Me, My Kid and Life

There is so much to write about, but then sometimes nothing comes to mind. I’ve found a cure for this dilemma. Keep a notepad nearby! Bring it on trips to the store, shopping, the cafe, anywhere you might think up an idea and need to write it down.

I must have over 200 article ideas written down. There is no way I could ever catch up with all the ideas I have for writing articles. Good! That’s not the goal. The goal is to not run out of options.

It’s nice to have extra ideas lying around because sometimes I just can’t think of anything I want to write about. It’s rare because I like what I write about, but if I’ve been working hard I might not have a lot of mental energy left over to come up with new blog topics. That’s when I refer to my notepad and pick one that seems appropriate for my mood, energy level and what I think I’d like to write about, at that time.

We can’t remember every idea that pops into our heads. Don’t bother trying. Just write it down. If you don’t have a notepad then write your idea on a scrap piece of paper, or a receipt, then transfer it to your notepad when you get home.

If you haven’t got a notepad laying around, take a plain piece of paper and start writing your ideas on that. Keep that piece of paper next to your computer so that when you sit down and think ‘what should I write about’ you’ll have your handy dandy list to refer to!

One of the nice things about a list of blog ideas is that of the ideas some will be short and easy to write while others will be more detailed. So, no matter your mood you’ll have a blog idea to fit it.

If your list starts getting long and you know you’ll never be able to write all those articles especially with all the other ideas you have swirling around in your head… consider yourself lucky!

Other Related Articles:
How Adsense Works
Monetize Your Website: Respecting Your Time and Valuing Your Efforts
How to Get Ideas for Writing Blogs and Creating Website Articles
Traditional Website vs Blog Format

I remember when I first considered creating a website, Me, My Kid and Life, just over 5 months ago. The first thing I did was to spend a good amount of time online reading about how to make money online, internet businesses, and how to monetize your website. I didn’t focus on things like how to get rich, fast money or mlm leads.

Certain topics are repeated frequently by webmasters who work from home, have an online business, and have been around for a while. They often talk about how the content for a website is the most important attribute for getting website traffic and making money via the Adsense program.

Different webmasters have different opinions and take different approaches to building website traffic and the best way to monetize your website. Steve Pavlina’s niche, Personal Development, is rather huge while Lisa specifically focuses her site on all the varying aspects of building a website. Both sites are ranked quite high in Alexa which goes to show that there are many options you can take as to how to design your own website and monetize your website.

Both Steve and Lisa’s sites have get a high number of website traffic hits and both webmasters support themselves exclusively from monetizing their websites in various ways, including the use of the Adsense program.

Did I lose you with the word ‘monetizing’? I used it in a sentence the other day with Sophie and she was like ‘huh? What does that mean?” To monetize your website means to make it so that you can make money from your website. It means setting your site up so that it can earn money. That is the act of monetizing your website.

It seems that some of the best ways to monetize your website are through the use of placing Google Adwords on your website via the Adsense Program and through web affiliate programs.

Google’s Adsense Program
Google’s Adsense program places Google Adwords on your website. When a reader is interested in the ad and clicks on it you make money from your website. No, that does not mean you should try to cheat the system and find ways directly or indirectly to click on the Adwords on your site. That would be against the Google Adsense Program Policies and could potentially get your banned from Google’s search engine.

I’ve seen a lot of sites out there that don’t use Google Adwords but do use other ad programs. I’m guessing that this generally occurs because Google has banned the site for violating Google Adsense Program Policies. If you are thinking about making money online using Google’s Adsense Program then you might want to acquaint yourself with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. I’ve read a lot on this subject and the consensus seems to be that the Adsense Program is the most profitable ad program for websites. It’s not a privilege a webmaster would like to lose.

Website Content
It is important to understand the nature of how the Adsense Program works with your website content. Basically, Adsense is content sensitive or content driven. Content is techy talk for the content of your article or the words in your webpage’s article, story, facts or whatever… as long as it’s words (or text) because Google’s search engine cannot read images.

When reading about creating a website for profit webmasters inevitable discuss the importance of good content. Another common theme is patience. Website design and monetization does not happen overnight. You will need to be patient. Set a goal. Decide how much money you want to make from your website and by what date, then, actively work to make that happen.

My goal is that I want my website to make $3000 a month by its 15th month. My website is currently 5 months old.

My goal is not traffic-based, it is income-based. Traffic and income are two different dynamics although they overlap. Traffic may, or may not, bring in additional direct money whereas income is the money earned from the website. When it comes to website design this distinction becomes very important.

It seems that many webmasters chase traffic. Many complain that they aren’t making much money. It doesn’t seem that traffic creates website income equally. Problogger wrote a good article on this topic. Darren talks about how some of his site make decent money without much traffic while other sites get tons of traffic yet make relatively less money. I believe this has to do with online social networking.

Social Networks
Online social networks are places where people gather to read and post blogs. A couple examples of Social Networks are Stumble Upon and Digg. Many webmasters have decided that social networks are the end all for getting website traffic. Without traffic a site would have no visitor and therefore would not be profitable.

Online social networking sites can dramatically increase a website’s traffic within a matter of hours if a single post catches on well. This could mean that more people than ever before could have access to viewing your account. I have had a few articles picked up by social networking sites that have increased my overall site traffic fairly substantially for a short period of time. Interestingly, none of those highly trafficked articles are my best money makers nor do they have high click through rates (CTR). A click through rate is the number of times an ad is clicked on for a particular article - the percentage.

On the other hand, social networks allow a site to build links going back to the webmaster’s site which helps increase the websites overall Page Rank, which is one of the ways Google determines the popularity of any particular website or webpage.

Ads on Your Website
Some webmasters sell advertising space on their websites. Advertising on your website is based on website traffic hits. Therefore, if you want to sell ads on your website your site will be more profitable (ie, your asking price can go up) with the more website traffic hits received - this is an area where online social networks become valuable to the webmaster. The more web traffic you generate the higher asking price your website will be entitled to.

The Value of Online Social Networking
Whether or not focusing on social networks is right for your website depends on your marketing strategy. Although I don’t focus on social networking I do acknowledge it and respect that it has a collaborative place on my website. By using social networks you increase your popularity in Google’s search engine which in turn increases your web page rankings, which in turn might increase your search engine hits which could help to increase your income from your website.

Search Engine Traffic
I have found that search engine traffic is the most valuable traffic when it comes to click thru rates. Google’s search engine likes interesting and informative web content because that is why a visitor is coming to your site in the first place. The reader is in need of information and because of the content on your webpage Google has decided that your website, or webpage, might offer what the reader wants. The higher you rank in Google’s search engine the more search engine traffic Google will send your way and the more likelihood there will be of making money from those visitors.

I remember reading an article by Steve Palvina in which he mentioned that some very small percentage of his total traffic came from search engines - something like 1.5%. For Steve’s site, perhaps search engine traffic isn’t really that important. Each site is different and unique just as each webmaster is unique. For this reason, it is important to understand how your site works and what monetizing techniques work best for you. I haven’t heard Lisa directly state the percentage of hits her site receives directly from search engines but she strongly advocates the importance of high ranking in search engine results.

Earlier in the month, I created a blog at Google’s Blogger. It was easy to set up and easy to add Adsense. I liked the look of the blog and felt it fit in nicely with the rest of my website.

Unfortunately, my Blogger blogspot blog was a separate entity from my website’s domain. I want to focus all of the Me, My Kid and Life traffic onto the same website as I believe it is a stronger strategy than to spread the traffic out between domains. Basically, I want my website and my blog to share the same domain name.

If I have a website and blog which are on the same topic but in different locations it would hurt my overall traffic because it would appear that I did not have as much content in either location and that would decrease my traffic. Content is king but traffic is something I am also trying to work on. I want all of my content in the same location as to maximize my traffic potential.

I would rather had one site with 100 hits than one site with 50 hits and another site with 50 hits but the two sites not connected. (In actuality, web traffic for Me, My Kid and Life this month will probably be just under 400 hits-a-day. I used easy numbers for the example to keep it simple. I have no way of knowing how many hits memykidandlife.blogspot.com is getting since Google Analytics is flat-lining the account. I do know people are visiting the blogspot blog because I can see activity in my adsense account from my blogspot webpages, as well as the fact that the blog is receiving comments and trackbacks.)

Higher traffic ranks my site higher overall with Alexa. When I decided to create my blog on Blogger Me, My Kid and Life was ranked at 815K. It’s not very high but my site is only a few months old and my numbers were going up. I was pleased with the progress as things were moving in the right direction.

As soon as I created the Blogger blog my website traffic started plummeting on Alexa. I could watch the drop happen on Alexa and in my Google Analytics account. At first, I couldn’t figure out why my Alexa ranking was dropping but then I noticed a drastic drop in my search engine results for my website in my Google Analytics account and within a four days of Google picking up my Blogger blogspot in my Google Analytics account Google stopped showing any numbers or statistics for the Blogger account. Google Analytics picked up my blogspot on March 10th and stopped picking it up on March 15th. As of a few days ago Alexa no longer has weekly rankings for my website, MeMyKidandLife.

Considering the fact that I’ve been diligently trying to increase my traffic by adding more content to my site on a regular basis it’s rather discouraging to have my ranking totally annihilated by Alexa.

One of the big problems with creating a website is that if you have a major problem, like pissing Google off - which I very well may have - there is no one to ask about it. You can’t write Google and ask if you did something wrong. You can’t write Alexa and ask why your website is no longer being ranked. What can you do?

The best I can do right now is to try to examine all of my web activity during the time when the traffic issues began. Luckily, I was able to do this. I came up with a few possibilities. The problem could stem from my new Blogger blog. I tried to incorporate the Blogger blog onto my site by using the FTP. I followed all the directions and it just didn’t work. I also tried to attach the Blogger blog to my website by using a subdomain and that didn’t work either. My host is Yahoo and there were plenty of instructions explaining exactly what how to incorporate the blog using both the subdomain and the FTP. To no avail. I was completely incapable of incorporating the Blogger blogspot into the Me, My Kid and Life domain.

I finally decided that I would continue to use the blog and would move articles over to my site when it seemed appropriate. I really liked the Blogger look and as it fit the feel of my site perfectly. Blogger is easy to navigate in and has a comfortable format and layout. So, since I couldn’t beat it I figured I would work with it until I found a more compatible solution. Google’s Blogger would add pics easily to the top right or top left corner, which I still can’t figure out for my own site. So, I would cut and paste the HTML from the Blogger Blog onto my homepage where I put many of the new articles I post on the site. I would also take important articles (such as Enduring and Embrassing French Language and Culture and The French School System and Sex Education and transfer them over to my website’s archives as the Blogger blog was tenuous and I knew I was going to keep my website and didn’t want to lose the blog articles.

Was the duplication of these articles on both sites what made Google Analytics shut down its statistical outpour of my new Blogger Blog? It seems like this may have upset Google, but I read all the time about articles that are on more than one site. In fact, I was just reading an article today about it. A blogger was saying what a great idea it is to have the same articles on different websites to increase one’s exposure. If that blogger is right then my theory is out the window. Too bad I can’t write Google and ask.

(Update on March 27, 2008 - I found the answer as to whether or not I upset Google by having some content on both my external blog and my website. Quoting Google ‘Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.‘ Well, that’s exactly what I did. It seems as though I have already fixed the problem so hopefully there will not be any long lasting ramifications for my error. Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines if you are interested in learning what Google likes and doesn’t like in Webmaster Behavior.)

Perhaps there is a flaw in my Google Analytics account? I don’t think so. I created a Google Analytics account for my blog and Sophie’s blog at the same time. Sophie’s Google Analytics is working fine for her Blogger blog, Teenage Life Junkie. Noteworthy, none of Sophie’s blog articles were directly added to my website. This would backup the theory that my website account is being penalized for duplicate publications of the same articles whereas Sophie’s blog account is being picked up by Google Analytics.

If I have angered the Google Gods via duplicate publications of a few of my articles on both my website and my blog then the best way to fix this is to create a functioning blog directly on my website - which is, of course, what I’ve been trying to do all along. The blog you are reading now is that attempt.

I have created this blog directly in my Yahoo account using Word Press. This blog, to the best of my knowledge, sits in my website’s domain, Me My Kid and Life. I’m fairly sure there isn’t a more direct way of having one’s blog incorporated into one’s website. Hence, (a) an absolute inability of decreasing one’s traffic by having one’s blog and website resting on different domains and (b) nothing to make the Google Gods angry.

I chose Word Press few reasons.

- It is Yahoo’s intermediate blog option and it had all the features I felt would meet my needs.

- The other day, I was reading one of Steve Pavlina’s recent blogs on Word Press Widgets and using the Word Press Widgets seemed like the best way to incorporate some of this new fangled high tech gizmo stuff without needing to know a lot about the technical aspects of how they work. Such as the “Share This” widget that allows you immediate access to all your favorite social networking sites (and some I’ve never heard of) so that an article can easily be promoted by your readers.

- I was watching one of Lisa’s video’s on How to Create a Blog With WordPress and she seemed quite pleased with the results her website received after recently switching over from Blogger to Word Press.

Hopefully, by the time you read this blog I will have figured out how to place Google Ads within Word Press. My goal is to live off the income I create from my website, Me, My Kid and Life. I clearly understand that there are certain things I must do to facilitate this goal.

- I must write good articles (valuable content).

- I must have a high level of traffic.

- I must have a high Click Through Rate (CTR) with Google Ads (or any other ad campaign I go with in the future).

…I’m working on it and I will succeed.

I’ve supported my daughter and myself exclusively from making money online for the past few years now. I’m ready for a change. I still want to make my living online, I just want to change the way I do it.

I want more freedom to travel and not be so time-restricted as to when I need to log on by. At present, I really can’t be away from a computer for more than a day, if that long. My goal is to create a website that will bring in enough of an income so that I may leave my other internet work behind and from time-to-time leave the internet behind completely.

I want to be able to take a cruise, which I simply couldn’t do right now because of my need to always be able to go on-line. I want to be able to take a cruise around the world. I’m not sure I actually want to take a cruise around the world, but I know I want the option.

It strikes me as funny that I can create an entire website with well over 100 pages completely from scratch and entirely in HTML but to add a simple little fully functioning and compatible blog, to date, has been an unsurmountable hurdle…

I will get over this hurdle tiny little hurdle of how to add a blog to my website. My website will flourish and grow. I want this. I will work for it. I will earn it. Most importantly… my website makes me happy. I’m happy to share. I’m happy to give. I’m happy to participate with others on a global level.

Updates
1:24am Easily added photo, but google ads are not showing up even though I’ve researched proper ad placement and the adsense script seems to be in the proper location.

DoshDosh has a ready-to-use downloadable Adsense ready Word Press template that I’m thinking of trying out. I can always alter the colors to better suit my site, at a later date.

1:59am Easily uploaded DoshDosh’s SEO Almost Spring with Adsense template. Almost Spring is the original template I wanted to use. I will probably want to alter the colors as it’s not quite a perfect fit with my site, but we’ll see. Two of the three adsense ads come up. The sidebar add does not appear - which is the same problem I was having with adding adsense to the sidebar earlier this evening. The two medium-sized rectangle adsense ads do appear and, for tonight, that’s good enough. Today’s goal was to get a blog up and running on my domain with adsense. As soon as I connect the links I will have accomplished my goal. I will be very pleased as getting a blog functioning on my site has plagued me for several months now.

2:28am Change link on Website’s homepage to redirect blog traffic to new spiffy Adsensitized Word Press Blog. One nice things about a blog vs a website is that you only need to change the code once on a blog whereas the code needs to be changed on each and every page in a website. The payoff in having a website is that you can totally create an environment to fit each page perfectly whereas on a blog each page set up is identical by default.

My next major task will be to add a forum. People have commented that they would like the ability to comment on some of my posts, like Is Marriage Outdated?, but can’t because the posts are articles, not blogs.

Other things on the ‘To Do’ List…

- Figure out why Adsense isn’t working on the sidebar of the Word Press blog

- (Done@3:59am) Create links from blog to website to ensure easy navigating for users

- (Done@3:29am) Change all blog links on website over to link to new blog address

- (Done@3:39am) Change top and bottom header colors in blog to match website

4:30am I was reading some posts and comments over at SEO Dave’s site on WordPress Theme Almost Spring with Google AdSense. Dave seems to think the sidebar is not widget compatible which explains why the sidebar Adsense isn’t showing. Others have run into the same problem. I’ve got two Adsense ads up. That’ll have to do.

On a more interesting note, remember how I mentioned that I thought I made Google angry by posting a few of my blogs both on my website and my (now old) blog. Well, Dave took someone else’s content and put it on his page and Google took away his Adsense program. A few days ago, I disabled my Blogger blog from Google’s Search Engine results. Thank goodness it was my own site and my own content with the same Adsense account or maybe Google would have shut down my Adsense account as well.

I hate to delete my Blogger blog because it has links on it from other sites and I wouldn’t like their links to go dead. On the other hand, it definitely seems that the best thing to do is to completely dump the Blogger blog as soon as possible. I only had a total of 8 posts on the Blogger site and only for a matter of a couple weeks or so.

I’ve learned a very valuable lesson… don’t be too indecisive. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the new Blogger blog since I couldn’t incorporate it into my website, but I liked writing a few posts in blogger as it gave me a new medium for writing and designing posts. I also got to learn a little about trackbacks and pings - tools I simply don’t use on the website but are clearly very important to many blog users.

It just didn’t occur to me that it would matter if I had a couple posts on both sites (probably because I often posts my articles on my website’s homepage). It matters. Google and Alexa care. I was cruising right along and watching my traffic ranking go up. I was so pleased with the progress. Then, it came to a screeching halt and I was watching my Alexa ranking plummet until it become a dash… a “-” of nothingness. I’m guessing that once the old posts are off the old blog, and the posts only exist on my website, Alexa and Google will forgive my mistake and allow me to continue my journey forward!

5:09am I have delete 5 of the 7 blogs on my old Blogger blog. The three that remain on the Blogger blog are not on my Website anymore. I hope I have resolved the issue as to why I was having ranking and Analytic issues with Google and Alexa.

One more thing, someone who commented on SEO Dave’s site said that he gets about 2000 unique hits per day but only makes about .20 per day. I have a theory about low CTRs and high unique hits coming from social networking sites. I’ve read and tend to believe that people who come to a site through a social networking system don’t click on links nearly as often as visitors who come to a site from a search engine. For this reason, I really try to write useful content. The articles I’ve written that have been the most popular have gained their hits from social networking sites but most of those ever so popular posts didn’t get many click throughs.

I value social networks because Google cares about those statistics. Therefore social networking is an important part of laying the foundation for my site but I mostly like to focus on writing articles about things that interest me.

The other day I checked my page rank for the first time. In fact, I didn’t really know what a page rank was so I researched it and found out what mine was. My page rank is a ‘4′. I’m very happy with that number. Hmmm… I just rechecked by page rank and it’s a -1 on a scale of 1/10, ten being best. lol. I’m just not going to worry about it. I’m sure it’ll be back to a good number soon.

Okay, I tried another page ranking site and it states my page rank is 4. I’m going with the second opinion! Here’s another page ranking site that also gave me a 4. This site also tells the exact age of the site. Me, My Kid and Life is 5 months and 4 days old and was registered on 10-21-2007. The site claims that the older the website the more favorable it tends to rank. The site also says my website is not registered with DMOZ or Yahoo (I’ll have to fix that) and that it’s value is $57.