Here are 5 scenarios. I guarantee you will fit into one of them

1. You already make stacks of money and have no real need to make an effort.
2. You are very busy working on lots of different blogs, things are going ok, but you don’t have time to set up new ones.
3. You have a make money online blog and thats about it. You don’t want to spend more money without being certain you will get a return.
4. You have plans to set up a network of blogs but haven’t chosen a topic yet and are still “researching”.
5. You are lazy.

If none of those are you, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog (although not everyone who reads BloggingFingers is lazy). Every single one of those scenarios presents good reasons to buy domains.

The fact is domains are a great investment simply because they go up in value all on their own. You only have to have to try and buy aged domains yourself to see that they sell for a premium. This is because search engines trust aged domains more than new ones and so you can gain higher SERPS positions more quickly with an aged domain.

Back In September I wrote 4 Blogging Laws I DoFollow where one of the rules was to always sleep on an idea before spending money. I created this rule because I registered some domains in a moment of excitement only to wake up the next day thinking the ideas for what was going to go on those domains sucked. Looking back however the domains I registered then were pretty solid and are growing to be worth more than I paid for them.

Quick Tips For Registering Domains

I am by no means a professional domainer, but these are some things I have learned:

• Web 2.0 domains with crazy made up words won’t stay in fashion long and won’t be considered “brandable”. Better to play it safe there.
• SEO domains with keywords in are always a good choice.
• Domains with too many words in are spammy
• After buying the domain, quickly knock together a post and install Wordpress, then get a link to the Homepage of your new site from anywhere and submit it to Google Webmaster tools to get it indexed. Having it indexed for a year makes it worth much more than just having been registered for a year.

I’ve registered 5 new domains today with plans to set up a new mini blog network. If you are hesitating I urge you to take action!

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If you’ve spent a lot of time running a flagship blog it is easy to forget about the issues bloggers that use a niche blogging approach face. There are lots of theories about the Google sandbox and the way Google handles young blogs with freshly registered domains.

From my experience Google gives sites a ‘trial run’ where upon first indexing the blog is given unnaturally high rankings for a few weeks and if it doesn’t gain enough links/content during that trial period it is de-indexed (sandboxed). Or if it gains some links/content it is given given lower rankings which have to be built up from scratch the old fashioned way.

I’ve found this out from starting several niche blogs some of which have kept the good initial rankings, some have been sandboxed and some have had their rankings lowered after the ‘trial period’. I have experienced every scenario and want to share what I believe the reasons Google treated my niche blogs differently.

Race Analogy For Google Ranking New Blogs

It is like you are running a race with a head start but also a heavy weight is tied to your ankle for being a newcomer. You have to run extra hard to stay ahead. If you cannot stay ahead of the other runners for x amount of time you are disqualified for the rest of that season but if you can stay ahead for long enough your weight is removed and you become one of the other normal runners.

How To Stay Ahead

• Churn out much more content. I’m not saying you should compromise quality for quantity but as a new site you have to teach the Googlebot who is boss by training it to visit your blog often. I would actually say this is more important than large scale link building because Google are more strict about gaining links to fast, but they lap up all the content gladly.
• Get a few quality links. You need this for Google to index you. Otherwise you could be waiting months if all you do is submit your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Obviously relevancy helps but to get that initial indexing a link from an off-topic site will do the trick.
• Don’t go overboard on affiliate links. It is easy to ignore this because we want to, but I have experienced entire blogs being de-indexed after adding to many (un-cloaked) affiliate links. Google doesn’t trust your domain yet so take it slow.
• Spread the link building out. You want the Google bot to see an increase in links each time it arrives but you will have a limited number of ways to easily get links. It works well to build some links, wait for indexing, build some more, wait to be crawled again, build more links etc.

I know these are things you would be doing normally anyway, but with a new blog if you get lazy the consequences will be far worse.

Do you have any other tricks to avoid early de-indexing and getting a new blog off to the best start?

This has to be one the most commonly shared experiences in the blogosphere.

You start a blog, publish lots of posts for a few weeks (or maybe a couple of months) but you find yourself not earning as much as you would like and ideas for blog posts are starting to become harder to find. You end up reducing your posting frequency down to just once or twice per week and then you stop posting altogether. The blog is dead and you are frustrated at having wasted all that time and only earning a few Adsense dollars.

If that has happened to you all is not lost!

Your “dead” blog has value and can still be resurrected to help you make money online!

5 Ways To Make Use Of A Dead Blog

1. Write sponsored posts from sites such as PayPerPost. PayPerPost (and other sites like it) have such massive inaccuracies in their blog ranking systems that they chances are your so called “dead” blog still has a high enough ranking to earn the same amount per post as it did when it was still alive. I say use that to your advantage!

2. Plug your current blogs and new blogs that you launch. When I launch a new blog a problem is that it can take a long time to get indexed in the search engines. Knocking together a quick post about your new blog will have it indexed the next time your old blog is crawled. An advantage of owning a dead make money online blog is that blogging about a new blog fits the niche!

3. Add your new blogs to your dead blogs blogroll. Simple but effective. Do this in moderation and at your own risk. Blogroll (sitewide sidebar links) are more dangerous because you are linking from every single page on your blog, which can put the site you are linking to in danger of penalization because 100s of links suddenly appearing is somewhat suspicious.

4. Use it as a link trading epicenter. 3 way (or 4 way or more) link trades are a way to help disguise the deliberate trading of links and your dead blog can be used as a way to gain links for your new blogs.

5. Leave a “current projects” post. This is simply a post left as the last post on the blog listing your current blogs and projects. Rather than writing a new post when you launch a new blog you just edit this one to include the new blog.

Disclaimer:
To some humans, search engines and zealots, bringing a blog back from the dead to perform these wicked deeds is offensive and should be done so at your own risk.

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Photo by nickyfern

I previously wrote about using Google Webmaster Tools to increase search engine ranking. The idea is to find the pages that have made it to page 1 of the search results but not quite hit the top spot, and give them a little push to make it there.

This method has its merits, but what was missed is that the higher up the SERPS (search engine results pages) your page reaches the harder it is to climb further. Just like a real mountain.

For example, imagine you publish a blog post with some keywords in the title. It gets indexed quickly because you’ve been blogging consistently for a while and google trusts your domain. It appears in the SERPS on page 25. The page then receives a single link from another blogger and jumps up to page 5. You then start promoting the post and even link back to it yourself in another post and with these few (lets say 5) more links the post has reached the bottom of page 1 of the SERPS.

If it took 1 link to move 20 pages, and then 5 to move up 5, how many will it take to move up 1 more?

A lot.

Naturally it depends on the keyword phrase you are aiming for, but if you plotted this on a graph it would be a curve. I.e. You need a greater number of links to move up a smaller number of places the higher you go.

How To Remedy The Situation

It is likely to be harder to move up to the top of page 1 than to get on page 1 in the first place. The way to avoid getting in this situation is to plan ahead for the keywords you are aiming for and if the first few results are ones that you will never beat, such as government/important Wikipedia pages then aim for slightly different keywords.

P.S. If you want to win a T-shirt that has one of the coolest blogging logos on it, check out the Health Bloggers Unleashed Contest.

If you haven’t tried to unsubscribe yourself from a paypal subscription you would think me an idiot to even thin anyone could struggle with this, but it is harder than it should be.

To Unsubscribe From A PayPal Subscription Vist PayPal.com And Click:

1. My Account
2. History
3. Sort by Subscriptions
4. Chose the time period for when you first subscribed
5. Click “cancel subscription”

People struggle because the “cancel subscription” link only appears if you view the history of the first payment to that subscription, when it would make sense for it to appear next to each payment.