Bill Masson Work At Home Network

Hi all, here’s a brief look at my daily tasks on how I approach building new blogs and sites, now it might not be the experts way of doing things but hey it works for me. Of course I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject, share and share alike!

Keeping up to date with my blog building journey I have launched two more new sites on Yoga and Herb Gardens. I am still in the building process with these blogs and over time I hope to have more structure with the widgets and visitor information. Comparable sites are packed with information so I can learn from them and structure accordingly. I hear a lot of webmasters saying that you should build your site first before you add Google Adsense but I just think that this a load of bull. Why leave empty real estate when you can monetize right away and benefit from the odd click.

I noticed after I had launched two Cashback sites that my Adsense earnings increased quite dramatically, I put this down to higher paying advertisers with the likes of financial and retail ads showing up, along with the fact that visitors to these types of sites are more likely to click on the ads because there on a spending mission.

Starting any site requires research and I write at least 20 articles, I like to post about five immediately and time stamp the rest to go out every two days. I exclude the post date and time from the theme so that once all the articles have been posted I can leave it as a static site. It’s important to give the site a normal website look as opposed to looking like A BLOG. The great thing about WordPress is its shear flexibility and excellent SEO abilities.

Every post should have a good description and keyword tags, the simple tags plugin if configured properly can have a dramatic effect for linking your site up which the search engines love. Your permalinks are important as well and with Headspace 2 you can double your permalink structure to increase search engine exposure, I find that it is always beneficial to change your site wide permalink structure from the WP default dating which is awful.

Another great SEO plugin to consider is Smart SEO links which apart from linking up your pages and posts also allows you to paste in a list of affiliate links so that when you type out any affiliate keywords it automatically hyper links them. You can choose to have the links open in a new window and add no follow attribute if you so desire.

For extra content I like to use three RSS plugins, I don’t always use all of them but together or individually they can increase your content automatically. Two of the RSS plugins are from lessnau.com, the twitterdoodle utilizes the twitter stream and allows a user to create posts and categories based on Twitter keyword searches. The RSS Doodle plugin does a similar job but fetches excerpts from posts by keyword search and pulls results in from Technorati. The third RSS script called FeedWordpress can pull in feeds from any site or blog, you will have to experiment with this one as results can be a bit unpredictable, you also have to swap over two RSS php files to replace the default ones in your “include file”.

Adding more dynamic content, the likes of video and Podcasts gives your site a richer content value for your visitors. You can of course setup a mashup of Video and Podcast RSS feeds. I like to hold these feeds for “pending review” before I post them. I can then add tags and description along with time stamping them for future release.

I guess this covers most of the important points of setting up your site to get the search engines to notice you. I don’t do any premium promotion for my blogs; I tend to do promotion through manual submissions to directories and search engines, all the important ones anyway. Of course I use the social networks and as many free blogging platforms as I can manage too.

Until the next update, thanks’ for reading

Please feel free to leave your thoughts and share your knowledge

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If you’re looking for a CMS (content management system) that is maintenance free then you might consider taking a look at Blogs.mu. You can sign up for a free account to see if you like it and if you do’ there are several premium options that unlock various extras.

From what I can tell from this CMS from Blogs.mu, the principle gain for subscribers is a hands free hosting account. To put this in context say you have 25 WordPress blogs online that are self hosted and assuming that you have the same plugins in all of them. So every time a plugin needs updated or WP has an upgrade you have to manually login to all 25 blogs und upgrade plugins. Now multiply that 25 blogs by 3 fold you now have 75 blogs that you have to look after. So without doubt Blogs.mu really comes into its own because they take care of all the upgrades and keep your WordPress site up to date, so you get the idea, total peace of mind and a hell of all a lot of time saved.

To give you an idea of investment return, the following estimation of earnings is based on the Adsense model, you can of course you have any advertising platform that you wish including any affiliate programs. Before I forget, you can have your own domain name and start your own community of blogs by inviting premium memberships. Or you can start a free local community and generate cash through advertising for your chosen cause.

Their package starts at $7 per/month for a single blog then rises up to $9 for 10 blogs, it gradually goes up to 5000 blogs at $299.00 per/month. So to put that into context if you have the 50 blogs package at $24.00 per/month and you make 50 cents a day from each blog, then you’re looking at $750 in revenue. So take away your domain name costs of say $7 per domain that still leaves you with $400 clear profit. It’s not that impossible to achieve and you can relax in the knowledge that you blogs are up to date in regards to plugins. Of course you have to provide the content and design. If you can manage a $1 a day from each site you’re looking at $800 profit.

I found the Blogs.mu system to be a little restrictive in regards to editing and plugin choice. It could do with a decent SEO plugin like HeadSpace2 to give you more flexibility, and it lacks the freedom of self hosting which I feel is important when you need to use automated RSS plugins or edit your theme, but overall it does have a very easy layout and feel to it. I am as yet undecided on what format to use when building a network of blogs. If you are going to have 50, 100 or a thousand sites then working out the best CMS solution is critical. Perhaps these minor problems will disappear with future upgrades and addons. They have a support forum and help for new subscribers.

I recently dropped by to the support forum and made some suggestions on plugins, they seem to be open to the upgrade of one or two of my suggestions like CommentLuv and the DoFollow attribute.  Let’s not forget the main principle of Blogs.mu; it is an excellent platform for starting your own community. Depending on how you want to go about it you could be covering your costs quite easily by charging a membership fee, the potentials are endless.

Check out Darren Rowse Problogger Interview with founder of Blogs.mu James Farmer

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