The best niche blogging articles by Doshdosh

Doshdosh is one of the few blogs that I can warmly recommend for anyone who is trying to make money online with blogging. Unfortunately, Doshdosh has not been updated very often during the last months. The blog archives, however, are full of gems that ought to be read by every blogger interested in tweaking the performance of her blog.

If you don't have a lot of time for reading all of the articles, start with these:

1. How to Make Money Blogging: 7 Strategies to Help you Get Started Immediately
2. An Introduction to Niche Blogging
3. The Lazy or Smart Blogger’s Way to Create Content for Niche Blogs
4. How to Create Your Own Niche Blogging Masterplan for Long Term Profit
5. How to Choose the Right Blog Niche: A Simple Three-Step Method

These five articles are a really good introduction to profitable niche blogging. I have learned a lot by reading Doshdosh and I'm sure you will learn a lot as well.

Niche Blogging Boredom

As I write this article, the blog has been available for two weeks. I still have not got a single visitor coming to the blog from Google. It will be interesting to see if the situation has changed when this article is published in the mid-March.

At the moment I write content for several niche blogs. The most popular of them has pretty good CTR of about 4 %. Furthermore, the AdSense clicks are usually pretty well priced, ranging from 20 cents to 1.5 USD. That blog will probably have its high season in April or May. After June the traffic will probably die almost completely for the rest of this year. Early in 2010 there will be again more readers - and then I will have most of the content ready for recycling.

I'm also trying my luck with a couple of more niche blogs written about business matters. In one of the blogs I just started I write about accounting. a theme with no competition in the language I write in. I chose the niche because of economic reasons: the average cost per click is pretty high in that niche. It will be interesting to see what happens in a couple of weeks when the blog hits Google results.

I have only written three articles for that blog during the last few days and already now I have a few regular readers. But they are not the readers I'm interested in -- I hope they don't read this blog :-)

What I'm trying to do is to get a great ranking with certain accounting-related keywords for the Google search. I target people who are getting into a small business and are searching for information about accounting. This way they might well click some of the very well targeted AdSense ads in the blogs.

I'll keep you informed about the success of this blog - the idea should be easily transferrable if you write in a language other than English. For English writers, the niche is too difficult to conquer.

Choosing an AdSense Optimized Blogger Template

Now that I have kept this blog alive already for a few weeks, I hope there are already some regular readers (I write this three weeks before the day I have programmed this article to be published!). Thus I should at least now be thinking about changing the template from Minima Lefty to something fancier.

Or should I?

In fact I have started to like the template a lot. It is simple and clean, and it lets the reader concentrate on the content. And content should be the most important part of any blog, not the AdSense ads in the margins or between the articles.

On the other hand, if people find it too unattractive they might not bother to read even the first article. They would probably just return to the Google search results and move forward to the next hit. Bad for me. And for my readers.

There are many good templates that claim to be optimized for AdSense. At least they are designed to look good and they have nice places ready for ads. But are they really optimized in the sense that they give higher click-rates? So far I have not found any conclusive analysis or comparison made between different free blogger templates. And I do not intend to do such a time-consuming comparison at the moment myself. I need my time for other, more important things. Like for writing this and several other blogs.

Minima is a very functional theme and I value functionality very high. But do the readers see it in the same way? Does the blog just look plain and boring? Does it look (too) unprofessional?

If the template is too plain or unprofessional, the visitors to blog might just jump to the next Google result and not read a single article of the blog. In this case, they most probably will not click any ads either.

At the moment, I am testing Thisaway Blue. It is one of the default templates available in the Blogger. It's pretty simple but still a bit prettier than Minima.

AdWords for AdSense Finds Profitable Niche Themes

I have to confess that when I launched my first blogs and my first web site I had not done any research regarding the price of different AdSense keywords in the niche. I wish I had learned about Keyword Tool earlier than I did!

AdWords Keyword Tool is a great tool for finding niche keywords. Actually it is meant for advertisers to help them to locate keywords for triggering their ads on different web pages. But as the tool shows the cost of click for different keywords and their combinations it can be used by web page authors as well.

For example, I noticed that my only self hosted blog targets a market that mostly triggers ads that cost 5 cents per click. Now it does not surprise me at all that I don't make a lot of money with that web site even if it has a decent number of dedicated followers and a pretty good percentage of them even click the ads.

Unfortunately for me, the theme of that page is so narrowly defined that it will be difficult to address any better paid keywords. But I will certainly try to add something to that blog knowing that even slight changes in the wording can potentially bring AdSense advertisements that have a much higher cost per click.

It will be interesting to see if this works well. Basically my idea is to add some names of local towns to the texts as my main market seems to offer much better prices when the adword is combined with the name of some town. The reason seems to be that the services advertised are rather local in nature.

My niche blog waits for Google and Adsense

Probably the most difficult part of being a successful niche blogger is caused by the sandbox effect. As no readers seem to find their way to the blog, many bloggers lose the faith in their blog. And losing faith in the project means failure: the blogger gets bored and does not trust that some day his/her blog will be on the top of the Google search results.

And when the trust is lost, the blogger does not write any more content for the blog. And when no new content appears on the site, it becomes even more probable that the blog will never make its way to the top of the niche.

The game is over.

But I've been there before. I did not lose my faith in the Lightweight Linux blog. Finally there were more than 100 daily readers. And before too long there were 200 and even 300 daily readers. Unfortunately, the niche is not especially profitable as the open source enthusiasts seem to be adverse to clicking on the ads.

I think it is important to try to find at least some readers before the Google starts to bring the masses to the blog.

This can be done by actively commenting other blogs and participating in discussion forums on the topic of the niche. This way at least some potential readers will find their way to the blog.

And if you for some time lose your interest in the blog, you can start yet another blog for which you have some fresh ideas. And when you have run out of the ideas for the second blog you might already have gotten something to write about for the first blog.

Diversification is an important concept of business strategy. When blogging this means simply that you should have several blogs on different topics. This way you can diversify your blog portfolio and you do not rely on only one blog as a possible source of income. If some blog does not make it to the top, you still have some other blogs in your portfolio.

Maybe one of your blogs will be the next big success in the blog world?

Stop Press: New Font Options for AdSense

Until now, the bloggers have had little control over the appearance of AdSense ads in their blogs or other web sites. But now, Google has heard our prayers!

From now on, we can choose between three different fonts: Arial, Times and Verdana. These are available in languages using Latin fonts.

There are a few ways to customize the font used. It is possible to change the font settings for every ad unit that is generated from the user's account. If this is what you want, visit the 'Ad Display Preference' in the Account Settings to select a new font to be used in all the AdSense ads. The change will affect even the units created earlier.

See the official Google AdSense Blog for more information!

Adsense revenues with free niche blogs

At the moment my main business idea for this blog is to monetize it using AdSense banners. It might not be the most lucrative source of revenue but it is easy to use and Google as owner of both Blogger and AdSense has nothing against using AdSense on Blogspot blogs.

In fact, the combination of a free blog platform and advertising limits our search for possible ways of monetization somewhat. On one hand some free blog platforms like Wordpress do not accept any advertising on the freely hosted blogs. On the other hand, some advertising affiliate programs do not accept blogs that are published on free hosting services to join the program.

But AdSense and Blogspot combine well together. The Blogger menus for setting the layout of the blog even include AdSense widgets that are extremely easy to add to the blog with only a few clicks (blog layout -> monetize). Thus it is not at all surprising that AdSense is the most popular advertising program used by a growing amount of bloggers who use the Blogspot as the platform for blogging.

There are many other good reasons for the choice besides it being free to use. As it is one of the most popular platforms, there is a huge selection of free templates to use. The default selection of templates is pretty boring, but the Internet is full of nice themes that can be used with any Blogger blog.

So far I have used several different Blogger templates that are "AdSense ready". Some bloggers might argue that this does not mean anything, as any Blogger template can be used with AdSense code. But for those of us who are not html and css code wizards they certainly make the life of a webmaster easier. At least I have been pretty happy with several free adaptations of popular Wordpress themes.

On the other hand I have used the very plain Minima white on one of my most lucrative blogs. So it seems that even the plainest design can be used for a money-making niche blog as long as there are customers who are interested in the content of the blog. I think I will use Minima also with this blog at least in the beginning. Keep it simple, Stupid!

I will return later to the theme of blog branding when I myself have to start considering the branding and visual image of this blog. Even if I don't consider it as the most important part of successful blogging it certainly helps to have a well designed blog template that is designed with AdSense in mind.

Subscribe to my Niche Blog about Google AdSense!

If you are a first-time visitor, and considering the age of my blog you most probably are, you should subscribe to this blog.

It is quite easy to do by clicking the "Subscribe To" widget on the left hand column of this page. Doing this you make sure that you will not miss any update or any interesting bits of information.

Of course, you can use the traditional bookmarking, but do you really remember to visit all the bookmarked sites you have hiding somewhere in the menu of your web browser? If you are like me, you most probably forget the links and never visit the site again.

There are many good free applications for reading RSS and Atom feeds. Wikipedia has a nice list of different feed aggregators - you might very well have some aggregator already installed in your system.

If you don't want to (or cannot) install any new applications you can of course use web based aggregators. Google reader is a good example of them.

Do yourself a service and subscribe to this blog now. It is a win-win situation: you win by reading this blog regularly and I win new readers.

During the last year I have experimented a bit both with full feeds and partial feeds, feeds with AdSense and without AdSense, feeds using Sideburner and a lot more. I'll return to this theme later. If you subscribed to this blog, you cannot miss the later posts on this interesting topic!

AdSense added to the blog, waiting for the revenue

I have written already six different, unique articles to this blog to be published during the next days. As I'm pretty sure that I will continue to add content to this blog even now that I decided to add the AdSense widgets to the blog. I made this decision a lot earlier than what I originally thought. At the end of the day, the idea of getting maybe 1 EUR a day more than now was the main reason for acting fast. It might have been clever, or it might not have been clever. But it's done :-)

The template I use is the very clean and basic Minima lefty. Minima lefty differs from the classic Minima template by using the sidebar on the left side instead of the right hand side in the Minima. Some readers of my other blog have complained that having the sidebar on the left makes it more difficult to read. On the other hand, according to Google the ads are clicked more often in the left sidebar than they would be clicked in the right column. So the choice is based only on the idea of profit-maximization. You might not like it, but I have to consider the money-making potential of the template.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes before any readers find their way to the blog. Furthermore, I'm very interested to see how high or low the click rate is in this rather competitive niche where the readers are aware of the fact that Google ads are paid ads that should bring some money to the publisher of the blog or web site.

I have read somewhere in the wide kingdom of the Internet that the people who read blogs on the niche "make money online" are among the worst possible readers when considering their willingness to click the AdSense ads. As I have already one blog where I write about open source operating systems and applications I cannot imagine that this niche would make even less money as AdSense revenues. But let us see what happens!

In the articles that are published during the next days, I will write about SEO (search engine optimization) and content as the king of GO (Google optimization). Please come back for more even more interesting articles!

Five-step plan for building a blog

You probably have noticed that so far I have not added any AdSense widgets to this blog. You might wonder why not? Why don't I try to earn some cash with ads from the beginning?

The answer is simple: at the moment there are no readers for this blog. So I think it is better for me to concentrate on providing content that will earn the site some credibility in the algorithms of the search engines. Only when I see that some people are actually finding their way to the blog, I will add the AdSense widgets to the margins of this blog.

Before adding the ads I have to decide which template I should use for this free Blogger blog. There are many good free templates that I have used. But at the moment I am not sure how I should brand this blog. The branding should be good and stable so that people would immediately recognise this blog and see the difference between this and thousands of other blogs that claim to have unique information about making money online with niche blogging or AdSense.

One might of course argue, that if I had the AdSense in place already now I would have higher motivation for building the readership of my blog from the first article. The few cents I would see in the Google AdSense reports would provide me a clear incentive for getting this blog to the top as fast as possible. I do not deny the logic behind this reasoning. As student of economics I would be one of the last to deny the importance of economic incentives for working harder. But I doubt money is the only incentive people work and write for. At least for me, the importance of learning is at least as important as money is.

With this blog, I plan to proceed in the following five steps:

1. I create some unique content. The more the better, the more unique the better.
2. I choose the template. This is an important step for branding the blog.
3. I add the AdSense widgets.
4. I start to build my readership aggressively by commenting other blogs and joining different discussion forums.
5. I advertise the blog in my other blogs to find even more readers. For this, I might either use text links or add unique banners that look like paid advertising.

At the moment I'm clearly still climbing the first step. When I have proceeded to the step five, I might have ideas for the next five steps.