Blogging Success and Failures

When you enter into the world of blogging, you will learn almost every single details as to how this stuff works, how you can make money with your blogs, how to gain traffic, how to increase readership, how to find the best template for your blog or website and much more how to's that you will encounter while you are on your way to this kind of business or hobby.

Reading articles on how to create an effective, productive or income generating blogs is essential also in order to reach your main goal. Like you, I have spend much of my time reading articles about how this things works and some recommendations of those who are ahead of us as well as the lessons learned from those who stopped blogging. Based on what I have read and heard from different sources, those bloggers who quit are due to :

1. Lack of interest.
2. Busy with new job or work.
3. Low traffic.
4. Fewer visitors.
5. No more post or article to make.
6. Laziness to update blogs
7. Decreased Google Page Ranks or PR zero
8. Adsense account was disabled due to invalid clicks.
9. Low or no affiliate and advertisement income.
10. Language

Meanwhile, those who are still into bloggings have maintained the opposite of the reasons mentioned above. They even made more development of their blogs and even expanded and created more website. I remember one author said that " the greatest mistakes that bloggers did was to stopped blogging ". After making a blog or website for few months, they stopped. We need to take note that traffic or visitors are earned over time. The more post we make and the more efforts we make in order to promote our website or blog, the more chance of reaching our goal.

Here are few tips that I have learned about successful blogging:

1. Examine your title, articles or posts. Most authors or successful bloggers recommends to have one theme. Topics that will lead the readers to bookmark your site or to subscribe to you posts. It does not matter if your will just make 20 articles of same theme. Readers will come back and spend more time in your site if they found your site useful.
2. Examine your website design and template. Does it matches your title? Does the graphics are related to the theme? Do not put more graphics. Avoid to many widgets. Do not add ad links that have pop ups. It is annoying. Put yourself in the readers shoe and you will never visit that site again.
3. Examine how long your page will load. How many seconds or minutes until it will be fully loaded. This happens when you add more pictures in the website. When you created a post with pictures, try to edit it or embed the image URL or just the image link. Photobucket and Flickr are some places to edit the size or the get html or image URL links.
4. Create 5 or more Lengthy articles.

My Affiliate Experience

Affiliate is like an online sharing between an online merchant and the website or blogger owner by placing advertisements on his website to sell the products of bring potential costumers to the merchants website in exchange for a profit share of the products in three ways:

• Pay per Click
• Pay per Sale
• Pay per Lead

Since I am on my way of exploring how to earn money online and also curious as to how Affiliate marketing works, I tried taking affiliate opportunity in SocialSparks. As seen below were my taken affiliate opportunities dated October 14 and October 21, 2008. I have followed the all the requirements:

To make a post of each affiliate opportunity in my blog.
Generate a code
Paste it in my Blog

Everyday, I checked my account on affiliate, It is clear the Start date (10-21-08) and End Date (10-21-09).
Last November 2, 2008, I received an email with subject, Ended Links Still Active and the body of the letter are as follows:

Please be aware that the following links are from affiliate opportunities that have recently ended:
423667/Personalized Flash Drives
423693/WhiteWalls
Art Gallery... Love Art?
423665/FirstStreet USB Turntable
Please remove these from your sites as you will not receive any additional payments from click-throughs.

Opps! I thought it will end on October 2009?! Anyways, Delete, delete. What can I do! Hmm. Another lesson to learn again.

LP Saver™ USB Turntable

Upon learning this new technology that converts all of your old records to CDs, iPod, MP3 or any other digital files. All you need to do to record your records to CD is simply plug this one-of-a-kind three-speed (33 1/3, 45, and 78 RPM) LP Saver™ USB Turntable right into your PC. It plugs directly into your computer using the included USB cable. In addition, it comes complete with dustcover, and all cables are included.

I remember one of the friends was worried about their wedding VHS video since it happened 15 years ago, the pictures were no longer clear and so with the sounds. With USB Turntable, the quality of the recordings will be improved by eliminating some of the old pops, hisses and static they've acquired over the years.

Thinking to give gift for your dear ones? This is an ideal gift. Wait, why not get one for your mom? I'm sure she will love it!