Use Pinterest To Bring Traffic to Your Blog

I know.  Another social book marking site.  But wait.  This one seems different.  I like the idea of grouping a bunch of same topic posts in one easy to navigate site and just using a picture is perfect. Pinterest is a site that allows you to create a virtual “bulletin board” featuring photos of things you have found on the internet. Encourage your readers to pin your pictures by adding a pint it button to each post.  This will require some html hacking but Kelsey Creates explained it on her blog.  I reworded it over here.  So far I have the button on my Teaching Spanish Blog.   Check out my pinterest boards here and here.

My Kontera Experiement

Overall thumbs up!!  October 11, 2011 I got my first payment from Kontera, $62.36.  The funny thing is that it was my year's anniversary since starting with Kontera.  Here is the breakdown for each month since I started.

$1.30 Oct 2010
$1.67 Nov 2010
$1.05 Dec 2010
$1.77 Jan 2011
$9.40 Feb 2011
$3.57 Mar 2011
$2.33 April 2011
$7.19 May 2011
$6.95 June 2011
$10.11 July 2011
$17.02 Aug 2011
$19.23 Sept 2011
$17.11 Oct 2011

As you can see the amounts in the beginning were rather dismal but the last few months have been pretty decent.  Not bad for hardly doing anything.  The only thing I did was sign up and place the widget in my blog.  It looks like it has really started to take off.  It took 12 months to reach my first payout but I project that I'll only need one more month to reach payout for the second time.  That's only 3 months.  Not bad.  I was happy making that amount when I was with Ehow (RIP). 

Want to learn more?  Just go here.

Use NANOWRIMO as a Challenge to Work on your Blogs

Did you know that November is national novel writing month (NaNoWriMo)?  I didn’t know there was such a thing until a few months ago. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel during the busy month of November. I am participating but since I did not really have a novel in mind I am instead just focusing on writing the 1667 words per day that it will take to get to the required 50,000.  Since I am not writing a work of fiction I am considered a nano rebel. Maybe next year I will work on a novel and not be so rebellious.  This year, however, I am working on my experiences with walking the camino de Santiago from the Summer of 2000 and I am working on updating my blogs.  It is now day 3 and i should be up to 5001 words but I am a little behind.  I am at 2500 which leaves me with just 2500 more to be on target for reaching 50,000 by the end of the month.  How did I get so far behind already?  Oh yeah, I have 3 kids, one of whom happens to be a 5 month old.

So how can bloggers use NaNo to make money? Use it as a challenge like I’m doing.  Remember the more quality material that you have for your blog the more visitors you’ll get.  The more visitors you get the better chance you’ll have to make some money with your blog.  I am now making an average of $40 per month on my blogs.  It is not enough to pay the mortgage but maybe it is enough to keep me motivated to keep working.  It is exciting for me to know that what I wrote over a year ago continues to work on my behalf.  

Are you up for the challenge of writing 50,000 words in one month for your blog or blogs?  It is an average of 1667 words per day. Let me know in the comment section if you decide to do this too and I’ll cheer you on!  

This poor blog has been neglected for a while and its page rank is at 17,932,469.  Let's see if at the end of this month I can bring it up a little ways.

The page rank for my Spanish teaching blog is: 1,478,086.
The page rank for my home school blog is: 1,392,931