Money Blogger

Inviting guests is always a trouble: you’ve got to clean the house, prepare good food, tell your family that there will be guests on Sunday noon. You will also have to talk with them on various topics, entertain them, and be polite: they’re guests.

Guest blogging does not differ too much from this: if you invite somebody to write for a short (or even a long) period of time on your site, there are several things you have to check.

• prepare your visitors (your "family") to the fact that also somebody else will write on the blog, forever or for a short period of time
• introduce your guests in the best way, telling the world who they are, what they will do, why they will write on your blog
• then, and only then, let them post: to start with, a couple of short messages will be better; after all, they are probably strangers to your visitors
• always continue writing you, too: guest blogging does not mean letting somebody else run your blog. Otherwise, your style will be lost
• give your guests enough liberty, but always check what they post

Guest blogging is always useful, but in particular it becomes vital when you go on holiday and you can’t post messages from the beach. In that case, prepare also several generic messages, like those of the secret vault, and have them published periodically in your absence: you will be present on your blog even when on holiday, and this is a great sign of somebody who cares what he/she does.

According to Technorati, 80,000 new blogs are created every day. Despite the fact that I don’t know how many of these fall in disuse in a few weeks, I am pretty sure that among these blogs only 1% of them survives for more than a year.

You can easily see this reading blogs somewhere on the net: blogs tend to be abandoned, since there is lack of time or creativity of their authors, and a dream of an enterprise becomes suddenly a nightmare.

Blogging takes time, a lot of time: you can’t think of writing a blog in 10 minutes once a week. You have to read, and to read a lot, to make sure you’re updated with news. Then you have to think, to elaborate your thoughts and then write something. This process takes no more than 1-2 hours per day if you’re fast and are writing no more than 2 articles per day.
Do you want to earn blogging? Do it, but don’t think it’s easy-money.

If you can’t afford this time, every single day, weekends included, it will be tough for you to be a professional blogger.

In the real world, a competitor is a competitor: I mean, except in very rare cases, nobody would ever dream to ally with a competitor.

The blogosphere is however a bit different: everybody, if he has something to say and has enough credibility and style, has the power to be heard, and the first that hear him are exactly his/her competitors. In this scenery cooperation among bloggers, even if the blogs are related to the same niche, is not impossible.

What a blogger should do is to create relationships with other blogs by trackingback them if they say something you find useful. Comment them, create articles on the posts of the other bloggers. Write, write, write. And be sure also to try exchanging ideas, reciprocal links and such with the other bloggers: being referred by others is the only method to succeed.

Many blogging tools - such as Wordpress (which by the way I’m using) - offer a custom search box to search articles on your site. That’s a very useful feature, indeed, so why should you get rid of it?
The reason is quite simple: money.

In fact, as you may know, Google offers a custom search box for sites that:

• let you search on the given site (that is, it replaces your WordPress-or-whatever search box)
• has your own look and feel
• let you search on the web

But the nicest part of this is that with the Google adsense search you can earn money from the searches that your users do, and this would be impossible with that WordPress-or-whatever search box you have!

I was just thinking… once we had sites, now we had blogs. What has changed in 2-3 years?

We have experienced at least three transitions:

• sites
• portals
• blogs

Not a long time ago anybody wanting to make an online enterprise had to build a site: that meant that people had to buy a WYSIWYG editor - or just write plain HTML code - and continue to update pages in order to sell their products, promote their ideas or sell services.
If you had no graphical skills or good taste, the output could be horrible, in the best case.

Then it was the time of "portals", such as PHPNuke: everybody had access to an easier way to maintain his/her site, and people could somehow interact with it. Very few sites built around this technologies had a lasting success, since it was rather difficult for people to understand what to do, how to interact, where to find contents. I’ve always hated them.

Now it is the time of blogs: almost everybody has one, and user-interaction is far easier. Blogs also have the advantage of having nice skins, but unless you personalize them you will get not a very nice and unique out-of-the-box experience.

The main problem of a blog - but also of any other site built upon any other technology - is content. Unless you present your users updated content, the blog won’t be read by anybody. But I’ll dig into this matter later on.

Welcome to MoneyBlogger!
So, this is the first post: if you’re reading this, maybe a bit of understanding on the purpouse of this blog could be useful to you!