A part of his website, Shoemoneytools.com, provide subscribers with the necessary tools to rank higher in search engines, particularly Google.

I am going to just skim through his website offer here and may consider signing up for his $9.95 trial for 9 days later on. However, the price after the trial is rather steep at $199.95 per month!

There are four categories to the whole set of tools, namely, SEO Tools, PPC Tools, Link Building Tools and Valuable Resources. There is another whole set of other tools under each category.

Looking at the tools list, I am not sure if they can be found elsewhere on the internet and used free. But, it may not give the same result and you would need to know which tools comes first if you are still new like me. The guides in Shoemoneytools should be able to help those starting out.

Looking through the list of tools, I can roughly imagine what each does. What intrigues me the most is the Adsense Crawler. What does it do?

I guess the guides and walkthroughs would be beneficial in learning what tools to use for what and when.

He garnered in more than $130k with that picture of him showing the cheque, all from Adsense. If he’s showing what he’s done here in the tools, people should at least be making a fraction of that. But the question would be, would that fraction be enough to cover for the high monthly subscription to his tools. If for a few months there are losses in investment, people may not be able to sustain and commit any further. This may create premature cancellation of subscriptions and people just give up. No one knows when the profits will start pouring in, and hence skeptical thinking sets in to give up.

Maybe, what one can do is to sign up for the trial first, look at the tools and decide if it can be applied for profits. I would strongly suggest that newbies do not jump the gun. At least make full use of the nine days of trial to learn a lot of things. Do not go in blindly. Understand and at least have a realistic expectation of what the tools can do.

If you are trying the tools then…

To your success…

As of now, I just had a two hour nap before sitting down and pouring in my thoughts for today’s topic.

I guess consistency is important to have a successful blog. I read somewhere that statistics show 94% of blogs in the blogosphere are not updated. I certainly do not want www.blogwithzee.com to be in that 94 percentile. Of course, it may be too early to say now that I am only in the eight blog post. To really be consistent in blogging a post each day for the next few months may not be that easy. However, I am determined to put in that effort so that these initial efforts are not gone to waste.

John Chow mentioned in his free e-book that…

“A non-updated blog is a dead blog”, page 9, para. 6

I have to totally agree with this. I mean, it doesn’t need rocket science to come up with that phrase. It’s just common sense but true in all its essence. However, whether or not my efforts are fruitful becomes another part of how successful this blog is.

John also mentioned that…

“You cannot exist without readers…”, page 9, para. 7

I do not know who my readers are, if any. I suppose the only way to know is for my readers to leave comments about my blog post. So far, I have only 1 comment in my maiden post. That comment was very encouraging too. I left a comment on his blog, and he returned the favour. His was a PageRank 2 blog. Mine is still zero.

There is really no point in trying to rush to reach success. I’d probably fail doing that. John Chow took several months before his blog actually became a growing success. I shouldn’t try to cut everything short unless it was a miracle, and miracles don’t happen to everyone.

Talking about comments, I’m going to search for 2 plug-ins referred to in John’s book as a must-haves for blogs, namely “Subscribe to Comments” and “Top Commentators Widget”.

Now, back to the live blog… see you later…

But as you can see, I start off on the right footing in following John Chow’s advice on Beginner’s Blogging Tips.

John Chow’s Free E-Book “Chapter 3, Page 9”.

Talking about passion; I love to write.  I can write my mind off and sometimes it doesn’t really matter to me if it made sense or not. I gather a lot of ideas from writing. Not to mention that it improved my language skills too. I love to elaborate on things that may seem simple. From there, an argumentative platform gets created and ideas pour in abundantly. I don’t usually save what I write, because it was there to just put my mind in writing and improve my skills.

I started off this blog in trying to write about making money online and find out how certain people reap in that success from blogs. Although I started with really no experience in making money online, by starting out really new, I can share what many bloggers go through; starting out. There must be a starting point at something. If I were to be a successful blogger, I must start blogging right? Well, so this is it, my first blog.

Domain Name and Hosting Your Blog

I could easily use a free blogging platform and start my blog. It wouldn’t cost me anything except time and passion. It would be a real waste if I were to see that blog grow into something and doesn’t have an identity of its own. I decided to purchase this domain and start off from there. Whether or not it makes a name out of itself is a separate matter. What is important is that I create an opportunity for it to grow with an identity and not regret later on.

Having wanting to own a domain name comes the cost of maintenance; domain renewals, hosting fees and premium themes. I treat this as a small investment for bigger things to come. More importantly, it gives me the drive of confidence and provides an anchor to avoid me giving up. It is always easy to give up on something if it doesn’t cost you anything. With this small investment it ties me down to make sure it works, or at least try hard to make it work. Also, I may not be as committed with a free blog.

Another good thing of having a hosted blog is that I can be flexible with the designs and whatever I want to be included in the blog. I can choose from thousands of themes, both paid and free. Even when its free, I can still customize it by learning some PHP and CSS codes.

I purchase this domain from GoDaddy.com and hosted it on HostGator. There are several discount coupons you can use if you just search them on Google.

Custom Search

The hosting fees are minimal actually starting at less than 10 dollars a month. I found a coupon that gave it to me free for the first month. As for the domain, I bought it for 5 years. Plus a coupon, it really isn’t expensive.

I hope this post motivates you to start a blog if you haven’t done so. You need to make that first step of being confident that you can do this and just put your mind to it. The rest of things should come freely after you make that first decision to start blogging.

See you at your blog…

That’s the commonly used term in the internet marketing industry where you create opportunities to earn money from your websites, be it blogs or any other personal or commercial sites.

In John Chow’s free e-book under recommended money-makers, there are several advertising or affiliate networks that allow you to create this monetizing opportunity. However, I feel that not all should be applied right away unless you have met certain criteria to even make money from it.

Text Link Ads and other similar advertising networks, should be approached only after the site or blog have matured with strong enough traffic. This is because such networks act as middle-men between you, a publisher, and advertisers. It is common sense that if your blog is new, with measly traffic, no sane advertiser would pay good money to advertise on your blog. With this in mind, the advertising network wouldn’t even want to approve adding your site to their network of publishers, as it will undermine their reputation of providing quality publishers to their paying advertisers.

CPC networks would make the ideal choice for newly created sites to monetize. Such networks include Google Adsense, Kontera Content Link and Adbrite. There are many others too if you were to browse through John Chow’s 130 money making networks. Although the returns would be small or even negligible in the beginning, at least it can get you started and motivated to put in more effort.

You would notice that my blog is running these CPC Advertising Networks to get the site started with advertising.

If you are using Wordpress like I am, there are many plug-ins that would help you organize the placement of these ads. I like Kontera very much as I don’t have to worry about placement. It actually makes use of the words in the content and creates clickable adverts from it.

One other way is affiliate marketing. See the 125×125 ads on the right sidebar. Those are affiliate products featured on my blog. This is also known as CPA (cost per action) Ads, where the action is to purchase the product. The affiliate earns a commission when the purchaser clicks on the advertisement and buy the product.

When your site has strong followers and traffic, you can even sell this 125×125 ad button space for a flat fee. John Chow sells his for $500 per month per spot. He opens up 8 spots for sale; $4000 per month!

If you look at John Chow’s Advertise page, you’d notice that there is an “Ad Age” shield that shows that his blog is ranked #10 in the marketing blog industry. ProBlogger is there too in the top 50! That’s where the leverage is to set the advertising space prices. You can also look at the list and learn from the best.

That’s what I’m going to do. Learn from the best!

Until next time…

Okay. I’ll skip John Chow’s e-book today. I had a much more urgent mission. I had to beautify my blog so that it’ll look presentable to my visitors. You would have noticed that it was a total makeover. I believe a good first impression is required to make my visitors stay and read my blogs. The last theme was good but this one turns out to be even better. I had to look for something much more refreshing and not turn off any visitors, as much as possible.

I went to look for a nice theme and found one at SkinPress.com … It was free although I was very much tempted to get the premium ones, well, of course for a price. I thought, let’s save that for later after I make some money from this blog.

I was on a roll to get it a little customized and learned a few PHP and CSS codes along the way. I also went to correct some wordings to make it even better.

The initial launch was not too nice with all the posts showing in full. I learned fast to add the “more” tag in each post. You can find out how and all other codes in relation to Wordpress usage from here.

I had a paid account with iStockphoto sometime ago and put it to good use here. I downloaded some pictures to accompany my post. If you notice from my featured posts, there’s an accompanying picture that I tried very hard to create a relation to the post.

And what else did I do?

Some other minor tweaking, like the font to the blog title. If you have Trajan Pro installed on your computer, you would see a different font on the title rather than the boring Verdana font. All this by learning some CSS codes.

I guess I only skirmished past the easy part of CSS and PHP in this session. The more advanced codes are very much complicated. I don’t think I would dwell in those in the near future.

Now that I am pretty satisfied with how my blog looks, I should concentrate further in making it work for me.

Till next time…