How to start a new blog and make money

I am going to take a new direction in earning income from a blog. This will be first post on my new approach which you are more than welcome to give feedback on. However, I want to talk a bit about my adsense partnership programme.

My announcement of that programme went well. Much better than I expected as the 10 slots were filled in less than a week. My challenge now is to work out a dashboard through which I can communicate with my partners such that they know what to do every day without direct communication with me. For the rest who didn't sign up in time, I will be posting things here that I am doing with my partners so that you can follow along with you want to. I do hope that I can really help anyone there who needs a push in their attempts to make money with adsense.

 The first thing I am going is to pick the niches to work with my partners. Here is my method of keyword research and selection. I don't use much tools but reply on common sense.

First approach: mine your own stats for buying keyword
I have chosen buying keywords that I know can make money based on my previous sites. I have a couple of general article directories that carry articles which span many different topics. Most of these directories do not have strong authority but if the content on them can rank, it tells me that the keywords they are ranking for is really weak. If I build sites around these weak keywords, the possibility of my partners making fast money is real. If you do not have any article sites, you can do the same thing. Use google to hunt for weak article directories and see what keywords they are ranking for using SEMrush.

Second approach: apply a modifier to create a new category of keywords
Another approach I use is to look at general topics and apply a modifier that can be used on the keywords found in the general topic. For example, if I choose the home decor niche, I will not choose keywords such as chairs, or lighting, or storage as these are too competitive and need a long time to see results. Instead, I pick a modifier such as portable or cute or energy saving and build an entire site around these modifiers. In this case, I will pick a domain such as portablefurniture.com and create articles that attack each longtail keyword such as portable coffee table, portable wire shelving, portable kitchen lighting etc. I find that this thematic approach not only gives your site a unique angle but they are easy to rank for all sorts of longtails. If you pick a modifier that is up and coming, the traffic will be good with little or no competition.

Now that I have done the research and come up with a list, I am facing a dilemma. Should my partners and I create a site that we don't really care about except to make money or should we create a site where we can really contribute to the web? I am now thinking of the latter and I am asking all my partners who have read this to email me your thoughts. If you want to build a site that you can contribute your experience or expertise, you can let me know and we can rebuild that list of keywords to start the site with.

I am facing this dilemma because I want to build something that I can proudly show people. More importantly, it is something that is long lasting and is more energising to work on. Now, I am not saying that all my adsense sites are junk, just that I have very little interest in the subject area.


My new project
This brings me back to the first point, which is my new project. During the past weeks, I have brainstormed through a list of ideas that I can create a blog on. These ideas are i. n areas that I know I can provide a unique voice and perspective, like what i am doing here. Not only I find these ideas very motivating to work on, but I am going to test out some new ideas on getting traffic as well as monetisation. The best part is I can show you these sites so you guys can follow along if you want to.

Now, my problem is which idea to pick. I will list some of them here so that you can give me some feedback if you want to. In a future post, I will write down how I pick topics that I know will have an audience and how to give a unique value proposition to your blog :

Email newsletter business: the most primitive of communication channel and yet the most effective if you get it right. As the old saying goes: 'the money is in the list'.  The reason I want to start a blog that teaches people how to create profitable email newsletter business is that there is a lack of free and detailed information on how to really get started in this business. My approach to building such businesses will not be the typical IM way i.e. just collecting email and spamming people to death with IM products in the disguise of a useful email. No, I will talk it from the perspective of a content strategy i.e. what to write about, how to find unmet information needs in your niche, how to analyse your stats etc. I am not an expert but I am currently doing this in the startup I am involved in so I will be transposing my lesson there to the site.




Email newsletter are a classic form of permission marketing, as coined by Seth Godin. It is a new form of marketing that fits very well into this new economy of ours where we now ignore classic disruptive based marketing such as ads, cold calls, spam emails etc.

In fact, big companies such as dailycandy.com grew out of this model. What I hope the blog can do is to be a starter kit for anyone to create their own dailycandy.com. If you want more reference about this business, you can read these:

email newsletter are serious business
how to start a email newsletter company

We love these jobs: Most of the people I spoke to hated their jobs. However, with the changing economic landscape, new job positions are being created that demands creativity and non conformity. Jobs that demands imagination. Jobs that allow us to be...humans. However, these positions and new job specification are not easy to find as they are scattered all over the place. I hope this blog can collect all the companies that are 'fun' to work with and maybe even do interviews with the staff. Other useful content will include highlighting future career trends and how to maximise one's potential in these new jobs. Over time, the site might evolve into a new kind of job board, one that is filled with jobs which everyone wants to do!

Your daily dose of great marketing ideas: I scan many online marketing blogs and boy, do they suck! I mean, most of them spilts out generic advice and me too headlines that it becomes too painful to read. Blogs such as those by seth godin are insightful but they are too far away from day to day operations. I hope this blog can collect case studies on how real companies are implementing these new marketing concepts that seth godin talks about to give these ideas more meat. I got this idea when I wanted more examples on how to execute these new marketing ideas and could not find a good resource for it. I am sure there many people like me who does online marketing but really needs that daily dose of inspiration from something that is real.

This post will likely turn off some readers because it is my first attempt to gel what I had written in the past before knowing SEO and the current content about making money online. It may seem strange to combine the two but I think that intersection between SEO, startups ideas, innovation, creativity etc will be an interesting road to take. Hope to have you on aboard.