Advertising with no money. Part 2 of 3.

So last week, we went over a couple of ways to advertise your blog without any cash. The first being Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. The second being search engine submission and lastly, fliers.
As you can see from my previous posts, I didn't advertise with the fliers as much as I would have liked to, however, with the little bit of advertising I did do, it actually generated some hits and little bit of money. This week I'm going to put out more fliers and see if has a greater effect on my hits/revenue. I would expect it would.
I've also been linking my Myspace account to the blog. The problem being I don't have a huge friends database as I'm fairly new to Myspace, so right now I don't expect that to generate a lot of hits quite yet.
Lastly, I submitted my site directly to Google and Yahoo, (instructions to doing this are on the May 3rd blog) and then used a free search engine submission site for the other search engines. (a link to the site is in the Update blog on May 11).
Continuing on now:
4) Craigslist. Now I'll be the first to admit, I am not a big fan of craigslist, I feel like its just a big jumble mess of lists, but nobody can argue the popularity of this site. They have just about anything you can want on this site and the best part of it is that it is free to list. The worst that can happen, is nobody comes to your site because it gets lost in all the jumble , the best that you start getting hits and put your name out there. I may waste a little time writing up a description on the site, but that's about it, its not costing me anything.
5) Business Cards. This idea kind of came to me when I was making up the fliers. I got to checking it out, and a lot of companies online will actually make your initial batch online at a minimal charge ( it cost me $5.13, 21-day ship, zero for the print and the rest was considered shipping and handling) so that you can get an idea of their quality. The nice thing with the business cards is that their easy to distribute, relatively cheap, and not as easy as the flier pull down tabs to crumble up and/or lose or throw away. I chose to go through vista print and have set that up as a direct link to their site.

These are the only two things I'm going to run with this week as I feel like I shorted you last week by not putting a full effort into the fliers.

Update. Week One -making money online.

So its the end of the first week. I'll be honest, I didn't advertise as much as I would have liked. I just got busy with finals this last week. I put out 10 fliers, 5 of which had pull down tabs on them, I was really surprised at how well the fliers actually worked and wish I would have put up a lot more than what I did!!! Everyday I would put up a new flier and everyday the pull down tabs were all gone, and with as little advertising as I did, I actually got 20 hits.
In addition to the fliers, I also put a link on my Myspace page to the site, and I'm not really sure how well that worked or didn't work, as I'm still fairly new to Myspace and don't have a huge friends list.
Then finally, i submitted my site via google and yahoo. I also used a free search engine submission service, addpro.com, and have included the link. to their site : Search Engine Optimization.
So, my results for week one: 20 hits, $1.32 income from AdSense, definitely not stellar, but considering my marketing efforts, better than I expected.

So you've got your blog up and running, your ready for the world to hear what you have to say, now you just need the traffic to start coming and your ready to rock and roll!!! Problem is - you have no money for advertising. 
This happens to be the predicament that I'm in right now. So I've been doing my research and decided that I'm going to try to advertise this blog with as little cash as possible. I've been checking around and have decided to come up with a list of free marketing ideas, I'm only going to try a few at a time so as to keep this as scientific as possible, I'll  then report back my success and failures. I was just approved for my AdSense account today, so I only have information on what my blog has done so far - 3 impressions and $0 earned. So with that being said here are the first three ideas: 
1) MySpace, Facebook, Twitter. It seems that everyone these days is somehow associated with one of these social networking sites.  We have friends that we will never meet however, we talk to them all the time online.  Tell them about your site!!! I figure this is going to be a no-brainer and at the end of all my comments and blogs, putting the link to the blog on it.  2) Search Engine submission. I initially signed up directly through Google by typing in Google search engine submission. The very first link was directly from Google, after clicking on it, they had me sign in using the same information I use for my AdSense account.  It then asked me for my URL (http://canwemakeanymoneywithblogs.blogspot.com) and gave me two options to verify my account. I chose the html option, which means they had me copy this html code and place it on my site, I then verified and I was done.  The nice thing about Google is that signing up information directly through them will give me information on who's coming to my site, how they found it, etc.  The next thing I did was logged out of that and typed in yahoo search engine submission, again I went directly through them, they had me sign in with my yahoo email information, and said that they will send whatever their site crawler is called and it may take up to six weeks.  I figured those are the two biggest search engines and I'm most concerned with getting listings from them so I used www.submitexpress.com/submit.html to submit to the smaller search engines, it didn't cost me anything and took only about 3 seconds to enter in my URL and email address. 
3) Fliers. I know this sounds kind of old school, but I figured what the hey, it'll give a little bit of visibility to my site since I'm not expecting to be at the top of any search engine results in the near future.   I'm going to try a few different methods to see what works, if any, and what doesn't.  There's a couple of different methods I'm going to use.  The first method will be, a super sized bold heading and then tear off tabs at the bottom, its easy to keep track of how many people actually cared enough to pull off a tab and put it in their wallet or purse. The next method I'm going to try is actually making full size fliers that people will grab and place in their purse or wallet, again, an easy way to see if anyone actually grabbed any, just count the number of missing fliers.   Lastly, I'm going to place fliers up around campus and see if anyone decides to jot down the address. 
So were going to give this around a week as I figure that is adequate enough time to see some results to report on. 

Writing blogs and waiting on adsense.....

Well, I'm still waiting on adsense to either approve or reject my application, they said a week, maybe they just got busy, I don't know.: )

Since I'm fairly (actually, VERY ) new to this, I've been trying to get tips on writing meaningful blogs that people will actually enjoy reading and would be helpful as well. While doing my research I came up with what you may call a blog business plan.

Step one, which is the most important of all the steps, is to decide who your target market is, for instance in the case of this blog, I would say my target audience is: individuals that are interested in making money online either passively or as a primary income because they either dislike their job or, as we all do, just want to make some extra money on the side. They've come here as a means of getting information as well as seeing how successful a newbie is at doing this.

Step two, is to set the tone of the blog. In the context of this blog, when I write, do I want to be serious the entire time, write this as comedy or just write as though I were teaching a lesson. I'll be honest, this really got me thinking, I want this to be a site where when people come here, they learn but at the same time enjoy reading it and don't see it as just me lecturing. So I'm going to just put it out there, I'm going to try to make this blog as informative as possible while at the same time as laid back as possible. Lets think of this as a group meeting with no ties and everyone is wearing shorts and bahama shirts.

Step three, keep it real. Now that I've put it out there in the last paragraph that I want the tone to be as laid back and as informative as possible, I want to also tell you that I'm going to be honest with you in my writings. I am not going to tell you I expect this to be easy, but also not going to say that I don't sometimes dream about making money with this. I'm not here to sell you anything, I'm here to learn and pass it on, if I make money at it, great, if not, maybe my grammar (or writing) will improve.

Step four, actually write, dont just list a whole bunch of links for people to find information on what they want to know about. We know how annoying it is when we go to a website and all it is, is a sight that links you to what your actually looking for, its the same with blogs. This isn't to say that I'm not going to put links (on the right) to helpful information, its saying that we dont want to replace text with links.

Step five, Keep It Simple Sweet, we've probably heard this a million times. In a nutshell, what were saying here is, keep the paragraphs in your blogs short, don't ramble and keep the writing as easy to understand as possible.

Step six, its quality not quanitity. I can write everyday, however, one of about three things are going to happen, 1. I'm going to get tired of writing everyday. 2. Your going to get tired of hearing from me everyday or 3. I'm going to run out of things to write about and the quality is going to go down. So with that being said, expect anywhere from one to three posts a week on the site.

Step seven, RSS feeds. You're probably wondering, what the heck is an RSS feed? Well, it stands for Really Simple Syndication and is basically a subscription to your blog. Basically, whenever you update your blog or site, it sends that update to your subscribers, (similiar to a magazine subscription) rather than them trying to remember to come to your site or coming back when there isnt anything new on it and wasting your time.

Well, that about wraps it. I hope this information was helpful and it you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them. Hopefully, Google will approve my adsense account by the next week.

Adsense.

So I've been checking online, ways to make money with blogging and hands down it seems that one of the first steps is to set up an adsense account. Adsense is Googles affiliate type program where as they put targeted ads on your site and you get paid when people visiting your sight click on the ads.
So I've signed up as of today and their telling me that its going to be a week to find out if I'm approved or not.

The 5 steps to setting up an adsense account:

1. Go to the following link:
https://www.google.com/adsense/g-app-single-1

2. Fill in the applicable background information.

3. Read the policies and agree to the adsense policies and procedures and then submit.

4. The next screen will verify your information and then ask you what you would like your login information to be.

5. After all this is entered you will need to wait a week for approval.

Can we make any money at this???

I'm not going to lie. I have one goal and one goal only, I want to see if I can make any money from blogging. My ultimate goal is to see if i can make $100 a day in passive income. I'm going to periodically update this blog with my successes and failures and say whats working (if anything) and whats not. I'm not going to charge, so you dont have to worry about me giving a lot of BS advice just to make a buck off of you. I'm also running a simultaneous blog on myspace.com with the same intention. So check it out!!!