Full Time Blogger - Looking to make a living online!

Doesn’t everyone? But I don’t get all that many (even though I’ve got a lot of regular readers here at Full-Time-Blogger).

So I went doing a little digging, we don’t want to be spammed to death (you people know who you are!) but we really would like to get a few more comments (go on, be the first to comment on this post - you know you want to!).

Users Must Register to Comment

The first thing I’ve done is remove the need for users to register to comment, it might sound mad but I’d completely forgotten this option was even switched on! If I had to fill in a form and register every time I commented on a blog I probably wouldn’t bother either!

Incentive

I’ll be introducing a “Top Commenters Feature” every month, and will start to provide links to them on every page (now if that’s not an incentive I don’t know what is!).

Banter

I like it when we do get a comment, if after we’ve replied there’s a little bit of dialogue. It shows that you’re not a fly-by-night comment spammer just looking for a link to your Viagra content - our comment policy should cover that!

What Else Can you Do?

I quite liked Neil Patel’s post over at ShoeMoney about 6 easy way to increase your comment count, most of these we’re doing already!

I would like to reward top commenters here with links back to their site (we’re already part of the dofollow community!), and possibly even guest posts if they are interested?

How do you build commenters on your blog?

If you live outside the US or Japan, you can expect not to earn anything more from referrals to Adsense (note that’s just Adsense referrals for the time being).

A few people have reported this, but the official post is here stating that in these regions it just hasn’t performed as expected (maybe we’ve all got Adsense accounts in those regions?).

If you’ve made serious money from referrals and are living in one of the regions it’s been removed from I’d be interested to hear from you!

It’s a moral thing I guess, but to some it could be misconstrued as fraud or deception, I’m talking about Faking your FeedCount, I’ve got to be honest, I rarely check my feedCount for any of my blogs, so I wouldn’t even know if they were doing good or bad!

I can see the logic some people might apply in faking the FeedCount on a new blog, but really is it worth it? You may just end up losing credibility, particularly if you later correct it because either a) somebody spots it, or b) an advertiser wants proof of your subscribers before they pay you!

We’ve talked about installing FeedBurner before, but I simply can’t see the point in faking subscriber counts, simply write good, compelling and unique content and you’ll find that number goes up anyway!!

Michael Martine is right, when you’ve just started your blog, all you want is traffic. We’re lucky here at full-time-blogger.com as we got quite a lot of traffic from day one, and that is growing daily thanks to people like Damien Riley.

Michael has found a way for you to get some extra traffic to your site and get a “leg-up” quite quickly.

Simply comment on his post with a description of your blog, subscribe to comments so you see any new ones after you and visit them - subscribing to them and stumbling them as you go - finally link to them on your own blog (all stuff you’d probably naturally do anyway!).

So let me know how you get on - Full-Time-Blogger is over there today!

Chris Garrett pointed me in the direction of this today, Remarkablogger (Michael Martine) has produced a book based on some of his posts on how to start a business blog. Weighing in at 80 pages this covers more topics than your average $7.95 “report”.

It starts at the beginning (as all good books should do!), with an introduction to blogging in general, and the benefits it can have for your business through to Commenting Policy, Crisis Management and what to do once you’ve got your blog.

All this takes the form of a workbook with exercises as you go through.

So to get your free copy, all you need do is subscribe to Michael’s RSS feed!

Let me know what you think about it!

Today we have a guest post from Damien Riley:

Time off from work, or whatever you do that resembles work, is crucial to writing as a full time blogger.

When stress reigns and you can’t get up from it, you’re stuck. It’s easy to say, “I work at home, I can take time off when I want to,” and it’s another thing entirely to DO IT.

Not giving yourself “mental health” or sick days will wind you up unhealthy. And if not unhealthy physically, then worse: UNINSPIRED. Have you ever read an uninspired blog? I have, it’s a bummer. I usually don’t return.

You may not have the financial ability to take a lot of time off . . . to you I say: “Find a way to recreate!”

Meditate about your favorite places on your lunch hour, listen to headphones in your MP3 player, get outside of the realities that bring you down and stress you out.I like to read and color with my 3 year old. This is hard to start but once I get into her world I get lost and see the world (and whatever I’m working on) in a fresh new way. Go out into nature with a yellow pad and pencil and write what you see, feel, think.

And don’t think for one minute that tech sites like this one don’t need these inspiration sparkers. Writing is writing and all writing comes from inspiration. Find a way to somehow separate yourself from the rest of the world, for a time. When you return, you’ll bring something back, inevitably something valuable.

Reading helps me cope with life. Time apart from the world and from people helps me summon something to write. How can I offer anything to my readers unless I step away sometimes?

I know of someone who is discouraged today, ready to give up on writing. Maybe that would be a good idea, temporarily. Walking away from our work can make our work better upon return.

I’ll close with this, thanks again to Keiron for having me as guest blogger today, remember “The Resting Jack:”

There were two lumberjacks in a contest to see who could chop down the most trees in 24 hours.? One cut non-stop while the other took frequent breaks to sip cocoa and read his leather book.? At the end of the contest, the non-stop jack had cut down 12 trees and the other 24. The beleaguered jack who never stopped axe-ing asked this question: “How, if you stopped so much, did you cut down more trees than me?” Then Jack retorted: “I stopped now and then to sharpen my axe.“

My question to all you full and part-time bloggers is this: “How do you sharpen you axe?”

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About the guest blogger, Damien Riley: I’m a dad, teacher, author in Southern California. I keep an eye on pop culture, the news, and humor all around us. I have an MA in English with an emphasis in language, writing and rhetoric. I’m a published writer and have 2 blogs: a personal blog, where I share my daily impressions of life in a tumblelog format, and a “weekly greatest post” blog. I live with my three children and lovely wife in the High Desert of California.

Commenting is a fantastic (when it’s not full of spam and breaks all of my commenting policy) way of finding out if anyone is actually reading your posts.

I realised yesterday that after commenting here on Damien Riley’s post about what he was going to do next year, that when he tried to respond about my offer of a guest post he couldn’t comment, I’ve now rectified that and allowed users to comment.

Which Mona promptly did, however - I suddenly realised I’d not setup subscribe to comments on this blog!

I’ll be honest if I leave a comment on a blog and this plugin isn’t there, it’s very rare that I either:

• Leave a comment in the first place!
• Check back to see if there’s a reply after leaving a comment!

So it’s now installed here so you can stay in touch!

I can’t backtrack so hopefully Damien will see I’ve replied to his comment!

Alright, alright so I screwed up - it’s Christmas!! Comments were set to registered users only, but I hadn’t set up the blog so anyone could register as Damien has quite rightly pointed out, although pointing it out to Chris Pearson and not me will probably just add more confusion!!!

Damien, Chris, I apologise!

We’ve already discussed what people have learned in 2007, but what are they going to do with this new found knowledge into 2008?

Damien Riley has his list, which includes guest posting wherever anyone will have him - we wouldn’t mind a guest post from the funny farm here at all if he’s ever interested, I’m not sure anyone would want me as a guest poster at the moment - this blog looks very quiet still - unlike my other blogs!

Pearl has her list, which alongside some task related items includes some very SMART goals PageRank, Technorati Rank, Subscribers etc. are all in there.

Scott’s focus is a two pronged attack, he’s looked back at what happened in 2007 and made resolutions to correct those things in 2008, many of these focus on paying less attention to unimportant things.

Fred at Newest on the Net has sensibly divided his goals into content, stats and monetary - a sensible decision.

Where do I stand?

• I’ll keep my personal blog it’s a fun place to spend some time and chill.
• This is my new project and I’m loving it at the minute.
• My niche sites will continue to grow (hopefully) and I have a few more in the pipeline, hopefully if any of them get too big for me to work on I can either sell them or take someone on to work on them!
• The webhosting business goes from strength to strength on an almost daily basis, that will undoubtedly continue to grow at an alarming rate of knots!
• I want to put into use at least 90% of the domains that I have bought over the years, I’m sick of renewing them and wondering when they’ll make their money back!

On a personal level?

• To be happy and go on enjoying life!

How about you? What are your plans for 2008? Why not call back here every couple of months and let us know how you’re getting on with them?

It’s been a busy year for me, I’ve increased my blogs, We’ve got married, I’ve honeymoon’d, We’ve found a new house and are trying to sell our current one. A lot of people ask two things at this time:

• What have you learnt over the previous year?
• What are your goals going forward?

It’s a strangely reflective time for almost everyone, and I can’t really be sure what I’ve learnt (other than great Irish Rugby teams can be beaten easily!). I may go back through my posts of the year and see what I’ve blogged about later, in the meantime - I’ve been interested to learn what other’s have learnt - maybe I can learn something from them in the closing days of 2007.

• Mona has started a post series about what she has learnt in 2007, starting with #15 Not all monetizing options are best for your blog. The series is continuing from the links on this page and I’ll definitely be following with interest to see if I can learn something new as well!
• Not so much a what we’ve learnt, but Tamar over at Techipedia, has put together the Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007, it’s going to take me months to read all of that lot - well into 2008!

Is there anything you’ve learnt that would benefit others in the coming year?