Make money blogging in South Africa

I got a really great idea from a colleague of mine about a series of posts for this blog. I’ll be reviewing a number of these Web 2.0 sites that you hear and see all over the internet, but just you don’t know what the point of the site is, or how to get the most out of them. Sites like Digg, Technorati, Flickr and the likes have very different uses but have a number of benefits for you and your blog.

So over the next few weeks I’ll be highlighting some of these sites along with their pros and cons and how to squeeze the most benefit out of these sites for your blog.

While I’m at it, I’ll be adding a BuzzWord to each post - start using these in every day conversation, and you’ll sound seriously hip and happening on the web!

BuzzWord #1

Viral Marketing

Takes your message and powerfully and quickly spreads it across the Internet, just like the age-old concept of “word-of-mouth”, but in an electronic context

I recently had quite an upsetting experience with Adsense over the New Year period. 3 days before Christmas I received an email from Google informing me that they had disabled my Adsense account for illegal clicks. I was completely shocked. Illegal clicks? Where? How? When? Was it me? I just couldn’t understand it.

So as they suggested, if I thought that they had made a mistake, I could appeal their decision and they would look into the case. If they found that their decision was the correct one, that the decision was then final and I would never be allowed into the Adsense program again. Firstly I was pretty sure if they just had a look at my sites, that they would find nothing wrong and they would reinstate my account immediately. My second thought was - “what if…“. and this is where I learnt 1 very important lesson.

Diversify your income

The old saying goes - “Never put all your eggs into one basket.“. This is so true, but how many people actually follow through on this age-old business model? It is becoming ever more important to diversify your earnings model. Relying heavily on Adsense and Google traffic, might work for months, even years, but when you become complacent about it, thats when all of a sudden your sites drop from the SERPs and your Adsense account runs dry. I might not of been making tons of money with Adsense when my mini-crisis happened, but it still made me sit-up and start thinking about multiple revenue streams.

John Chow is an excellent example of how to use multiple revenue streams. He is currently making money from Adsense, Vibrant IntelliTXT, Text Link Ads, FeedBurner Ads, ReviewMe, Direct Ad Sales, Affiliate Sales and even by receiving Free Stuff. Some make more money than others, but the principal is still the same. If he had to lose 1 or even 2 of these revenue streams, he would STILL be making money.

Where do I start diversifying?

I wrote a post earlier regarding making money from blogging and I outlined 4 different revenue streams that are possible for South Africans (as well as the rest of the world) to make money from. Concentrate on 1 or 2 different streams to start with and once you have mastered them move on and learn about others. This way you will always stay ahead of the game and never have to worry when 1 of those rivers run dry.

BTW, after a couple of days, Google did reinstate my account and all my earnings along with it.

Ever wondered how, when you hover over an affiliate link on someone’s site, it shows something like this:

I too wondered that. It really is an simple, yet very smart way of hiding those ugly affiliate links, as well as tracking your affiliate clicks. Want you know how its done? Sure you do…
Keep reading →

You may not even know it, but you are spilling your very own pagerank to all the links in your blogroll! Your blogroll appears on every page on your blog which makes those half intelligent Google spiders think that you highly recommend those sites since you link to them on every single page! So off the spiders go and along with it, some of your pagerank. (This is not an exact science, but there are a couple of case studies that have been done on this.)

Internal Linking your way to a better pagerank

If you are going to have a blogroll, make sure that you have at least 5 times the number of links on your blogroll pointing internally. Another tip is to add the nofollow attribute to all the links in your blogroll, which will stop Search Engine spiders from moving on to those sites. Obviously if any of these sites are reciprocating the favour, then by all means keep them in your blog roll with the nofollow attribute off.

Andy Beard posted on his blog regarding leaking pagerank through a blogroll. He has some tips on how to increase the number of internal links on your blog which I will definitely have a look into. I have already started implementing some of these strategies, and the first was to remove my blogroll. I’ve moved it over to a links page, which also has link exchanges and a couple of links to my favourite articles on the web.

In conclusion

So to those of you trying to increase your page rank, try to stop spilling your pagerank to other sites by using a blogroll. Also try and increase those internal links and maybe your pagerank will increase too!

So you have started your blog, chosen a niche topic to blog about, used a number of my SEO tips and have got the hang of RSS. Now you asking - show me the money!

Being in South Africa, and not being able to use PayPal, does limit the number of advertising and affiliate options that are available on the net. But it definitely doesn’t stop us!

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I have just installed the dofollow plugin for Wordpress. Ever since Google launched a campaign in 2005 to stop comment spam, they initiated that the attribute rel="nofollow" be placed on all links in the comments on blogs. It made sense in the beginning but recently there as been a big move to remove it.

What the rel="nofollow" attribute does is that search engines will not “follow” links that have that attribute set on a link. Although spammers try to use it from their own benefit by placing phrases like “buy viagra online” etc that then link to their sites which influences search engine rankings and SEO, it kills the real benefit it has for bloggers. So lets fight spam and not blogs.

So from now on any links in my comments will not have that attribute on it, and therefore I will be sharing Pagerank with you as well as connecting bloggers and the web the way it was intended.

Visit the NoNoFollow site to read more on the pros on turning rel="nofollow" off, install the dofollow plugin and start spreading the comment link love again.

In need of some Google juice? SEO is the single most important thing to getting better rankings and traffic from Search Engines. Every type of website, whether it is a static text-based site, or a fully fledged CMS, needs SEO to rank. So here are some of the top tips to increase SEO rankings for blogs.
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As I’ve written previously, it really is easy to start a blog. But that means there are also tons of bloggers out there - around 54 million and counting!

If your blog is going to get a decent amount of traffic, and make some money (more on that later), you need to specialise. Think about that in the real world. When a doctor specialises, they without a doubt, make more money than a standard GP. They also normally have more work to do, as there are fewer doctors that do exactly the same as they do, so they are more in demand. This example somewhat applies to the blogosphere. If you have a specialized blog I.E. a niche blog, and your blog has some decent unique content, you too should get more traffic, which monetized correctly, could earn you some decent cash. Keep reading →

So you understand what a blog is, and you have your head wrapped around the simple, yet powerful technology of RSS feeds, now you got to start blogging! Keep reading →

I’m sure you have seen these orange buttons on the web sometime or another, or have seen a link saying “subscribe to RSS”, but don’t have a clue of what it is? Well let me explain. Keep reading →