I had almost forgotten how cold and lonely it could be waking up to an empty blog. Recently I’ve been reminded how dreary it can be as I’ve been working on my blog about pet snakes. With this blog I get a couple of hundred people visiting on average per day. It sits at a Page Rank of 5, I have a respectable number of subscribers to my RSS feed, many of whom use the email RSS feed (no doubt hoping to win some money). Even when I don’t post for days at a time (like recently, sorry about that work and “stuff”…) I still get visitors. It takes almost no effort on my part to retain the status quo. Which of course means if I were to put in a concerted effort this blog would probably grow. But not so with the other one.

Getting visitors to it is like pulling teeth. Big, hardy, deeply rooted teeth. It used to be like that around here, but as I’ve grown I’ve begun taking it for granted. Starting this second blog has been an eye opening experience for me. It’s a lot of trail and error due to the fact that it is a niche focused blog whereas this one is not. On the other hand everyday I know exactly what topic I’m going to blog about over there. I have Google Alerts setup to notify me of news, groups, blogs, and videos that might deal with snakes and reptiles. Currently I’m only writing a few articles a week for it due to “ramping up” and having learned from this blog that too many articles can be a turn-off especially when the blog is young.

Here’s a list of some of the things I’ve learned from my Pet Snakes blog:

Search engine ranking

I concern myself with each articles ranking in the search engines. The first thing I do when I’m thinking of a topic is start plugging various titles into Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search. I’m looking for word combinations that get between 75,000 and 500,000 results on average. The reason for this is because I know the lower the results the easier it is to rank higher. The caveat is that it means a lot less potential generic search engine visitors.

Keyword Tracker

I also run the potential title through a keyword tracker which helps me to determine how many average searches both the word(s) entered will receive, but also what different combinations including those words can be expected to receive. I’ve not reviewed how they determine that information, but I suspect it has something to do with querying search engine results. Either way it is a handy little tool to have.

Monetization

The potential to make money is a lot better with a niche specific blog because the majority of people who are there have an interest in the topic. Currently I’m just using Adsense to gauge how many clicks I can expect to get. Since the payout for the snake niche is almost nonexistent I’ll be switching to something else in the near future. For now however it lets me see if there’s any potential. I can’t give exact stats but if I had the same percentage of click-throughs on this blog (and they were paying the same average rate) as I do on that blog I’d be pulling in an extra $300 to $500 a month, easily.

Content is still KING

I’ve always believed it to be true and on more than one occasion I’ve even preached it to you folks who read this blog. My experience with pet-snakes.com is the same. Content makes the world go round. I was a little surprised to find how easy it is to write on a niche topic. I’ve always been “passionate” about snakes (reptiles in general), but had expected it to be a huge bore writing about them all the time. So far I’ve got more topics to write about than I know what to do with. But no matter how many ideas I have in the fire, or how many topics I want to cover I’ve learned not to sacrifice the quality of content for quanity.

Never stop learning

I’m a huge advocate of lifelong learning. From cradle to grave I believe we are not only capable, but best served by continually learning new things. This blog taught me a lot, but it’s going to a whole new level with the new blog. First and foremost because I’m continually learning new things about the snakes. Secondly because as I work towards realizing the blogs full potential I’m learning new blogging, design, and marketing techniques. It’s a continuous process which has been extremely rewarding.

I invite everyone to checkout Pet-Snakes.com if you haven’t done so already, and keep your eyes open for a contest over there that will be announced sometime within the next 3 days!

Speaking of contests I’ve been running the “500 email rss subscribers” contest here. Well I’ve changed the rules a bit. Decided instead of 500 we’ll set the limit to 100. Which means that once I have 100 ACTIVE email rss subscribers to this blog I will randomly draw 1 name and send the winner a check for $50 $100.00!

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Tags: Blogging, monetization, new blogs