Welcome back to the “Making Money From Blogging Duel” with WordPress Expert Steve Watson and myself.  Except Steve’s still ill, the poor old sausage.  Nasty headache and nausea all the time.  So he’s still off the hook.

I’m feeling a little downcast today.  Did I mention before that I got a very stern email from Google telling me that NicolaCairncross.com and TheSuccessFactorBook.com had both been deemed to be…. and I quote …. “get rich quick” sites.  They didn’t mention the word “scam” but they may as well have done.  You would have thought The Money Gym would be more likely to come under scrutiny but no, it’s my domain, which I’ve owned since around 1995 when I bought all our names as domains.

They have banned me from using Google Adwords to send traffic to both sites and I’m not sure about this, but they may be de-indexing them too.

On all my other established sites, the search engine traffic accounts for around 50% of all traffic and Google is the biggest player in that.  I’ve just had a look at The Money Gym analytics and 42% of the traffic comes from search engines with Google sending 37% of all traffic overall.  MembershipClubMagic.com gets 52% search engine traffic of which Google is 35%.  Singing Sister HeatherCairncross.com gets 68% search engine traffic with Google generating 56%.

Compare that with the dismal 12% that is search engine traffic on NicolaCairncross.com where search engine traffic is 11% and Google is 10% of that….well there is something wrong somewhere, especially as it’s my most active site.  If you look at the last YEAR you see that 20% of the traffic came from search engines withGoogle sending 14% of that.

Actually there is no listing of Yahoo and Bing sending traffic at all which is VERY weird, so perhaps it’s not just Google perhaps there is something wrong in the way the site is set up for search engines generally.  Who can I ask?  I’ll have to ask Steve to take a look at it as starters?  There was an odd incident where I was unable to license my copy of OptimizePress on a sub-directory due to some mix up with the way the WWW was, or wasn’t set up…could that have something to do with it?

And blogging every day like I am, with totally unique content, you would expect to see some sort of rise in traffic, but no, it’s holding completely steady apart from spikes when JV partners mail for me.  “making money from blogging” is searched 74,000 a month, and my Day 2 showing on Page 2, Position 3, you would think you would see SOME rise in traffic.

Anyway, back to the duel.

Day 16 – Your Blog Post Plan

It’s short and sweet on Day 16 which is good because my daughter’s on the way, to come and see “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”.  Michael Dunlop says, on Day 16, that you should create a blog post plan, and brainstorm your best ideas for blog posts, when you’re stuck on planes etc.  Up until now he hasn’t mentioned much that you need to blog regularly, but this day’s actions let you know loud and clear that you need to be blogging regularly, and ideally with lots of unique content.

So what could a blog post plan look like?  Well here’s mine and I’ve found that the WordPress Editorial Calender plugin helps a lot here.

My Weekly Blog Post Plan

Monday – Top 10 List

Tuesday – One Thing I Would Do Differently, Starting Again

Wednesday – Guest Interview With Transcript

Thursday – Top Tip

Friday – Business Diary (What I Did This Week To Move My Business Forward)

Saturday – What I’ve Liked This Week In The Blogophere

Sunday – Twitter Roundup

As I was typing those, I had a few more ideas….some bloggers like Pat Flynn at SmartPassiveIncome.com report their earnings and break those down, once a month. Pat’s November income report is looking pretty impressive!

They get monster amounts of traffic so they obviously know something I don’t about blogging, perhaps I’ll ask them what’s up with my blog.  Glenn Allsop at Viperchill is supposed to be an SEO expert, perhaps I’ll ask him.

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