My sidebar still has the MyBlogLog widget hanging around. It’s mostly for the benefit of visitors who are MyBlogLog users; it gives their sites or blogs the extra exposure by allowing people to click on their avatars and visit their sites.

But I don’t use MyBlogLog anymore. It’s probably been half a year since I logged in, and half a year in this digital age is a very long time.

Why did I start using MyBlogLog? I thought it would be an easy way to build my blog community around it.

The problem is, I didn’t intend WebGrrrl.net to be a place for me to network; this blog is merely a place for me to share what I discover and learn. Over time, I guess this blog did kind of gotten a life of its own, and a little build-up of followers seemed to be a natural way of its evolving to be what it is today.

Like many other social bookmarking / networking sites, using MyBlogLog is hard work if you’re counting on it to bring traffic to your blog. Think about this though: do you spend more time online searching for information and solving problems, or do you spend more time networking with people?

If you’re looking for answers to your problems, a service like MyBlogLog might not be the first thing that comes to mind — you’d be going straight to the Big G or the Yoddeling search engine and do you stuff from there. However, if you can spare the time and really do enjoy connecting with other people, then you should definitely continue to work the MyBlogLog sites and such.

When it comes down to it, I’m just as happy blogging for the sake of blogging. It’s great to know new people, but I don’t necessarily need to. I’ll still keep the MBL widget, though, as a courtesy to my blog visitors. Giving back links are always a nice to do.

Starting today, I’m going on a personal blogging challenge — to post once a day for the next 30 days, and it’s not unlike the challenge I took last year. My reasons for doing this again are:

1. To revive traffic to WebGrrrl.net. Lord knows how much neglect this blog has suffered due to my greed to make money blogging! (Though I gotta tell you, the time spent focusing on just that has been totally worth it!) My previous OPAD challenge managed to bring me a 70% surge in new visitors — I’m not sure about the subscriber conversion rate, but I’ll keep an eye on it this time.
2. To churn out content that could turn out to be gems and traffic generators for this blog. I highlighted a few of these posts when I did a 2008 review of my blog. These topics continue to give me lots of search engine hits till now.
3. To go back to what I love the most — just plain ol’ blogging on matters that don’t matter After all those effort on making money online, it’s time for me to come back as the WebGrrrl that I am and share my Web and online findings with you and anyone else who cares to read this blog.

I actually planned on starting this challenge yesterday, 1 June 2009, but seeing that it was a public holiday in my state, I thought I might as well do it today.

Before I forget, allow me to show off my latest blogging ammunition:

Consisting of a 3G modem, a laser optical wireless mouse, and my handy-dandy netbook the size of my two palms and leopard-skinned to show the Grrrl side of me (thanks, honey!). Two pesky robbers broke into my apartment and stole my old laptop, but the police managed to capture those buggers after almost a month. Sans the old laptop and RM15,000 worth of other stuff, of course.

Any-hoos.

My strategy is to do lots and lots of scheduled postings, as I’ll probably do them during the late nights when I’m not so tired from my work, house chores, kids, more money making activities, Facebook-ing, and MCSE classes. I’ll also take this chance to (honest to goodness this time) launch Blogging Fu and Looking For Niches blogs by spreading some content around there while I’m at this challenge. Who knows — I may even re-launch LornaTimbah.com with a new look and a new focus as well!

Care to join me? Leave a comment if you’re doing a similar challenge, and I might even do a review of your blog or post!

Before I go further, I’d just like to show off to you a pathetic snapshot of my first ever AdSense cheque which I’ve received earlier this month (and a wonderful New Year’s surprise it was!).

I was in a rush preparing for my son’s first day of school for the year, and only managed to take this picture while I was driving to the bank to cash it out. It takes a month for that US$124.15  cheque to clear. Why not use Western Union? That is a story for another day. Anyway, I’ll be getting another cheque at the end of February just from that one arts and crafts site I mentioned and yet to reveal.

Apart from paid posts and playing forex, making money online takes hard work, action, and patience. I’ve bought e-books and implemented the advice of  many Internet guru programs, both locally (in Malaysia) and internationally, that promise you to make money online, and I ended up getting frustrated each time. As many have claimed, they are mostly crap. More annoying is the fact that, at one point, I bought some e-book on profit blogger from one of those Malaysian Internet marketing “experts”, only to find out that I actually knew all the techniques he pointed out during my first month of blogging. What a bunch of bull.

Luckily, my early days of blogging introduced me to RT at Untwisted Vortex (who also happens to be one of the first people to comment on my blog), who, through his many posts, introduced me to two most invaluable web sites on making money online. Best of all, they’re totally free!

I based my niche site development through the advice I get from Court Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School and his new site called The Keyword Academy (co-run by Mark Butler). Due to their advice, I was able to increase search engine visitors to my web sites triple-fold. I started using Court’s techniques since late August 2008, and my traffic at that time was 900 unique visits a month. By end of November that year, traffic surged to around 3,000 uniques a month, and as of January 2009 is now close to 6,000. More importantly, my visit-to-clicks conversion for my ads are steadily improving. I realize I was in a low-paying niche, but it doesn’t stop me from getting that $1.50/day AdSense earning (and it continues to increase — imagine if I had 20 of those sites…). You need to subscribe to Court’s two sites right now, as he and Mark are currently releasing a series of very critical posts on how to improve keyword content on your sites. One of his recent posts featured a demo web site which you can follow exactly to the dot for your next niche site.

The other site I refer to for specific AdSense advice is Grizzly’s How To Make Money Online For Beginners. Don’t let the blog title and fugly design fool you — no matter how seasoned you are in AdSense, you’ll always benefit from Grizzly’s insights on making money with AdSense and other programs and methods. He continually convinced me that we should be chasing organic (a.k.a. search engine) traffic instead of social traffic if we’re seriously into the making money online business. One of his recent eye-opening advices is that you may make more money by not posting. It makes sense, and this seems to be true for my case. My subscribers have jumped more than triple in the last couple of months, mostly obtained through organic traffic, and 80% subscribed via e-mail (the rest are RSS aggregators and search engine updaters). I only spend one hour a week updating my niche site, posting 3 original content at the most per update. Yet, by doing so, I still get more search engine visits every day. The nice thing about it is that even during my month-long hiatus in December, traffic is constantly increasing without me updating the site. Chasing organic traffic also helped me increase my ads earning from Chitika, AdBrite, and shockingly, Amazon.com! I’m not eligible for eBay affiliate for some reason, but I’ll keep trying to apply until I get it. I’d hazard a guess that revenue from eBay could burst through the roof In any case, enjoy Grizz’s long and valuable posts, and for those who’d like to get started making money online, he has a set of tutorials for you to refer to. Just scroll down the navigation bar on the right until you see the sections called “Make Money Blogging” and “AdSense Lessons”.

I’m checking out another program to see its effectiveness, but I’m taking my time on this fella. I’m going to work full-time starting next week, so I’m sure there’s a lot of things going on for me soon.

Besides, I’m starting two more blogs. Yeah, can you believe it? As if I’m not busy enough with my 30 other blogs! WebGrrrl.net (this site) will focus more on technology, the Internet and WordPress. Blogging Fu is going to be my space for exposing my techniques on how I actually update my 30+ blogs, as well as tutorials on how to start a blog. Lastly, Looking For Niches is a site that tells you how I go about researching and making money from my niche sites, as well as the tools I used to do my research. Both Blogging Fu and Looking For Niches will be launched as early as mid-Feb, so stay tuned!

Update: This challenge has been discontinued.

I’ve been meaning to do this ever since I received an encouraging number of participants for this project through SocialSpark. Take a look at the top of this blog’s sidebar, and you will see a link called Take My Challenge. Read through the requirements before you request for one.

In case you missed my previous post concerning this topic, Take My Challenge is a project I started in SocialSpark as a way to build links to and from WebGrrrl.net. The way this works is that if you blog about and link to a post I made in this blog, I’ll respond in kind. Pretty simple stuff.

In a way, this also prevents me from going through a “writer’s block” — you know, when your brain goes through this weird spasm, and you suddenly don’t have any idea what to blog about? This is a pretty neat way for me to warm up my thoughts and start collecting ideas on topics I’m interested about.

I have tagged my posts as IBlogUBack on those related to this project, so if you’re interested and you like what you see, take my challenge now.

Since my preferred browser has always been Firefox, I thought I’d give the ScribeFire add-on a try. I would have been posting away with joy if it were not for my lame-slow Internet connection which I have to bear for another week.

Having the tool taking over half of my browser space took a little time to get used to, but it’s worth it for the convenience it gives me. I’m especially impressed with the multi-blog site and platform support, making it easy for me to switch from one blog to another whenever I feel the need to post in either one of the sites I own. I also like the fact that when I need to add a link I have copied, ScribeFire grabs the URL and automatically inserts it in the Add a Link option, then all I needed to do is click OK and the URL’s part of my post’s hyperlink.

I may take Wanderer Thoughts’ recommendation to use DashBlog, though. The part that caught my eye with this tool is its integration with Twitter. Active Twitter users may find this tool convenient for their use.