A Tale of Three Blogs

A Tale of Three Blogs

This blog is about technical reviews, SEO, internet marketing and all that schtick. And like everyone at the moment I need some extra money. So I decided to perform an experiment. I have two Blogs, one that is mature, but which I have not done much with, and one that is new, but updated frequently. I have and AdSense account for my main website, Celtnet... almost everything I need for a little experiment.

I will be adding another blog to the mix and from now until the end of November I am going to be running these blogs in parallel, whilst using different strategies to promote and monetize them. Below I will introduce the blogs and explain my strategies.

1 Celtnet Recipes Blog.

This is the most mature of the blogs and it's been going since 2008. However, I have been concentrating on running my main website so this blog has not really been updated for a long white. As you might have guessed from the blog's title, this is a recipe-related blog. Originally I used it to feed traffic and links to my main Celtnet Recipes site. I had a steady but small traffic flow of about 30 visitors per day. So this is an established blog with not much content and not much traffic.

As  Google now allows product ads in the UK I am going to be monetizing this blog using AdSense ads and by putting ads for recipe-related products in the blog body. I am going to post 1 or 2 new recipes onto the blog every day. I will get backlinks from commenting on other recipe blogs. I will also try and get five backlinks from articles to the blog or individual posts every week.

I am going to add a 'popular blog posts' widget and I will link as many posts as possible into themes so there are crosslinks in the blog.

And that will be the whole strategy.

2 Dyfed's Adventures in Publishing.

I started this blog about a month ago mainly as a personal journal for me about my various writing and publishing exploits. It has some but not much content and very little traffic. I have really not promoted this blog at all.

I will use AdSense ads and I will also use this blog to sell my own eBooks as well as putting links to relevant affiliate products for writers. This will be completely content based and I will (I hope) provide good and useful information.

To promote the blog I will use comments on appropriate blogs, article marketing and guest blogging only.

3. Repossession Homes.

This is a completely new blog with no content. And it's never going to get any meaningful content. What I will add are basic descriptions of houses and electronic products and AdSense ads.

This blog will not be advertised at all, but I will use free ads on Craigslist and the like to entice visitors to the blog. There will be no links there apart from Ad links and hopefully they will click.

Aims:

Here, then, are three different blogs each with different content and different marketing and linking strategies. My aim is to make a minimum of $300 each per month with the blogs.

Whether that is achievable or not, I do not know, but I think it's an interesting experiment to find out.

Basically this experiment is to find out whether an existing domain or a new one is better. Whether guest blogging is better at getting traffic than blog commenting and article links and whether you can actually make an income from a blog with minimal traffic and absolutely no marketing at all.

Things have been running for about a week now and traffic on the Celtnet Recipes Blog has increased to over 100 hits per day. The Dyfed's Adventures in Publishing blog has gone from nothing to just over 30 hits per day, with the occasional spike of 80 hits or more when some articles are published. The final  blog gets occasional spikes of traffic, but it's very low. However, I only have two pages of content at the moment. That will increase as I add a new page and new ads every day.

The aim is to work on each site for only an hour every day, leaving time for writing other articles and managing my main site.


And this blog? Well think of it as a control. I will add content as and when I can, but I will not add any links to it. It will be used just to document what's happening with the other blogs so that there will be a complete record of what's happened over the next month or so.