In the spirit of the new year, I thought I would start off the year with a series post. This will be several part series on finding your own blog voice and how the A-List bloggers can teach you to find it without even knowing they are showing you. I had originally only planned on making this a single post, but as I got into it I realized in a single post this is going to be way too long.

I’ve been spending a lot of time browsing various blogs around the web. As a member of Entrecard just as a side benefit you find yourself on a lot of blogs with a lot of different types of content. These niches range from making money to personal blogs to humorous blogs as well as quite a few others. At first I considered this a waste of my time, but the longer I spend with this system the more similarities I see, but also I see a lot of differences. The main differences do not come from the content as a lot of it is good, but in the technical expertise of the various bloggers. Some bloggers are quite astute when it comes to the technical side of things such as SEO, web design, traffic generation( well sort ) and some don’t have a clue about the technical side but are very good writers. Some think they have a clue even when they don’t and this goes for both sides of the equation.

But neither of these items are the similarity I’m referring too. I’m referring to the raising of hands screaming at the A-List bloggers saying hey look at me. Some of these blogs do this so much that its hard to figure out what the blog is actually about. Some of these are quite amusing such as Not John Chow’s John Chow is Dead post I’ve been guilty of linking to some of John Chow’s or Darren Rowse’s posts in the past and I will again, but not for the point of begging either of them for attention. Did do it for the trackback link

I read both these bloggers almost every day because sometimes there are some decent tips to gain knowledge about blogging. A lot of these tips come from the Guest Bloggers and not the actually author of the blog. But still you have everyone saying hey John look at me, I’m so special if you would just look and give me a link then I’ll be great just like you. One thing is certain if you want his attention then pay him $400 bucks for a review and then he will pay you some attention. You can determine this for yourself if you look at the number of paid reviews posted in the past month. The one thing I find missing from John’s blog is actual good information you can use to build your own blog. Some people say the same thing about Darren and Problogger. Of Course John does not beat around the bush in this area. After all the title of his blog is I make money by telling other people how much money I make. He never says he is going to help to teach you to make money like he makes. Sure there are tips on the blog, but not actually how he does it. John says he made 27K in November. Whether you believe him or not is up to you.

Lets look at that number a little bit. The top four money makers follows:

Technorati tags: blogging, John Chow, Darren Rowse, problogger, money makers, widgetbucks, readwriteweb, affliate marketing, bidvertiser

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Well in the following of people such as John Chow and Darren Rowse, I decided to do a earnings report for this blog. Now unlike John and Darren I won’t break everything down into separate areas but just give you an overview of this blog’s earning power. This figure does not reflect anything to do with any of my other sites revenue as I treat this blog a little special than everything else I do on the web. Drum Roll Please, Are you ready? Here it is I have earned Zero dollars from this blog the past month. Wow great I’m rolling in it.

Now you may ask what is the reason for posting this? The reason I’ve earned Zero on this blog is not from a total lack of traffic, while I don’t have the numbers of the A-List blogger’s, I do have some traffic. Not anything stellar but in comparison to some people out there who do not get any visitors at all or get 20 per day, its better. I average between 300 and 500 unique’s a day with with a little over 300 RSS subscribers. These numbers are not stellar either, but they are something to work with. Some people over at the Warrior Forum would say you are not monetizing it correctly.( I’ve come to the conclusion that most Warriors are idiots, but that’s another post.) In fact, I have not monetized it at all. I just put up a couple of ads this week, but historically I have not tried to monetize this blog at all.

At one time I did run some Adsense ads, but that turned out to be a total waste of space as I got very few clicks on the Ads. This type of site is not optimum for doing well with Adsense. At the advice of John Chow, I did decide to to try out BidVertiser to see how it may work. I ran Kontera for a while and I may do that again and I’ve posted an occasional Affiliate link in posts. I’ve earned a few dollars over the life of this blog, but not anything to brag about.

So why make the post? Well I decided to post this as a statement for myself. As I said I’ve been reading a lot of John Chow and the more I think about it, I really like John’s writing a lot better than Shoemoney or Darren Rowse. I’ve heard stories about how a lot of people don’t like John. Perhaps because he tells you to get off your ass and do something. I’ve learned over the years that a lot of people don’t like you pointing out their weaknesses. I have decided that I’m tired of working the 8 to 5 or 10PM job and I want to do something else. This blogging thing looks okay. Its not hard to do, you just have to build up an audience and you have to do a little work. I originally planned to do just that with this site, but I got lazy. I went for a long time without really posting in a frequent and timely manner. This is probably one of the worst mistakes a blogger can make. I went for a time when I did not post at all and even when I did it was just links to other blogs and added no real value to my blog. This stunted the growth of this blog and did not really help me at all. I plan on changing that.

I’m going to start monetizing this site. While my goal is to start making it pay the bills, I’m going to try to do it in a manner that is not intrusive. I’m also dedicating to actually posting more. While I won’t commit to posting every single day, I will try to do a lot better at actually writing something every couple of days.

One of the issues I’ve had with writing is finding topics to write on, but again listening to John Chow I may have a way to overcome that problem. One idea John suggested was to gather ideas from the comments of your visitors. This struck home as I wrote a post a couple of days ago about How Article Marketing does not work. One of the comments was very insightful and a point was brought up that I did not consider in my original post. I will need to write a follow up post and clarify my position on the matter as well as acknowledge the fact that the comment actually made some valid points against my original argument. Great idea John and I’m glad I decided to finally read your money making guide that was sitting on my hard drive. For anyone who wants to earn a little money through their blog should probably head over to John Chow dot com and subscribe to his newsletter. As a prize John will give you a copy of this book. He does not try to sell you anything other than giving up your email address for his list. There isn’t any one time offer and John even makes statements against the practice and also separates himself from the so called Internet Marketers who do employ these practices. John actually got me to thinking hard about whether I should associate myself with some of these so called marketers, but that’s a topic for another post.

So there it is my Earnings report. I’ll promise to do this again next year and I’m betting the results will be a lot different for this blog than this year.

Technorati tags: John Chow, Darren Rowse, shoemoney, earnings report, visitor comments, creating content, Adsense, Kontera, affiliate programs

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