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Have You Ever Tried To Teach Your Partner How To Make Money Online?

Posted by Paul B | March 7, 2008 .

I have a very supportive wife that doesn’t mind so much when I spend hours and hours on the internet at home after I have supposedly finished my days work (probably because it lets her watch TV in peace!). The problem is that when I get an idea I have to go with it there and then which can occasionally disrupt happy family life. A while back in order to compensate for this I decided that we’d start a blog together, a learning experience for her. The truth is that Suzanne has never been short of an opinion anyway :) and was contributing to quite a few forums. Instead of ranting long and hard on other people’s websites why not have her own? And so the Ballroom Dancing Blog was born, somewhere for my wife to write about her favourite hobby with the odd rand for good measure thrown in.

Having been posting content for a few months now what has surprised me is how the evolution from a “I just want to write something online” blogger has evolved into a “now I want more readers blogger”. The next step of course will be the “well how can I make more money from this” blogger. She is interested in making money now (hence a bit of Adsense and a few small affiliate deals) but not as a priority, last night I decided to go through a few ways of increasing her traffic (and comments, she loves comments, if anybody wants to stop by and leave a comment please do!) and will eventually help her to make more money. The embarrassing thing was that as I discussed these things it became apparent that I wasn’t really doing any of them any more on my own websites. I can’t remember when I stopped actively link and traffic building but by all accounts I have! When was the last time my RSS count jumped up, I can’t even remember? I start “PROJECT TRAFFIC” on Monday.

A Few Of The Things We Discussed

1. Forums - Forums are great for getting like minded people to your blog. My wife was already a member of several dancing forums and has a history of posting on them so the trust issue was not and shouldn’t be a problem. We updated her profile to include her website as her home page and I’ve left her to think of a nice signature to use. By ONLY posting a valuable contribution to any forum topic this is a legitimate way of link building and gaining traffic. My wife’s forum posts are epic, I also explained that when a post gets beyond the 3 paragraphs stage that it might be a better idea to hold onto that content for your own website.

2. Blog Comments - Having explained to her that a URI, URL and Website are all a place where you can put a link back to your own website and shown her a few Google searches for finding dance related blogs that have comments sections she can not get more active in her own niche community. This isn’t all about getting followed SE links but about getting more visitors to her website, doesn’t matter if a link is no followed for that to happen!

3. YouTube - There are lots of dancing videos on YouTube with lots of people commenting on them. Get your name out there, be witty and when the time is right consider posting a few videos of your own. We have hundreds of clips that could go online at some point.

4. Stumble - Each page of my wife’s blog is now stumbled by at least one person. With a few more (not a problem when you’re active in a niche community) this can be a valuable source of new visitors. I’ve only just started to reap some benefits from social bookmarking myself so I’m as interested in seeing how this turns out as she is.

5. The last source of links we talked about was directories. I’ve explained that most are junk and not worth wasting time on and then went on to go through some that might be worth going for a listing in. We have now submitted the site to a few of the higher quality ones (DMOZ, Aviva Directory etc), every little bit helps and besides a listing in DMOZ will provide some benefits with the search rankings, not that our dancing website ranks badly anyway.

Finally we discussed who was making the drinks and whose turn it was to load the dishwasher. As she was busy posting in forums it seems like it was my go to do both!

I did consider filming our talk and trying to sell it using one of those horrible black on yellow squeeze pages for $97 (with $182,291 of FREE BONUS ITEMS!), but in the end apathy took hold and I couldn’t be bothered. Maybe next time when I teach her about alternative revenue sources for her website?

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1 Comment so far
  1. Google Analytics MALTA Windows XP Internet Explorer 7.0  March 27, 2008 7:38 pm

    In answer to the post’s title: Yes, she loved it, set up a blog with quality content, got a bunch of backlinks… and that’s where it all stopped. From one day to the next she’d given up hope. Probably expected miracles, but a shame really. Who knows she’ll pick it up again some time soon. I might sneakily get her a bunch of backlinks myself, maybe her Google Analytics graph will revive her interest in the whole thing.