Excited About Blogging Again

Well, I started my own WordPress blog on HostGator, and I must say that I am excited again.  It is fun and challenging to try and start from scratch and try to build traffic and an audience of consistent readers.  Right now, I am spending a lot of time commenting on other blogs to try and get my name out there and develop social traffic at the same time that I develop links.  This seemed to be a good strategy for my other new site, OptionsDude.com.  As such, I think it will be a good thing for my new blog as well.  Since the topic is a little more broadly based, I am hoping that I can generate a little more interest.  I will know more over the next few months.

I am starting to make plans and goals for the new site as well.  I am not quite ready to post yet but in the next few days will be solidifying my plans for the remainder of the year.  I am hoping to be able to make up for the lost time that I suffered at the hands of the Panda Update.  It sure put my income back by almost a year as far as I can tell so I do have some catching up to do.  However, now that I am getting the hang of working on my own site, I think that things are more promising than before.

My new site is getting indexed in about 48 hours as best I can tell.  I have about 5 blog posts that are indexed and 2 more that have been recently written which should be in Google by the end of the week.  Having the site as part of Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools seems to help.  Plus the fact that I am commenting on other blogs after each post to take advantage of ComLuv also seem to help.  This is another reason that I think the blog will grow relatively quickly compared to my other work so far.  It is certainly nothing compared to what the professionals are able to do, but I am OK with that.  I am just a part-time blogger anyway.

Anyway, I am having a blast building something from the ground up and am curious to see what the possibilities will be.  I have been writing online for 2 years now.  The majority of that time was spent with the content farms and sites like Xomba, eHow, and HubPages.  I can't help but think where I might be if I had spent the time developing my own site or several.  I might have 200 posts on an authority blog rather than 200 disparate Hubs.  If you are even considering getting your own blog, I would suggest it.  HostGator has been easy to use and the installation of WordPress was pretty easy.  I can't believe I waited so long.  Just click on the HostGator banner above to start building your own blog now.

Earnings During the First Three Months of OptionsDude

I thought I would take some time and make a brief report about my progress and earnings at OptionsDude.com since it has been a full three months since I started the site.  I am also wanting to document this information so that I can compare the progress with my newest financial blogging site to see where the two will compare.  My goal is to have the site pay for itself during the first year of life.  After that, I would like to see it grow earnings ever so slightly so that it could be profitable after that.

The cost to set up the site with Weebly was $40 which included the domain and hosting.  Weebly takes a 50-50 split on AdSense impressions so that the cost of hosting is actually supplemented by my future earnings.  It turns out to be an easy way to start a site which doesn't involve much technical knowledge at all as well as an inexpensive way to get started.  It does come with a cost and that is 50% of your earnings.  There also seems to be less flexibility from a design standpoint.

I can see where a Weebly website would have a place.  I appreciate the opportunity to work on my site and have found that I am mainly blogging about my options trades and adding in a few other blog posts.  I have some articles at the site and will add some more content over time.  Initially I thought a more static site would be the way to go, but I have found that I prefer the blogging format to a much greater degree.

That being said, I think I still have a decent future with OptionsDude.  I have developed a following among several financial bloggers.  I think many are interested in the information that I am publishing and the practical experience that I bring.  I am also getting search engine traffic which is slowly increasing.  I am excited to see what the remainder of the year has in store.  I think that I could double my traffic and maybe even see triple the search traffic that I am seeing now.

Increasing the search engine traffic is vital to being able to increase the earnings since social traffic will not click on any of the AdSense ads.  That is OK though.  I have always believed that overall traffic has some impact upon search engine results and authority.

As for the earnings, I have earned a total of $3.47.  That may not sound like a lot, but I anticipate that it will be gradually increasing so that by the end of the year, I would expect to be earning a solid $5 or more per month.  I believe that I am truly on pace to earn the $40 I would need by the end of the first 12 months.  Added content is indexed fairly quickly.  Plus, I plan on adding a couple blog posts per week which should help add to the visibility of the site.

Starting to Get Search Engine Traffic

It may not be the best traffic (photo credit: Derek Harper), but I am starting to get some search engine traffic at my new site, Optionsdude.com.  It seems that the majority of that traffic is coming to the various posts on my blog through several longer tail keywords.  I can't tell you how exciting this is so soon after starting the site.  Unfortunately, the bounce rate is pretty high and minimal time has been spent on the site, but there has been one visitor who spent more than 1 minute!

I am also generating daily traffic by commenting on blog posts from blogs that I find on the Yakezie Personal Finance Blog Network at Yakezie.com.  There are a lot of good bloggers that are part of the network.  I know that I will never be able to have a blog like one of those, but maybe someday, I could come close.

By commenting daily, I am able to get a handful of visits daily which provides just enough motivation to keep going.  I did have one day last week which had no traffic at all, but that was the only one over the past 30 days.  My plan is to continue to read various blog posts and make relevant comments on ones that I might be able to add to the discussion.  I will do this as I continue to try and add content to my site.  Adding content is a little slow going right now, but I did add a page this past week.  Maybe I can get something up tomorrow also.

I would like to see the number of visits to the site surpass the number to this blog by the end of the year.  It will be tough going, but I think I can do it.  I will need to post some links to some of the various articles after I get more content up.  I really have yet to try and backlink any individual pages other than with a few blog comments.

I also want to say that I am seeing some of my pages in Google for some of the longer tail keywords that I have been following.  I am on page 2 for one and page 4 for another.  Too bad there is little monthly search traffic for these words, but at least I know the process is working.  Again maybe by the end of the year, I can get some serious ranking done for some of these keyword phrases with backlinking.

The bottom line is that the progress is somewhat slow for me since I don't spend 8 hours per day on the internet.  But at least there is progress.  Oh and by the way, I have earned $1.10 on the site, so I only have $38.90 to break even!