitable for you to spend all those time blogging when you could most probably earn more working part time somewhere else.

It is good to have plan before you want to earn some money from Blogging. You may have some competitive edge before you start blogging. Here is some way of evaluation.

1. Friends – The easiest way to get some traffic is through friends. It does not cost them to give a visit to your website.
   When more friends are online, the more chances some or little of your friends will drop by your website once a while.
2. Profession / Study Fields – If you could blog about something you do often, it will be much easier rather than digging up things that you have to check each time you need to make a post. ie: if you own a hand phone shop, it would be very good for you to blog about phones.
3. Hobby – Having a blog about your hobby is not a common thing, this is one main reason I blog, it is because I like exploring stuff online plus I studied little programming during my student time which are not used in my daily job.
4. Blogging Friends / Online Friends – This way, you could market each other blog or at least give a 2 way link to each other. Although blogging about different topics may not get you Page Rank or Search Engine Ranking, you still get to exchange traffic. The basic stuff you need to know is that, you do not lose reader when you send your reader elsewhere. Loyal reader will remember your domain or have your feeds saved. This is very helpful as you could exchange knowledge about blogging tips, plugins (if all use Wordpress) and maybe even share the same hosting to save cost.
5. Knowledge in Programing – No doubt knowing little knowledge in Programming helps but if you have a high curiosity to know how a website works, that alone is good enough. Although there are some people who are successful online even though the know nothing, but they learn on the way.
6. Have current other website – Having some current website will help you do better as you are not subjected to blog solely for money as other website my already have them. You could divert some traffic and provide a link back from your website. It is an extra boosting arm, which is why the first is always the hardest and most people fail there.

If you have little to none of these, my suggestion is not to start blogging unless you have a strong determination. When you decided that you wanted to Start a blog/website, do your best and not give up. If not all effort will be wasted.

Blog promotion is not limited to the online world only. Doing offline promotion is equally important and result may be even better compare to online promotion. Lots of people is doing offline promotion, like any other conventional brick and mortar business. Doing offline promotion may require more effort as you will have to do some travelling or communicate the promotion yourself if your blog is still new.

Word of Mouth

The most common offline blog promotion done is definitely word of mouth, while not everyone may notice that. Depending on how you word it, sometimes it may sound nice rather than advertising to your friends. Usually I would wait until the correct moments or the right topic to notify them.

You could do this word of mouth online with messenger and social networking website too.

Bumper Sticker

This is one of the cheapest method to promote your website. You could choose to print them with a printer or you could DIY. Getting a good quality sticker which are waterproof and customizing it yourself is actually pretty cheap.

Contest

Offline Contest could be done to promote online website. You could promote registration / feed registration by brochure, word of mouth, mail and any method you could pass on the message about your contest.

Higher Cost Advertisements

Higher cost advertisements could be done if you have the budget to run them. It is very common to see branded goods promoting their website on billboards, packaging, radio, roadshows and even Television. This are equally effective as long as you have your goal/target for this advertisements.

It is slightly harder to measure advertisements offline as you do not have a tool such as Google Analytics or any other stats and cookie to track users. Therefore, it is important that you ensure that the blog promotion is measurable. This is because you will need to know if the cost of advertisements is worth your effort and money. Use promotion technique which

This blog has been doing good in the previous 5 months. But in the recent weeks updates is slightly out of schedule. Therefore, I am writing this New Year Resolution down to ensure that I have my aim for year 2008. This blog, my part-time hobby and maybe my part-time career is actually progressing through out the years and I hope to do much better in year 2008.

Firstly, I would like to build this blog’s traffic. I will try to write at least an average of 5 posts a week to ensure that my reader has something to read. I will encounter more traveling next year, therefore planing will be crucial. I will be writing more post before travelling using “post timestamp”.

There is still space to growth in terms of ranking. Google PageRank, Technorati Ranking,  and Alexa Ranking is my main aim. All this ranking have been increasing since this blog started and it will be increasing for the year 2008. You guys out there could give me some help too, by giving this blog some link love. Link building will be a hard job as Google penalize people buying links. My plan is to have links from quality post, and currently I have a few.

I will also start trying to invest something back to make this blog a successful. Although it has not been earning much, I will start spending and all money earn will be spend to promote this blog. Thinking of the right promotion would be hard as my budget is low. Let me know if you have any idea.

Affiliate products seems to be doing well for a lot of people and I have no idea about it. Therefore, I will try to dip my hand into it and have a look. I will report them in this blog if I have any news about it. I guess it is the right time to learn for this year Christmas.

Currently only think of 4 goals, more will come while I journey through year 2008. Happy New Year! I wish that all goes well for everyone out there. What is your New Year Resolution?