I’m into my second week as a blogger extraordinaire and I’m really enjoying it so far. I’ve been writing every day and it hasn’t been as much of a chore and I thought it would be. Of course I’m only around 15 posts in so ask me again when I’m floating around post 200 and trying desperately to think up something to write. If you start to see posts detailing how many socks I have of each colour or listing my all time favourite TV shows from the 80s then you can bet that I’m out of ideas, but for now things are going well.

I often have amazingly wonderful ideas for posts pop into my head only to see them fall victim to my dreadful memory and vanish into thin air. I always expect to remember them, but that never happens. This is probably really nerdy but I’ve started carrying a notepad around with me to jot my ideas into. Not one of those fancy electronic things either, I’m talking old school pen and paper.

If I come up with even a vague idea for a post or even just a title, I’ll jot it down. I’ve been doing this for a week and end up with half written posts, unfinished lists and little pieces of paper with blog post titles scribbled everywhere. Then every few days I consult my notepad of amazingly wonderful ideas and type everything that doesn’t suck into my blog as draft posts.

At the moment I have about 30 draft posts on the go. Some are feeble efforts that may never see the light of day and some are mammoth essays that I might be able to break up into a handful of posts. Whenever I get a spare second at work (or decide that I want to avoid work for several hours) I’ll fire up the blog and delve into my drafts, adding to each a bit at a time.

So far this has worked really well for me and I haven’t forgotten too many ideas lately. At least I don’t think I have, I don’t really remember.

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I’ve lived in the UK for five years and have never managed a trip to Wales. Blasphemy I tell you! But tonight I’m off for a weekend of camping in the valleys. Well, I think we’ll be on the beach but valleys sounds more Welsh.

Thanks to the handy dandy timestamper thing I will have posts magically appearing while I’m away. I don’t think it has the ability to approve comments or make comments for me though, so none of that will happen until I get back on Sunday.

Have a good weekend! It’s not supposed to rain but it will be funny if it does. You know I don’t even really like camping. I guess I’ll just drink lots.

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I have to admit that I don’t really have my ear on the pulse of the internet and any new term that comes my way has probably been around for at least 3.5 years so forgive me if this is seriously old news.

Well it’s not really even news, just a new term. Or maybe an old one. Who knows. Ok enough of me talking to myself… the term is ‘bacn’. It’s pronounced ‘bacon’ and I think the idea is that it’s better than spam or something witty and clever like that.

It refers to all those emails that you get that aren’t spam but aren’t from a living, breathing person either. Stuff like bills from your internet provider, notices that someone has just invited you to be a pirate on Facebook, a notice that someone has commented on your comment on a blog etc etc etc. All those emails that you’ll probably want to read at some point but never seem to have time for.

Do we really need to give this stuff a name? If we’re going to give it a name and it’s going to sound like bacon, why can’t we just call it bacon instead of the ridiculous looking bacn? Why does this even bother me?

I need to get out more.

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Finding a profitable niche to build a website around is important but knowing that niche inside out and upside down is the key to turning the site into a money maker. Having first hand experience with the topic you’re writing about will set your site aside because you’ll be able to anticipate what your readers are looking for and give reliable answers based on experience rather than some half arsed research and a lot of guesswork.

For example, my living in London site is aimed squarely at young people who come over from various Commonwealth and European countries (and sometimes the States) on working holidays. I moved over to London five years ago so I’m able to provide all sorts of information that I wish I’d had before I came. I can relate that getting a UK bank account is the most frustrating experience ever, give sneaky advice on getting tax back, recommend the seediest Aussie pubs to go out on the pull and point readers towards where to find cheap beer. I can relate to my target market (because I am part of it) and am able to anticipate their questions and provide information that they want. Because of this my London site has been a success.

On the other hand, if I started a website aimed at families I could provide them with generic information about the city but I wouldn’t have a clue about other things like finding schools and, um… whatever else families moving to a new city need to know. I could do some research and try to wing it but I wouldn’t be able to provide nearly as much value as someone who has recently had to move their family to London.

People can see through fakes so my advice is to build sites around what you know, not around what has the highest paying Adsense keywords. If you know your niche well and love whatever it is you’re writing about then it will show and your site will stand out from the crowd.

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I don’t know anything about Technorati rankings and I’m not too clued up with the whole Alexa thing, but one thing I know well is Google’s Page Rank (PR). That little green PR bar at the top of my web browser is one of the most important things for those of us who dabble in selling links directly to other websites.

Since starting this blog a few weeks ago I’ve found myself reading other blogs a lot more often. I’ve discovered a whole bunch of gems out there and it seems like most of the blogs I’m reading at the moment are PR0. Some of these blogs seem really well established and have pretty solid followings. It’ll be really interesting to see how all these newish blogs do in the next update.

Whether you love of hate PR, it does make a difference when you’re trying to sell link space or sell paid reviews and I know that this next update is eagerly awaited by a lot of people. I’m really curious though to see how this site does. I’ve got some inbound links from my other sites including my mighty 7 year old site that Google is in love with. Links from that site have always served me well so I hope it stays that way.

Ok enough PR talk. I hate it when people go nuts with speculation and obsess over their rankings and I feel dirty for having raised this issue myself. Dirty I tell you. But whenever this next update happens, whether it be this month or in the next decade, I’ll be watching with interest and checking all the newish blogs to see how they’ve done.

Are you new bloggers out there with PR0 as eager to get this update in as I suspect?

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It looks like I’ve finally done it. I’ve accepted that my current system of building websites with Notepad, HTML and some very crappy CSS just isn’t gonna cut it in the fickle Web 2.0 world. People want gadgets and gizmos and content that’s updated 3 times an hour and RSS feeds and all the bells and whistles that, until a couple weeks ago, I had pretty much zero knowledge of.

Why I am a Blogging Convert:

• Community - This is by far the major advantage to starting a blog. They’re interactive and you will be almost instantly connected to a community of like-minded people. Bloggers are a lot less anal about sharing a bit of link love and following people’s blogrolls is a great way to find other people who are into the same things as you.
• Instant Feedback - No matter how great the content on my static websites is, it’s very unlikely that I’ll get any feedback on it. Sure, I can see how popular a page is in the stats, but it can’t compare to getting a comment with feedback on what you’ve written. I know I can set this sort of thing up on my sites but I’m too lazy to figure out how to do it and using Wordpress makes the whole process painless.
• Loads of Templates - I hadn’t realised how many websites there are out there with free Wordpress themes for me to get my greedy paws on. Even if customisation is beyond the blogger, the availability of templates means that we’re not subjected to loads of sites that are clones of one another.
• Customisation Easier Than I Thought - When I made my first few head exploding attempts at customising my Wordpress theme I was downloading and uploading everything with a separate FTP program. I hadn’t realised I could do all the customisation in the admin area and this discovery has made everything a lot less confusing.
• Widgets - Why didn’t anyone tell me about the wonderful world of dragging and dropping plugins? Now that I’ve discovered the mighty widget, all is clear. It’s great being able to add cool features to the sidebar without having to wrestle with coding I don’t understand.
• Can Be Up and Running in Minutes - There really isn’t much to getting a blog up and running and that’s a totally new thing to me. Most of the sites I design from scratch take a month or two before they’re alive and kicking. Setting up a blog gets things going quickly and if I want to add static pages to teh site later I still have that option. Things move fast in the online world and wasting a month tweaking a design really isn’t the best use of my time.
• Non Techie People Have Things to Say Too - Ok snobbery aside, I suppose I can share the net with people who might be a bit HTML challenged. There are pleny of people out there who have stuff to say but might be a bit techie challenged and I still want to be able to read their ramblings. Blogs have opened up the internet to one and all and for every crappy blog out there I’m sure there are a few that I’m glad I’ve found.

So I have been mostly converted to the powers of the blog but still have a few reservations. I’m still a bit dubious about a few things like the long layout of the intro page (although I know this can be tweaked) and I think static website have an advantage with search engines (this isn’t based on anything really… just my own experiences) but I love the interactivity and sense of community and that outweighs any negatives.

Once I start working on my mighty web empire full time I might experiment with moving a static site over to Wordpress. Travoholic.com is in shambles so I think this site might be a good candidate. I always seem pretty resistant to change (I still use Notepad to build my sites!) but I think I’m sold on the merits of blogging and Wordpress as a content management system.

Is anyone else an anti-blog convert?

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I’ve never been a fan of blogs and I tried to fight the power but it seems like if I want to keep up with the Jones’ then I’ve really got no choice but to hop on the bandwagon and start one. Since my web host offers a one-click installer thing for Wordpress, Wordpress it would be! But it was not without much reluctance on my part.

Why I hated blogs:

• Everybody and Their Dog Has a Blog - Anyone who knows how to turn on a computer and get online can sign up for Blogger or Wordpress and get a site up and running in no time. I have to admit to being a web development snob and I don’t like this! I spent ridiculous amounts of time learning HTML, FTP, CSS, Photoshop and all the other tools of the trade and so should everybody else dammit. Where were all these time saving tools when I needed them?!
• Cookie Cutter Type Sites - I’m a bit of a design junkie and, while I have had it drilled into my head many times that content is king, I’m still a sucker for a well designed website. More people seem to be customising their themes now but it still irks me when I see a site using that has been used a zillion times. I can handle a theme being used a billion times, but a zillion is just pushing things too far.
• Super Long Pages - Am I the only person who thinks the main page of a blog is generally ridiculously long? My index finger would cramp up after 2 minutes with all that scrolling. Coming up with a good navigation system is always a major focus for me when I build a new site and having to scroll down for 4 years is not good navigation in my most humble, blog hating opinion.
• Posts Displaying Most Recent First - I read a lot of travel blogs and I really don’t think displaying the most recent post first cuts it. It makes more sense to me to be able to start at the beginning and some travel blogs make it difficult to actually get to the first post. Caused endless frustration. Endless I tell you!
• Wordpress Made My Head Explode - I had a few cracks at getting Wordpress blogs up and running and the whole experience left me with a splitting headache. Being the design freak that I am I wanted to tweak seemingly small things here and there that would end up turning into a 4 hour session of hair pulling and keyboard abuse.

I was gonna do this as one long post but since I’ve said I hate long main pages I think I’ll break it up. So tomorrow I’ll tell you why I have seen the light - AMEN! - and have accepted blogging into my life.

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So now that I’ve given a bit of history on my earnings with Adsense, Text Link Ads/Linkworth, affiliate sales and direct link sales it’s time to see how much moolah I’m raking in each month. This post is pretty much a carbon copy of a guest post I did over at Working Nomad because I’m lazy. I’ve been posting there for about a year and there are a bunch of old monthly earnings updates so if you want to see how I’ve progressed you can read the awe inspiring posts here.

For July my total earnings came in at just under $930 which is a record month. Considering I was still floating around the $100/month in earnings about 7 months ago I’m pretty chuffed with myself. Things seem to be pretty consistent month to month which is very important since I’ll be heading off travelling soonish and don’t want my earnings to suddenly drop back down too drastically.

Here’s a handy dandy pie chart:

I was surprised to see how much affiliates earned me but seeing this graph it’s obvious how much of an impact they can have. I really need to explore this area more because at the moment I’m relying on one main program with most others only delivering a few dollars per month if I’m lucky.

I earned over $200 for the first time in Adsense income coming in at just under $250. I also had my first $20 day with them so that’s something to work towards now that I know it can be done.

I sold a few more links with Text Link Ads but my three Linkworth advertisers cancelled so any new income from TLA was cancelled out by losing Linkworth. I’ve lowered my Linkworth price to see if I can get some new advertisers. So far no luck.

A major reason for my success in July was my living in London site which I gave a huge overhaul to. I added loads of content and I think it’s filled a gap in a market that I know really well and can write about easily. It’s already getting soom good traffic even though I have yet to go on a link building crusade.

I’m really pleased with myself, I have to say! My goal for August is to overhaul another old site and attempt to break the $1000 barrier. So far I’m a bit behind with the overhaul but I’m still somehow on track to earn a grand. It’ll be a close call though. I like to keep things interesting for your reading pleasure.

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Yes, I am fully aware it’s a Friday night and here I am at home tapping away on the ol’ computer. This blog is called Nerdy Nomad afterall. I do have a social life, I promise you, but I’m pretty motivated at the moment and am on a bit of a savings mission too. So there will be many more Friday nights chained to the computer for me. Lots of nights in general so I’ve decided to throw out a bit of link love whenever I get bored of researching and writing content for my other sites. Every now and then when I find myself up late and have some good links in mind I’ll whack one of these posts up.

So without further ado…

Here’s a great tip for earning more with Adsense that’s been posted over at the Working Nomad forum. One of those little ideas that I never would have thought of. If you know CSS well enough have a crack and let us know how you go.

The guy who made the post is actually the author of Travelfish, a fantastic site for anyone thinking of travelling to Southeast Asia. This is actually a really good site to look at for ideas of how to do affiliate programs well. He’s got Amazon set up, travel insurance, My Trip Journal, and even sells his own travel guides. All in a nice, clean design. Even if you’re not going to Asia anytime soon take a look because I really think this site is set up well.

Ok enough pimping Travelfish, time to send some love back to some blogs I’ve been reading lately. I’m totally new to the blogging world and never really got the point of them but I’ve changed my heathen ways though and have converted.

Here are a bunch of good ones: Rich Minx (funny), One Man’s Goal (will be interesting to see if he can do it), Retire Young and Wealthy (money tips from a nomad webmaster) and Travel Close Up (a newish travel/foodie blog that has been progressing nicely).

Ok that’s all for the link love for tonight. I’ve avoided doing research long enough, time to get back to work.

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I’ve recently bought a square on Blogging’s Most Wanted. For the tidy sum of $15 I am now the proud owner of a 40×40 pixel square on the site, located second from the left on the top line. Will it send me any traffic? Will it take off and result in a high PR incoming link? Who knows but $15 isn’t much to lose if the whole thing crashes and burns.

My blog is completely new so I’m looking for interesting ways to get it out there. I like this guy’s idea and think it has a lot of potential. If blogs that bought slots link back to the site he’s giving a refund of $5 too so that’s a great way to generate a lot of inbound links. Plus there’s a one in 625 chance to win a $1000 prize so I could always just treat it as a rare lottery ticket purchase by me and hope to win.

The site idea was thought up by Ryan Shamus who calls it “the hottest, baddest, most dangerous form of advertising for bloggers that has ever been announced.” That’s a pretty confident statement but if he promotes the hell out of it then he might just be onto something. I know I’ll keep returning to this page once he sells more spots to do a bit of window shopping for new blogs to read and I hope to get a few clicks here and there from other people doing the same.

The slots aren’t exactly flying off the shelves. With only 9 slots sold so far out of 625 you don’t have to rush but if you want your pick of the ad slots then getting in sooner rather than later is a good idea.

I’ve got no idea how this will turn out but I’ll keep you posted on whether I’m getting any traffic from the link and maybe that’ll help you decide whether to get a link or not. If I win the $1000 prize you can bet I’ll be reporting that it was worth it!

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