The heat is on
In my blog income report for October I stated that I wanted to spend more time on PINTEREST to improve the reach of my blog. I am happy to report that I was able to fulfill this goal. To be quite honest, I did more than fulfill the goal, I spent way too much time on sorting out PINTEREST and get certain things rolling.
I have added a total of 40 PINs in November for the 4 blog posts I added to the blog. I converted two of those blog entries into podcast pieces, as well as into YouTube videos. This whole process of writing a blog post, creating PINs, podcast, and YouTube videos is taking a whole lot of time already. Spending the remainder of my time to read-up on PINTEREST strategies and how to apply them is another huge time drain.
At this point I am not quite sure where I should focus my attention more. Creating content is important but so is social marketing. The fact that I am working my 9-to-5 does not help here either. I would much rather spend 100% of my time on adding content and growing this blog. But who knows maybe at some point in the future this will become an option.
I kicked off a request to Fiverr to write a blog article fro my blog about earning money as a ghost writer on Fiverr. I let you know here and in the post which posts are coming from a paid service, such as Fiverr. However if you think about it, this is a perfect match for my blog. I do not currently offer any service on Fiverr however people earn more or less money on Fiverr which makes it a real option on earning money on the side. it goes without saying that this income will not be passively earned but is earned by investing your time and effort.
I do expect to publish the result(s) within the next week or two.
AdSense rejection
So this one came initially as a surprise to me. I created another blog post about my experience with Google's AdSense rejection. The short of it is that about 96% of applicants are being rejected and I have not yet created sufficient content to be considered a viable partner to display their ads. Interestingly, Google Ads thinks otherwise and is asking me to spend money on Ads promoting this very web page. Its strange how the same company has different opinions when it comes to the type of partnership it is willing or asking to engage in.
I will try again early next year when I added more contents to my blog. and update everyone on what happened to this. For now you can enjoy an ad-free http://MakeMoneyOnlineForLife.com blog. I will look closer into other monetization opportunities for this blog in December. My goal will be to have a blog income report which shows a number greater than zero.
You can find my Support request here : https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/21307348?hl=en
UPDATE: I was able to sign up with Media.net instead and can now display ads on my blog. Because I just enabled them three days ago I have only received 54 impressions and thus earned nothing yet. I am very curious to see if I can earn a small amount through Media.net for the blog income report for December 2019.
[ml_raw_html]
Adding a new URL
I decided to pay another $8.99 to get a shorthand URL to this very website. I found typing MakeMoneyOnlineForLife.com somewhat long. You can now also reach us using this shorthand URL : http://mmofl.com. This will re-direct you to the secure https - address of our blog. This shortened link will help in certain cases when you need to provide an easy to remember address.Speaking of URLs. I also decided to change the link creation of this wordpress blog and strip the date string from the generated link. This is because I do expect to write a lot of posts which will be evergreen and thus be maintained, and modified over the coming years. Leaving the original creation date does not make sense in the long term and would only confuse the user.
If you ever want or need to change your link structure you have to be careful to not lose your links history. This can be achieved through some 301 - redirects in your ".htaccess" - file on your server. 301 redirects stands for "Moved Permanently".
"A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website."
E.g.
Redirect 301 /2019/10/07/how-to-start-with-passive-income https://www.makemoneyonlineforlife.com/how-to-start-with-passive-incom
Redirect 301 /2019/10/17/getting-started-september-2019-2 https://www.makemoneyonlineforlife.com/getting-started-september-2019-2
...
Installed Plugins
At the beginning of this month I was still very much into adding features and plugins to the blog. By now the blog should have almost all it will need. The additional plugins I installed are listed below.
- AddToAny Share Button
- Responsive Mortgage Calculator
- ML Raw HTML
- Pin It Button On Image Hover And Post
- URL Shortener by MyThemeShop
Responsive Mortgage Calculator is plugin I initially wanted to add some dynamic contents to my car buying article. I eventually came to the conclusion that I can do better using simple HTML, and JavaSctript instead ( You can check the result out here )
ML Raw HTML is another nice plugin. If you ave ever reached the limitation of Wordpress formatting and you went to the raw Text editor you most certainly started to regret ever clicking back on the Visual editor. This simple back and forth can destroy your carefully crafted HTML. This plugin will stop certain Wordpress formating and leave the raw HTML in place.
Pin it Button On Image Hover And Post. The author of this plugin certainly went over board when naming his plugin. The good thing about the name though is that it basically tells you what the plugin is all about. What can I say, it works like a charm.
URL Shortener by MyThemeShop allows you to create links which then re-direct to a specified ( longer ) URL.
Removed Plugins
I uninstalled the Play.ht plugin mainly because it did not work for me. The one time I was able to make it work with parts of my text, I did not hear the benefit I was hoping for. It may work better for you. In my case I know I will be better off without it.New domain registration
This new domain is a short hand for Make Money Online For Life. It will help in certain cases when a shorter URL is helpful. The main domain name is still MakeMoneyOnlineForLife.com and is what I am actively promoting to grow the brand. Branding is nowadays very important and a lot of blogs seem to miss this part IMHO.
In the future I intend to also utilize this URL as a link shortener. Something like http://mmofl.com/GXHZzuO5R1 could link to an affiliate link ( wink, wink ). Since these links are affiliate links, please feel free to order one. I wonder what the commission or the $256,000.00- watch is.
It would be great if one of the next few blog income report would show additional affiliate income as well as income through Ads. However finding synergy with products which will honestly bring value to my readership is hard to come by.
PINTERESTing
I have spend a lot of time working on my PINTEREST account. at first glance I can see the "Impressions" with an astounding 10.46k. However digging deeper into the numbers I can see that PINs linking to my web site only have 1.5k "Impressions". The more important "Link Click" metric shows an underwhelming 3 clicks total for the entirety of my PINTEREST existence. To make matters worse, this number it might have been me accidentally clicking on the PINs. There certainly is a lot which can be improved.
If you look closely you can see that the last two days have not been good. Going down from about 570 impressions to zero. I will see if this is a fluke in the analytics or if the real traction of my Pinterest account amounts to nothing. These are the pains of starting out and doing trial and error. Certainly if this does not change I do not see my blog income report for December look any better.
At this time I am bedaffeled and am questioning if it was something I did wrong, was it the Thanksgiving holiday, is it just an analytics issue, will I get some Impressions today and tomorrow, what can I do to change this picture ... Next month I will know how the trend-line will have changed. For now I am moving full-steam ahead.
In November, I sent out a total of 10 requests to join other peoples Group Boards and have been accepted by 3 boards thus far.
- Make Money Online by Inu Etc
- All About Money by CentsiblyRich
- Blogs that Make Money by Yao | DigitalManners| Blogging
I have researched Pinterest for the past two months and found many, many blogs which had great success through Pinterest. I have never read anything like I experience now on other blogs. This is a reminder to all new bloggers to be cautious about what you read. Information can be outdated, wrong or misleading.
Another important goal for December I want to reach is to grow to 25k Impressions and have at least 10 clicks. At this time I have no freaking idea if I can achieve this or if those numbers will just naturally fall into place. Well, there is only one way to find out ...
Let's do it !
With the goals set for December and November behind us, it is now time to think through mid to longer term goals. One of the areas I have to get more active on is to increase my monthly blog rate. If I could get to two blogs per week I would be happy. However with all the other workload around me I think this would result in a decreased quality of the posts. I want to create the best possible blogs for the topics I am writing about. For this to happen I have to collect information, sort through some rubbish online and extract what I know to be valid and true.
You will never find a get rich quick - post on here because there is likely no such thing. I think its a matter of scale. I am spending around 12 hours per day on this blog when I don't have to work ( Holidays or soccer free Weekends ). Otherwise I spend at least 3 hours per day on it, which is almost all the spare time I have. Yes, somehow I am still able to cram sleep into my life.
I have great ambitions for this blog. I want to push it as much as I can in the coming months and at the same time research other possible online income sources. This is a win-win in my books. I may find a side hustle which generates a small side income and if I do so I will write about it. Likewise if I follow some online advice which results in zero income I will also write about it.
I am curious as to how much money you can truly earn online. Speaking of online blog income report, lets look at last months income, shall we
Blog income report November 2019
[table id=3 /]
Blog and app side hustle = $637.27
Looking at this month you can clearly see that we have spent more then we received from the blog. $8.99 is not a lot of money but $0.00 in the revenue column is even less. For December I want to bring in at least a little money to get over the dry spell of the start-up phase. The initial phase has been set with the sign-up of Media.net. Another income source I may look into in December is signing up with Patreon or creating my own merchandise using Teespring or similar.
Looking at the income for my apps is a nice change from last months increase. This month I was able to increase the revenue by another 23% from $620.89 for all of October to $750.81 for all of November. This number may represent a exception though. On Thanksgiving day I received my largest ever daily payout of $96.63 from my apps. Overall I am still concerned with the churn on my most profitable app, which has received the lowest number of installs in 15 months. The trajectory does not look well.
Also from my past experience I do expect a crash of income from ads for all of January and most of February. This has been the pattern the past two years. Unfortunately, I do not expect that this pattern will break this year around.