Saturday, January 05, 2008

The ProBlogging Experience

These are the 25 things I learned in my first 40 days as a semi-problogger.

  1. Blogging on your own dotcom is better than on a free site. Opportunities are reduced 4x when on a free site. I still have to find out why.
  2. You need to have at least a 90-day old blog with no less than 20 posts, indexed by search engines and with regular updates.
  3. The more blogs you have, the better. It multiplies your earning potential.
  4. It’s not easy maintaining multiple blogs. You’ll run out of juice in the long run.
  5. PR matters: Those with nil are given fewer opportunities, and lesser payout.
  6. The higher the PR, the more the opportunities, and the bigger pay.
  7. Google swoops down the PR of those with too much sponsored post. Money or PR?
  8. You begin to worry about your own PR. Ghee and Javi expressed their concerns about my PR.
  9. Location matters. North American and European bloggers have more opportunities. It is advertisers’ preference though. We can’t do anything about it.
  10. Those with high traffic blogs can earn more with google adsense than doing sponsored posts.
  11. After 45 days with adsense, I still have a little over $1. I don’t have a quick-fix solution. I don’t know how others got hundreds.
  12. My first 8 posts in smorty gave me $76.40. They approve posts in 5 days and pays out weekly. The fastest so far.
  13. Some sites offering paid posts snub you. Or they just don’t approve your site immediately.
  14. You have to regularly log in to the opportunity sites in order not to miss out on some writing tasks.
  15. Some of the opps are just like bubbles. They appear and disappear before you even touch them.
  16. Blogging becomes a chore when it comes to some of the paid posts.
  17. You tend to skip reading the sponsored posts of your blogfriends, even failing to notice the more important ones. My apologies for falling into this. But there are those that are really good at concealing the ads.
  18. You fear you might have lost some of your readers because of the paid posts.
  19. Blogging for money is not on my original list on “Why do I blog”. Still, money is not my reason for blogging.
  20. You don’t love some of the opportunities presented.
  21. You love to blog about some opportunities you don’t qualify.
  22. You’ve got to have a paypal account.
  23. The good thing about paypal is -- registration is free.
  24. You get excited seeing the first few dollars in your paypal account.
  25. The bad thing is – you can’t withdraw it on any RP banks (except Union Bank). I’ll have to wait a little longer.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow! You've already earned more than 70 dollars? Not bad. Maybe you should try and get your own domain.

-snglguy-

Unknown said...

Oh well,as you`ve said:

"The higher the PR, the more the opportunities, and the bigger pay."

although,some consider blog traffic more than the PR.

nice post,Lazarus,good ideas/tips esp for beginners :)i can sense that youre working and learning a lot!

ghee

AJ said...

Hey bro.another informative post!
surely, this will inspire/help the novice blogger. I stopped (for the meantime perhaps,) doing problogging write ups..i was having a problem w/ smorty and paypal registration systems..or maybe because, i just write as per my mood is concern..keep up d goodworks anyway, and thanks for keeping me posted! :)

Anonymous said...

If I may add, some advertisers look at your Alexa ranking. That's why they don't like the free blog platforms kasi misleading ang Alexa rank. Ditto with traffic and other stats.

Happy New Year, Lazarus! More $$$ this 2008 to all of us :)

Lazarus said...

rudy, getting my own domain is on top of my blogging to dos this quarter. the basic domain and webhosting package is under $30 annual.

ghee/sasha, there are few advertisers who prefer alexa rank over PR. But again, it's the PR that matters to most.

josh, what happened to your smorty and paypal? They pay weekly.

Anonymous said...

Nice post, I learned a thing or two. I myself is o my way to blogging for money. Good for you, you are already earning. Good luck!

Anonymous said...

I'm glad you learned something out from this post, gladita. I was at your previous site. You moved na pala.