I’ve been writing more now than ever and wouldn’t you know it, my own site gets left behind.

I’m always trying to work out a good balance on how many sites to operate. It’s not always easy and being a serial entrepeneur I’m always coming up with new ideas. Often I take steps towards implementing then then realize that I’m spreading myself to thin and end up culling a few. Going back a couple years I had a Lot of websites and found that I was missing some focus. I was like a meandering stream. I made the decision that I was going to only focus on 2 sites, the Bookshop Blog and The Hockey Writers and the rest I would cull, all of them except for here as I wanted to keep one space for more personal stuff. So I took out the big virtual machete and hacked away. The 2 aforementioned blogs have since regained direction and grown by leaps and bounds. They’ve become so strong that I now envision a day where they will be able to support me working on the full time. So that’s the lesson, stay lean, stay focused and if you’re trying to run 10 sites get out the hatchet, pick your two best and Bang – cut the others loose.

Other items…on the Hockey site we’ve decided to double the amount of writers participating on the site. Thankfully Rick Gethin has agreed to do more. I don’t think I could manage the whole thing on my own, it’s getting too big. That will hopefully put us at 70 writers by the time the season starts. Should be a big year for us and since we are starting a CPM advertising model for the first time it could be lucrative as well. I’m still not sure what percentage of ad space inventory we’ll be able to fill (or rather the agency will fill) or what type of payout we can expect. I think this format will suit our site better than Click Through as sports readers don’t tend to be to click happy.

We’ve also done a writers push on the Bookshop blog trying to add more writers but even though we pay per post I still find it harder to have them stick around. Funny the guys working for free on the hockey site stick for a year or more but the guys being paid on the book site typically leave after a couple months. Maybe starting the payouts wasn’t the best idea.

One other challenge that I am currently participating in is The Keyword Academy Summer Push. We’ve all split off into groups of 10 to 20 members and selected a Publishing target. I’m part of the 500K group meaning that we have pledged to publish 500 000 words on our various sites over a three month period. These words will count against that so I may just babble on all day. Ideally the posts should be keyword targeted (as taught in the academy) but you also get untargeted long tail hits as well. I’ve mentioned before on this site that I’m very much enjoying being a part of the Keyword Academy. I think it has brought a lot of focus to my websites, helped me create goals and draw up a clearer picture of not only where I want my sites to go but how to get there, how long it will take and most importantly, how to do it. With my sites currently experiencing a monthly revenue increase of 5% I can feel that, although it won’t happen overnight, it will happen. By happening I mean my working on websites full time and leaving the nine to five behind. Like many guys I’ve always craved freedom and associate personal happiness with personal liberty. Taking deliberate steps in that direction is cathartic.

I picked up Thesis to play around with. I think I should start sprucing up this place.

You’ve heard me go on about them before. Well, things keep getting better and better over at The Keyword Academy. This past week they have added to their, or rather our, toolbox. Two more tools to help me get to where I want to be in the Online Marketing game. Now this isn’t a blog about making money online, in fact it’s not really a blog about anything per say. It’s just me sharing some thoughts. The guys at The Keyword Academy have decided to create a Team. The Team is made up of people that are willing to put in the effort and be willing to get trained in order to hit a target of $1000 a month in online earnings. The actual target is flexible (as in my case where my expectations are greater than that), it’s more of a marketing number than a concrete one. So I’m reading the email about the idea of joining the Team to really propel my earnings (commensurate with workload of course – that’s part of the Academy philosophy) and waiting for the price-bomb to drop. These things always seem to cost $97.00 don’t they? To my surprise there is no cost – zero. It’s a part of your existing membership they say. You simply need to agree to try and follow th guidelines. So it takes me about five seconds to think about it. Free coaching from a couple of guys that know their way around. Perfect.

I’d like to invite you guys into The Team. They still have some spots left. Just click on the link above to learn more about the academy. So I’m thinking, man I love being part of a site that keeps piling it on, adding free stuff to our arsenal of tools with no extra cost. Now about a day or so goes by and what happens? They announce the launch of yet another tool and yes, this one is free for existing members. Keep in mind you can try all this out for only $1 a month. That’s how I started. I was curious, paid my dollar but quickly signed up full time after seeing the tools that they offer (along with the intelligent and encouraging discussions in the forum). This latest tool is just a simple productivity tool, one that you could put together in your own spreadsheet but they are finding ways to incorporate the data into our profiles for a little extra encouragement.

All this to say that I’m very pleased with how things are going over there and can leave you with one final thought to ponder if you’re considering strengthening your online earnings (by working hard, not looking for make a million gimmicks) – my earnings keep improving. Each month my earnings have grown, that’s the bottom line. Remember it’s only $1 to have full access to all the tools we use at The Keyword Academy.

If I have only written 1 article in the past couple of weeks does that mean that I am going nowhere with trying to make a living online? Probably. But thanks to my 2 supersites I’ve actually published about 60 articles in the past couple weeks. Takl about leverage. Still – I need to be doing a lot more of my own writing. I wrote one at The Bookshop Blog yesterday so this here makes 2 in 2 days – we’re cookin’ with gas now!

I have to tell you that I was once again inspired by a fella at the Keyword Academy forum. His name is Fraser and is where I’d like to be in a few years. There was a discussion about how much you need to write in order to make a living via publishing on the Internet. Is it 3 posts per day, is it 10? Fraser suggests that you really need to focus on 1 post per day. If you sit idle for 3 or 4 days it becomes very easy to stop writing altogether and this is exactly what’s happened to me. Frankly, The Keyword Academy remains my best source of actionable, real life inspired place for solid info on Internet Marketing. I can’t recommend it enough.

Of course I won’t be posting here every day; as you might know I have a few sites going, plus Hubpages plus something called Post Runner (again, over at TKA). But much of it will be here. I’ve spent the better part of the last hour trying to decide if I should convert this site into something more specific, pick a topic and stick to it. Again Fraser (did I mention his forum posts are probably worth the Academy’s subsrciption price on their own) suggeasts that a site can be all over the place and still do well. I like that idea and will keep The Big Desk as a free for all, a place where I can write about family, travel, Internet publishing and life in general (as the heading says).

One article a day, minimum – every day – for ever and ever….Seriously, I’ll probably do at least three a day, now to find some topics. My next batch of articles will make use of yet one more of Fraser’s plans. A topic tree, where the top article is a Main, strong keyword with a gang of heavy keywords acting as branches followed up with even more ‘leaves’ which would be very long tail keywords with almost no competition. OK – off to find the topic for them….

Boy, I’ve been really busy lately. Getting into full swing with the blogs. I made a decision about a year ago to take my blogging much more seriously. The previous year I had made a lot of little sites, Bans, Niche sites, link farm sites, but this type of blogging wasn’t really for me. I needed to build something that I could show off to my family, not something that simply existed to make money. My involvenment in the book selling business has been dwindling so The Bookshop Blog wasn’t filling all my personal needs. I decided to start up a blog on my lifelong passion, the sport of hockey. The Hockey Writers is now a year old, has a crew of 35 writers churning out terrific original content multiple times per day. Readership continues to grow, now surpasing 50K per month. I can finally show off the site to friends and family without the feeling of emptyness that I had with sites that were strictly made for adsense (or Bans).

At the begining of this year I decided that some better training was needed. I’m getting decent at driving traffic, using social media and building sites. What I find I’m lacking are the skills to turn all of that into $$$. I have signed up for The Shoemoney System since he’s a king of making money. I’ll have some updates on that in future posts. I have also become a member of The Keyword Academy. The first webinar form Court was about the best 2 hours I have ever heard when it comes to traffic building. His site is a real goldmine. I’m learning tons over there. Again – I’ll go over that site in more detail in an upcoming post.

One more thing that I’ll be writing about shortly is the seo plugin Scribe. I’m testing it now and will give you a full report with my actual Ranking changes. I’m testing this out on 7 URLs – we’ll see after a week using Scribe and 0 link building if actual ranking changes.

And a final note. If you enjoy popping by here, I’ll be posting much more frequently in the near future. At the end of March I’ll be working from home (still with my present employer) but it should free me up to write just about everyday. Here’s to the future!!

1 Twitter account + 1 link request = 1 Link

or

Oh Twitter, how I love thee

Some tools just get the job done. Recently a gentleman I was speaking with mentioned that he didn’t really understand twitter; who cares if “Brian J is eating a mushroom pizza”. Yesterday I had a real world need that Twitter was able to fullfil. I thought I’d share it with you.

As mentioned in yesterday’s post I am embarking on a 30 day challenge to create more links on my hockey blog (did you notice the careful inclusion of yet another link there).7 down, 143 to go. The idea is to pump out 5 new links each night on stale posts. So I created 4 links on some of the usual haunts and decided to try something new (new to me). I decided to ask Mr. Twitter for a link.

I simply Tweeted, “Looking to trade 1 link on a hockey blog”.

Within just a couple minutes I received a reply from Curtis at Crash the Crease (now he’s up a link in the trade!). We shot a couple emails back and forth and within a half hour or so my link was on his blog. He also agreed to do another one next week. Our hockey blog’s Twitter account has over 5K followers, this may not work quite so smoothly if you’re just getting off the ground. It should help encourage you to build your Twitter reputation, you never know when I could come in handy.

Link Trading – one more reason to love Twitter. Do you have any similar stories to share?

our Twitter Account

@TheBigDesk

Links Baby, it’s all about the Links.

It’s Google Currency and the more you have the better. As in life, friends will find you and strangers will be nicer and the sun will shine brighter…

Court from The Keyword Academy is doing another one of his experiments. 5 Links per day for 30 days. His tests are a great way to work harder and smarter. They tend to not only focus your efforts and help you to understand more about what drives traffic but also have a beneficial result on your actual blog. It’s not just theory.
The idea is to find 30 lonely, unvisited posts on your blog or blogs, each day pick one of them and create five unique links. Bring out your dead…Bring out your dead…

Some benefits should be:

• A better understanding of what can happen to posts on your blog and how to revive dead posts
• Practice a required skill, link building
• Find great places for your links (some resources below)
• Better work ethics, force yourself to go 30 days and you  will strengthen those muscles

If you can think of other benefits please let us know with a comment.

I’m going to be adding an additional bit to my own customized 30 day challenge. I plan on creating 1 Google Adsense add and place it in each of these 30 posts, make 1 or 2 small on-page SEO edits and see if I can draw a couple of dollars out of this challenge.

I’ll be updating you every few days on work completed, any traffic that trickles in and any dollars made. To be frank I don’t think this will generate anything more than 2 or 3 dollars but I can’t think of a reason to not test this.

I’m wondering if Google Analytics will allow me to create a group of Pages in order to more easily manage this? I really should pick up a good GA book.

If you decide to embark on this challenge and post your results let me know. We can each add a little section linking to each other, do a little Carnival on this.

There seems to be growing voice within the blogging world stressing ultra-success. It’s mainly due to the need of being vocal by the Make Money Online crowd. Their chosen niche demands that they stress big money in order to attract a following.

I want to remind folks that there is nothing wrong with building a cool site, a growing site that you thoroughly enjoy and not worry so much about building it into a huge money making machine. Keep it fun.

A bit of background:  I never entered blogging with a view to doing it full time. I owned a used bookstore and created The Bookshop Blog to help other shop owners become better sellers. The site has grown slowly, my ad spots are all sold and the site puts a couple bucks in my pocket. Then last year I decided to launch a blog on my other passion, Hockey. I’ve convinced 35 writers to provide tons of original content (1600 posts in year 1) and the site is gaining a nice following/ making a bit of money.

Realistically, I’m not sure if I’ll ever be a full time, 6 figure blogger and that’s just fine. It seems the Make Money Online guys always stress the idea of treating your blog as a business. But a business is dog eat dog, tough, wrought with failures, struggles and missed goals. Here’s another way to view your blog, a very enjoyable pastime that enables you to connect with a pile of bright, fun people all while putting a few bucks in your pocket.

Think of other hobbies that chew up a good amount of time. How many of them give you the opportunity to:

• Communicate daily with a cool group of peers

• Grant you a potentially huge audience for your creative side

• Exercise your mind by reading and doing so many different things each day, as opposed to the same thing over and over again like most hobbies

• And the big kicker – Put money in your wallet – whereas stamp collecting or flying model plans will severely deplete it.

All this sounds great to me and I feel there is no shame in proudly declaring that I am a very successful 4 figure blogger.

I will continue to work at my pastime, develop it, improve it, and we may even get around to selling our own information product on The Hockey Writers this spring.

Like most young kids dreaming of the Major Leagues, most bloggers hope to be amongst the A-Listers one day. The reality is that if you can be comfortable in the C-List, make a few bucks and be proud of your site(s) then don’t knock yourself for not making it to The Show. This year, if I make enough extra dough to take my wife on a nice vacation – well that would be something! And I would be feeling mighty fine…

Ps  feel free to remind me about this post when you see me speaking at one of the big blogging conventions in a couple years (wink)

Are you just starting out with your blog? Is 2010 the year that you have decided to take your blogging more seriously or ‘take it to the next level’ ? I now I am!

You’ve probably seen a ton of videos, read all the free e-books you can handle but getting the nitty-gritty on exactly how to implement some of your new ideas could come up against some hurdles or at the very least, you may have questions. Where do you turn? There are a couple of good Forums that have been created just for you.

Authority Blogger Forum

ProBlogger Forum (my preferred spot)

The problogger forum actually requires a paid membership ($5.95/month) but the cost is very reasonable and keep in mind that if you hope to treat your blog like a business then you must be willing to invest in the appropriate tools. I use the Problogger forum almost daily. The community has a nice feel and because you need to pay to join it tends to attract only those who are more serious about their online brand.

If you’ve ever had questions on the look of your blog you can get free critiques from experienced bloggers.

• Need a particular plugin but not sure which one to use?

• Have questions on how to better monetize your blog?

• Would like opinions on a Hosting Companies?

There’s nothing like being part of a group of serious bloggers looking to make more money or gain a stronger audience for there sites. You’ve probably heard that Networking is a great way to build up your blog well here’s your chance. Come join us.

Posterous

Am I late to the party? I honestly had only heard of this site/service in passing and had no idea what it really was – until yesterday.

I had a blog post from Tim Ferriss drop into my Reader, checked it our and noticed something at the bottom. Tim included his Facebook link and right below it a Posterous link. Now I know Tim is about as near to the forefront of all things web that you’re likely to find so when I saw this link I was pretty intrigued.

First impressions are so crucial and on the Web they happen in an instant. At least when you meet somebody they get a few chances. The first seconds may make an indelible impression but when they begin to speak those impressions can alter when he/she speaks.  Even if they take a look at you, snub their nose, turn and walk away – you may still think ‘nice ass’ and reconsider your position. That could take 30 seconds or more. Now on the web you land on a page, take a fast look and do one of two things.

a) get some aversion, either design/headline/colors/image and quickly move on, never to return.

b) see something that catches your attention and dive in giving it your attention.

So I see Tim’s link, visit his Posterous page, decide that it looks interesting, read his profile, go to the Home page, check out Laughing Squid’s posts and I’m practically hooked. It’s obvious right off the bat what they are. An easy way to get some content up where it may be a touch to much for Twitter but not quite something that you want on your blog. A great middle ground.

So I’ll be trying it out over the next few weeks. If you’ve used it and have an opinion, please share.

Searching amongst my multiple personalities…

I think this may be a problem with a lot of folks that hope to make a few dollars in the blogging world. Here’s what I did yesterday. Checked my stats, that’s always number one. I’ve read many places that it’s a waste of time constantly looking at your numbers. Well it’s a compulsion of mine and I’m guessing for many of you as well. I’ll allow myself this vice. I then watched an hour or so of blogging related videos. Then read a half dozen ‘Pro Blogging’ type posts, spent a half hour looking for a new theme for this site before deciding to stick with Thesis and just modify it as time goes on. All in all, about 2.5 hours of ‘blogging’ with Zero actual output. Productive eh?

I keep looking for excuses to make a more serious effort. I think I’ve found one. At worst it will be another good attempt. Now before I let you know what I’ll be up to I should admit that my blogging efforts have not all been a waste. During 2009 I launched and grew a rather successful Hockey News site called The Hockey Writers. This site is doing wonderfully and I fully expect to double the traffic on it this year.  It’s my ‘personal’ site that can’t seem to get off the ground. I have a couple other sites that are working out but this one keeps spinning its wheels.

The big problem – Direction.

I couldn’t decide what I wanted my own blog to be about; what character I should play, or at least – what portion of myself  should I let take the stage. Bruce the comedian, Bruce the traveler, Bruce the blogging/Internet guy, Bruce the Father, Bruce the sportsman, Bruce the writer….and so on. I couldn’t find a voice for the site. It’s gone through a few iterations, been scrapped a few times, I’ve chosen a few different domains…

It’s time to make a decision and run with it. This could very well be a great year for me, I should get busy and quite spinning my wheels. So – I’m sticking with The Big Desk for two reasons. The domain itself is over 10 years old and I like the idea/sound of the title.  And as for the direction, it will mainly be Bruce the blogging/Internet guy with a little of all the rest thrown in. My Personal Brand for lack of a better expression.

And that system I’ll be embarking on is one that anybody that has surfed more than 3 blogs will have heard of by now. The Shoemoney System. I’ll tell you why I’m going this route. My blogging needs some direction and I need to actually write a lot more. It should be a great excuse to work harder and I’ve enjoyed the Shoemoney site for quite a while now. I’ve already borrowed a couple idea that I’ve seen on his site. The THW Marketplace is one example of an idea taken directly from his site. The Shoemoney System launches a week from Tuesday. Although I’ve been creating websites and blogs since 1995 I’m really excited about this one. Should be a lot of fun!