A Blogging Newbie

Friday morning.

Settling in at my home office with the first cup of coffee. Tim Horton's Fine
Grind http://www.timhortons.com/ brewed with an authentic Bunn machine http://www.bunnomatic.com/.

OK, enough with the plugs.

To business. Read the online newspapers. Checked the weather: cold and more snow. Checked in with Adsense once again to see what traffic happened overnight on my blogs. I am obsessed with this. Do it multiple times each day.

Wow! Pleasantly surprised to see that the # of unique visitors running significantly ahead of where I hoped to be. Hmmm...

I started blogging last October with a couple of things in mind. First, I wanted and needed an outlet for my writing. Done: posted stories on business, running and driving experiences: http://mykalsreport.blogspot.com/. Originally began with one blog, expaned up to three then consolidated back to one. Seems to be working.

Second, true confessions: I wanted to make money from blogging. Signed up with Google's Adsense https://www.google.com/adsense from the beginning and have been experimenting continuously ever since with ad placement, sizes, type, etc. Yes, it would be great to make a living from this. To get to this point has been a journey into the wild frontier of social marketing. And yes, I have make all the usual newbie mistakes.

In no particular order, here are the steps and learnings to-date:

• Hard work. Slogging daily through the various social marketing networks, setting up profiles on endless web sites and blogs. Signing up to receive endless newsletters.
  Go back to the ones that work for me and update them every time I post new material
• Twitter http://twitter.com/. Follow me at Chris_Morales. I post an update with a link to the blog I am promoting every time I post new material.
• Facebook http://www.facebook.com/. A number of things here. Update my profile of course with the new post and blog URL. Then post the same update in one or more of the relevant groups. If I have story on driving, I post in the driving groups I belong to. Same for the running or business posts.
• Send emails to 30 or so contacts/friends. Thank you for putting up with the intrusion :)
• Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/. More subtle here. I post a discussion only in the relevant groups I belong to.
• Tribal Running http://www.tribalrunning.net/. Recently joined this group. Not many members yet, but all seem dedicated to making the site work. Like it. Have received great response from the posts. An interesting note: I was prompted to join this group because of a connection I made in a Linkedin group, 'Running in Business'.

That's about it. No silver bullet. Just hard slogging building one-to-one relationships. Duh!

Stay tuned..

(Article originally posted on http://giraffemarketing.blogspot.com/)