I just published a piece on the potential expansion of the MLS in to the Atlanta market called, "Can Atlanta Support an MLS Franchise?" which I think is both topical and interesting and could drive some traffic to Gruffgoat's Football Blog.
For these first fourteen days, I've been submitting my own pieces to digg and other social networking sites, but I want to let this one sit on my site for a day or two to see if anyone thinks it "diggworthy".
Also, views seem to be pretty steady at around 35 per day; which is still quite low, but I'm ok with that for now. I've had a total of 329 unique visitors so far with 1,340 pageviews.
Interestingly enough, my most popular article so far has been about the collision between Turkey's Ayhan Akman and Germany's Simon Rolfes. Both players needed medical treatment on the sideline - Akman actually got his head stapled shut before returning to the pitch - I guess that kind of grit and determination has broad appeal!
I'm going to keep Gruffgoat's Football Blog as a blend of news interest stories, local Atlanta interest stories, and commentary...with that backdrop, I have 63 posts and counting - I'm thinking about enlisting some help; particularly for the local Atlanta interest stories...I just don't have the arms and legs to do all of it, but still want Gruffgoat's Football Blog to be a key soccer resource with broad reach.
Folks, this is how Gruffgoat's Football Blog looks today, 5 July, 2008:
My template originally looked very much like this one:
I've circled in red the Ads I removed from Gruffgoat's Football Blog. The Ad Bar on the top right header, the Adsense bar above the first post, and the 2x3 line of 125x125 ads on the right quadrant.
Why? After looking at my soccer site and looking at some of the highest rated by links and readership, I was thinking my site looked very busy. It looked like it was more about advertising and less about content. So about ten days in, I moved almost all of my ads to a single "Sponsors Page" that looks like this:
I'm going to track hits to this page through Google Analytics and report on how well this is working.
Cheers.
Step 10.
Here we are at Step 10, the final step...and the step is - share the love! What does that even mean?
Well, it's more of a request actually. If you've liked what you read here, if you've learned something new, or if you've just found something useful, please place a link to any or all of these steps on your own site or blog! Remember, the URL here is: http://writefordollars.blogspot.com.
Also, please share your results, make comments to these posts, send me emails with suggestions, tell me what has worked (or hasn't worked) for you!
This concludes my 10 steps - pretty neat that it ended up being 10 - for getting Gruffgoat's Football Blog up and running.
After this post, I'm going to transition my entries in How to Write for Dollars to more of a journal. I'll tell you what I've tinkered with, what seems to be working, how much (if any) money I'm actually making, and so on! Thanks again and stay in touch.
Welcome, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, Step 5, Step 6, Step 7, Step 8, Step 9, Step 10
Step 9.
Wow, you've almost caught up with Gruffgoat! You have a nice clean blog, you have Adsense ads, you have an Amazon.com store, you have ads running through your affiliate partnerships, and most importantly, you have content!
What you're missing now, is readers.
First, you have to know how many readers you've got. Go back to your Google account and make sure you sign up for the "Analytics" tool. Within a few clicks, Google will serve up a snippet of HTML code that you will need to embed in your blog. Do not be daunted by this if you're not a techie, it's really just a cut and paste exercise - but before you do anything with your HTML, make sure you BACK UP YOUR TEMPLATE to your hard drive in case something goes terribly wrong.
Once that is installed, you'll be able to get some business understanding of your Blog's traffic or, as Step 9 suggest, lack thereof.
One of things I've done to drive up traffic on Gruffgoat is to give my readers an easy option to share my posts. If you take a look at the bottom of each post, you'll see a list of buttons. These buttons give readers an easy path to share my posts on digg, technorati, del.icio.us and so on.
There are several methods to do this, I prefer adding the little graphic buttons you see below each of my posts.
Here comes the science!
First - go to your blog's Layout Tab and select Edit HTML:
Make sure you check the Expand Widget Templates box:
Now you're going to look for a line of HTML code in your template that looks a lot like this:
Hit return a few times just under the closed div tag to give yourself some space:
Now the fun part. Copy and paste the following code right in there. Feel free to use my code, but note that my graphics are linked to my photobucket account - so if one day I decide to chuck it all to work on a dude ranch in Montana, then you might be in trouble.
Of course by now you know to Preview before you Save! But this should add all of the social networking buttons I like, to your blog ;-)
When have a great post that you think the world is interested in, use these links yourself to send it out to your growing audience!
Welcome, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, Step 5, Step 6, Step 7, Step 8, Step 9, Step 10
Step 8.
We are almost done with the "Money Making" part of Gruffgoat's journey to date. There are future money making avenues I hope to explore, such as writing reviews for money, but most of my research thus far suggests that my blog will need to be up and running for at least three months before product managers will even give me a glance. I will let you know as soon as I get some intel on that revenue stream.
And speaking of streams, I wanted to talk to you about one of the mightiest of streams, Amazon.com! In Step 7 I talked about placing ads as an affiliate partner with vendors, now I want you add one more item to your growing "to do" list, and that is sign up as an Amazon.com affiliate.
I separated this Step from the previous because of one reason - the Amazon store. As an affiliate, you'll have access to link buttons much like you found with Affiliate Future, but you'll also be able to create your own Storefront to sell products related to your content! Pretty cool huh?
I have two stores with Amazon.com now:
Amazon.com Soccer Super Store
"How to Write for Dollars" Store
and both are linked off my blog front pages. With your Amazon store, you can add only the products you want to sell, or you can add products by category. Either way, you should certainly consider giving your readers the option to browse your own Amazon store. Again, it's a commission model which means you don't have to do anything but send people that way.
Which leads us to Step 9 - How to Get People to Read Your Blog!
Welcome, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, Step 5, Step 6, Step 7, Step 8, Step 9, Step 10
Step 7.
Right, you may have noticed on this blog and on Gruffgoat's Football Blog, that I have more than just Adsense ads up and running.
So you want to know how I got hooked up with global brands like Adidas, World Soccer Shop.com, EuroSport, Four Four Two Magazine, TicketMaster, and so on? Be ready to use some elbow grease folks, because this gets to be a bit like work.
First of all, the decision for these guys to let you list their ads is not automatic, so you really do have to have good content. But to get these ads set up, you may need to put down your pen for a while and roll up your sleeves.
It took me about three weeks to get all of the ad partners that I wanted set up and listed on my blog. With the benefit of this post, hopefully it won't take you quite that long.
I decided to try running ads as an affiliate. Basically that means that I earn a commission off of anything a shopper buys, IF they click through to the shopping website from an ad on my site and IF they end up buying something! Those are two very big IFs!
There are some firms, such as Ticketmaster, who run their own affiliate program, but most farm it out to an affiliate clearinghouse to manage the sign-ups, the tracking, the links, and so on.
The two affiliate partners I use are:
Affiliate Future
Commission Junction
You will have to spend some time in this process, but this is a big step to getting your site looking the way you want it, placing their ads, and then getting back to the fun part - Writing for Dollars!
Welcome, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, Step 5, Step 6, Step 7, Step 8, Step 9, Step 10
Step 6.
So here we are, six steps in, and you're finally starting to talk turkey? If I were to break down the "How to Write for Dollars" blog in to "How to Advertise my Blog", then this would be Step 1! I'm not sure if that's a consolation prize for you or not, but nonetheless, you have to march from Step 1 to Step 5 before you can offer any one anything even remotely compelling.
The first ad program that I tried with gruffgoat.blogspot.com, was definitely the road most traveled...it was also the road most accessible! And when you're just starting out, seeing the road in front is a big big plus!
If you are using blogger per my suggestion in Step 2, then you will see that it is already tightly integrated through the Layout tool with Google Adsense!
But not so fast, make sure that you have signed up for a Google Adsense account at:
https://www.google.com/adsense.
You will get a unique id that will be associated with your Google account and this id will provide the tracking that Google needs to ensure they are counting the clicks write and paying you accordingly!
An important rule you should know about - you sneaky little rascal - is that you can't click on your own ads to generate revenue (not that you would of course ;-)
Get those adsense ads set up and working!
Welcome, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, Step 5, Step 6, Step 7, Step 8, Step 9, Step 10
