Hi everyone who wandered by my blog! The title of the post can actually be misleading because this blog is not 15 months old. In fact seekdefo  started  just yesterday and this is my first post but I have been a blogger for the past 15 months and a very good copy paste blogger. What I did in those 15 months was copy pasting other’s hard work, I went to forums where a lot of guys posted extremely good stuff about hacking and tricks for using mobile services such as call, gprs, smses without paying a single penny to their operators. What I did was nothing unique because I saw many others doing the same before me and getting very good money for it or, so I thought.

But it was not that which catapulated me into the field of blogging, while others were merely copy pasting stuff I wanted to bring a change by posting things which actually worked, by posting working tricks. See most of the stuff that they posted turned out to be fake, tricks seldom worked and I guess they never kmew about what they were posting. So I started posting genuine tricks for the  first 8 months or so around 20 posts per month. The posts later started to dwindle to a trickle and on october I couldn’t post anything. There were no tricks and the pageviews never went above 200 per day. I started blogging on may 2011 and after so many months there was not a sign of traffic. My hopes started to dwindle and that was when I contacted one of my fellow bloggers in the same field and he told me just one thing “DAILY POSTING”. I took that advice to heart and started copy pasting because you can’t manufacture tricks by the day everyday, only forums could do that. I copy pasted 10 to 12 posts per day and my pageviews soared to 2000 per day and that was when panda struck in march 2012.

Even though I was religiously copying every trick I could find I was struggling to maintain my pageviews above 1000. When the panda effect finally subsided I was left with only 1000 pageviews per day. The exponential phase with which I was growing, that beautiful thing wasn’t there anymore. It took another month of copy pasting work to reach 3k views per day and then panda struck again. I don’t remember the date well but the pageviews dwindled to 1300. The panda effect subsided and I was back again copy pasting…

The pageviews soared again and reached upto 4.5k and then you know what happened. I had actually discovered a trick of fooling panda but I later I realised that it wasn’t worth it. Now I have a traffic amounting to 5000 pageviews per day bit the traffic isn’t worth a nickel. All the traffic that comes to my blog searches for tricks so that they don’t even pay for the data that they are using. Will such a traffic buy anything? Will such a traffic interest advertisers? I get a hell lot of traffic from poor countries all over the world, from nigeria, from south africa, kenya , phillipines , sudan, tanzania etc

The valuable lessons that I learnt on blogging, traffic, monetizing content

TRAFFIC LESSONS: WHAT’S YOUR TRAFFIC WORTH?

The Traffic that I were so dogged at getting led me nowhere, it gave me nothing. See if some one goes to johnchow.com and clicks on an ad, signs up for that service, pays something up like  for an aweber subscription, hostgator hosting then John gets paid a good deal lets just say $25. On the other hand if someone does the same mistake on my blog what do I get? I have ads displaying free recharge sites which work the best on my blog. For everyone who clicks I get 25 paise and for everyone who signs up I get 1 rupees i.e re 1.25 which happens to be 1/50 part of a dollar if I go liberally. That’s my traffic worth- a nickel. So if and somehow you start blogging then first keep the audience in mind. What kind of people do you want for your blog? Whether you will be doing well blogging and atleast be able to pay the hosting charges depends on this very fact. I’”ll tell you an example. If you look at your mirror and smile, the face in the mirror too does the same. When you smile at a person he ill most certainly smile back, if you frown then he would also frown, if you are impassive then the other side too will give you no reaction. The same thing happens with the kind of blog you build. You write shady content you get shady visitors, you go cheap you get cheap. Its not their fault, you attract them.

Know about what you are blogging!

In my case when I started out blogging I perfectly knew what I was blogging but then later on when I started copy pasting I didn’t have the heck of an idea regarding what I was saying. Sometimes my very posts sounded gibberish to me. Actually I started blogging with a mobile. I did not have a pc or laptop then. I was posting about operator hacks, free ips, gateways, free message center numbers etc and I knew it very well. But suddenly the vpn tricks started becoming very popular and I never used a single vpn all my life. So I started copying things I didn’t understand and posted a lot of gibberish. Well I feel that this is what happens with many bloggers out there. They post things about which they have no clue and then never enjoy what they are doing. They never reach the epitome of success which they had planned to reach and maybe lose out potential clients because of their lack of knowledge. More than the money or the joy of working from home blogging is about passion and interest in writing what you are writing. Don’t butcher that.

Monetizing your content: google adsense is not worth it

Catch any blogger and if he has got an  approved adsense account then he would most likely suggest google adsense to be the best option for monetizing content, but trust me its not. It may have the best ppc rates and serve the most logical ads which interest your audience but getting a few cents per click and losing out precious ad space for that is simply not worth it. Adsense is ok when your blog is small but when you have excellent traffic do someting else. Diversify, experiment, sell your own products, rent out space for other bloggers. Secondly google is a well known f****r. They can ban your adsense account anytime they want for petty excuses like thr “ potential for invalid click activity”. It has happpened in the past and it will happen yet again. Its happening everyday.

Traffic methods: try twitter, facebook instead of google

Just imagine you are doing every right thing under the sun for getting traffic and suddenly google panda punches you in the groin. You get up and then you start all over again. Or worse still google bans you from the search results because of excessive spamming as it happened in the case of John Chow. You type in all your favorite keywords and lol you are not in google. You are doomed but not if you have social media methods like facebook, twitter. During those days when google banned him the main traffic source to johnchow.com was twiter. He had a huge fan base on twitter and whenever john posted something it went live on twitter too and his followers got updated of his posts. If you don’t have any fan pages on facebok or  twitter build one now. Don’t depend on google alone for traffic.

The nuances of email marketing

If you are a full time blogger making his living on blogging and if your blog goes down one day what will you do. I will tell you a true story. Don’t be scared! A person built a chat site sometime ago when google panda was not in the arena. He was making $6000 dollars per month out of it every month and travelled all over the world with the money from his chat site. He even met his future wife on his chat site. And one day google panda struck. His pageviews declined to 1000 per day from 10k. After a lot of counter measures he managed to get back to 3k. His income was now one third of what it used to be. Then google disabled his adsense account. When he asked why in the webmaster’s area he was told that chat sites are no longer allowed. A majority of that poor fellow’s income is gone. He could now do nothing.

So what are the lessons that we can learn from this story?

First thing is that the money is in the list. So you have to build a list. The best way to build a list i.e to capture e mail leads is by giving away something for free to your readers like an e book. If he had done that in the beginning when there was light then he could have come past the panda tsunami. Once you have a list you can market your own products to your own list. If they are quality stuff then people would come again at your doorsteps.. oh thet will read your e mails and buy stuff. Business is built on repeat customers. Don’t cheat them. I have done all the cheating and its not worth it.

No quality backlinks

Because of the type of content that I was writing no good blog would allow me backlinks if I included them in my comments. However hard I tried my content or site was not worth a penny to them. Neither could I guest post on sites with high PR ,authority and readership. Their site’s reputation was of paramount importance to them and they wouldn’t allow shady content, links or people.

When the money came i didn’t feel like taking it

Well the money did come after several months. It was little but considering what I had done to reach this point I didn’t feel like taking it. What will I tell my parents that I have stolen someone’s hardwork and the cash is from that. No it wasn’t that great a feeling I had when I got the money…