Joseph Archibald

Learn English in Cebu, Philippines

March 31, 2013 by Joseph Leave a Comment

Kids Playing in Minglanilla, Philippines

[This is merely a Google ranking experiment. I'm testing out some new stuff...]

Learn English in Lapu-Lapu, The Philippines

Currently I’m providing free English lessons to the kids in my locality – all of whom belong to familes that can’t possibly afford private tuition for their youngsters.

Basically, the Philippines is about the ones who “have” and the ones who do not – there’s very little in between. The country lacks an integral middle class, so to speak.

If you wish to join in with the fun, then all you have to do is to send me an email (use the CONTACT ME tab at the top of this webpage).

But of course, my lessons are not merely for the kids.

I also teach adults too.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Joseph

If You Rank Webpages in Google Then Check Out This Insane Offer

March 22, 2013 by Joseph 13 Comments

So, the 40 Days Challenge methods are still functioning with regards to ranking webpages in Google.

Don’t just take my word for it, check out the comment from James on a previous blog post on this site (yeah, I bribed James to make that comment ).

Check out the comments on Pat’s website too (obviously things don’t work out for everyone, but then folks take short cuts etc so it’s not going to always work).

Check out how many people are downloading my recently updated ebook (around 500 each day… erm – I wish!), which I’m currently offering FREE of charge by the way. Most of the downloads come from the Warrior Forum thread which is almost three years old at the time of writing this post.

Personally, I’m a fan of the methods that continue to work over the long term such as article marketing, and I’m wary of new-fangled stuff that has yet to gain credence.

I’ve decided therefore to set up a complimentary service, which is something I ought to have done years ago but never got around to it. Better late than never…

Cutting to it, here’s the link to the offer…

Joseph Archibald’s INSANE Offer to YOU!

In simple terms, what I’m doing is providing services (Backlinks Genie, Unique Article Wizard, Submit Your Article, plus a combination of Submit Your Article and Unique Article Wizard) for really knock-down prices.

Unique Article Wizard – normally $67 per month. You can now get it for $42 per month – a saving of 25 bucks!

Submit Your Article – normally 70 USD per month for the top level service. You can now get that for $44 per month which is a saving to you of $44 USD!

Backlinks Genie (be sure to read the terms of the offer on my sales page on this one) – normally $137 each month for the top level service. You can have it for a fraction of that price – only $87 each month for BLG, which is a saving of $50 USD each and every month!

The Unique Article Wizard and Submit Your Article combination… Normally that would amount to $137 each month. You can now get both services for ONLY $79 per month! That’s a monthly saving of $58 USD, no less!

INSANE pricing, I know.

What’s more, I’ll make all the submissions for you. You don’t have to worry about submitting your articles or loading up Backlinks Genie with keyword phrases etc. etc. I take over the leg work on this for you.

Here’s the link to the sales page once more which provides for further clarification.

Joseph Archibald’s INSANE Offer to YOU!

If you have any questions at all, then please use the CONTACT ME tab at the top of this page, thanks!

Filed Under: Article Marketing, Automating Repetitive Tasks, Backlinks Genie, Best Online Money-Makers, Blog Commenting for Backlinks, eBook Covering the WF Challenge, General SEO, Internet Marketing, Unique Article Wizard Review Tagged With: best SEO tools, Joseph Archibald, rank in Google

7 Top Bloggers Tips on How to Create and Grow a Successful Blog

February 21, 2013 by Joseph 10 Comments

This is a guest post from Sandra Miller who is a tech writer from Brooklyn.

The number of active bloggers on the Internet is increasing each day – it is one of the latest trends in the social media world also. In fact, blogging is becoming an essential part of any social media strategy. If you aren’t quite sure what to write about, how often to publish your blog posts, or how to grow a network of people that will find and follow your work, don’t worry, you’re not alone!

Here are seven tips to help you with your blogging from top bloggers and social media experts with solid networks of fans and followers and tens of thousands of blog subscribers who regularly read their posts:

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Measure the Progress of your Blog

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Jay Baer, the founder of Convince and Convert, says that if you are blogging for business purposes you must set some goals your blog should achieve. Without these success metrics it wouldn’t be even fun to write. In fact, it can be quite lonely if you don’t know who are your readers, or if they even care for what you say.

There’s a truly great variety of different metrics you can apply to gauge the progress of your blog and selecting the ones that are most relevant to your blog’s goals is an imperative.

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At the very beginning it is important to be completely clear with why you are blogging and to understand the core business rationale behind your blogging initiative. In most cases, there are three main reasons:

Content, when bloggers pay great attention to how well their blog is optimized for the search engines to notice and recommend its content and drive traffic to it, including targeted keywords and creating important content strategies to help them increase the number of regular readers. If this is your scenario, you should focus on the search traffic.

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Business, when there are financial goals the blog should achieve. Here it’s not about the traffic solely, but about converting that traffic into sales. The traffic from the blog should be transferred to some other web destination which usually is the corporate website or some lead form the visitors should fill in. The metric you should apply here are conversions and leads.

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Community, when the purpose of blogging is to interact with other bloggers and supporters of a certain community. The focus here should be on some social outputs.

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Select success metrics that match based on your main reason for blogging.

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Pursue Opportunities for Guest Blogging

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Bloggers can get great online exposure if they engage into guest blogging and blog for other people. According to Rich Brooks, the president of Flyte New Media, you should find the influential bloggers in your related niches, read their posts and get involved with intelligent and thoughtful comments that bring value. You’ll not only get links back to your blog, but if you are interesting enough you might also open some guest blogging opportunities for you in the near future.

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The content that you publish on your blog or as a guest blogger must be unique. Duplicates are not well received by the search engines algorithms, and after the Panda update such content can really hurt all your blogging efforts.

There are number of tools you can use to protect your work from stealing and to make sure your blog posts are completely original, and there is a great free plagiarism checker you can look into.

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Change the Way You Look at Business Blogging

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Business blog writers often complain how they don’t have enough time or don’t know what to write about on their blogs. But experts say that here it’s not only about writing – this is one of the best and most powerful marketing tools you can use to distribute your message to a wider audience.

Here’s what Denise Wakeman, the founder of The Blog Squad, recommends for you to move away from that negative mode of thinking and schedule a writing time that won’t get lost between all the other activities in your busy day or week:

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• Set the writing time in your calendar as busy;

• Plan the topics you’ll write about in advance. You can make an editorial calendar for your content where you’ll write down the titles one to three months in advance;

• Make a list of minimum five subjects you can cover for each of your blog’s categories that are related to your business, brand, products or services you provide;

• Each time you have an idea, or see some something interesting you might want to work through, write it into your editorial calendar. When the time for writing comes you’ll have many topics to start from.

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Include Keywords in Your Blog Titles and Posts

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It’s easy to write about whatever subject springs to your mind, but Rob Birgfeld from SmartBrief says you should focus on your top-producing keywords extracted from your search data since they are the secret sauce to a successful business blog.

You can select ten of the most important keywords and phrases for your business goals and then write some compelling content about each one, scattering them throughout the blog posts together with their synonyms.

The important keywords should also be included in the titles and in the selected tags. If you keep to such a keyword-driven blogging strategy you’ll not only build and plan a great editorial calendar, but it’ll also help you reach your blog’s goals employing proven search engine marketing data.

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Find and Interview the Best in Your Industry

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If you get a videographer and visit some bigger event in your industry to interview the best, most respected and successful people, you’ll have tons of content you can publish on your blog in the following months. Social Media Examiner’s founder Michael Stelzner also says there’s a great chance these big names will share your videos with their networks of fans and followers, driving new visitors and more traffic to your blog.

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Create Persuasive Calls to Action

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It’s great that you have all that funny anecdotes, provocative insights, top ten lists, analysis and case studies on your blog, but where is the call to action? What steps should the visitor take after landing on your blog? He was probably Googleing for something and ended up reading your latest post on the subject. He may even not know this is a blog, but the fact is you got his attention.

Shouldn’t you use this opportunity to market your product or service at the exact moment your potential customer needs it, and isn’t even aware you are selling? Debbie Weil, founder of Social Media Insights Blog suggests adding some persuasive calls to action on your blog like Sign up for our e-newsletter, Download our e-book, Ask us a question, or Follow us on Twitter.

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If Video Blogging, Forget about Acting

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David Garland, author of Smarter, Faster, Cheaper and founder of The Rise to the Top, says to forget about acting if you are making video blogs. Your readers want to see the real you; they don’t want you to pretend to be someone you are not.

To overcome this “fear of the lens” you can invite someone you feel very comfortable with to ask you a question that you’ll answer simply. Then ask this person to hold the camera and record you doing the same. You should repeat this until you are completely satisfied. Try imagine you are looking at this close person of yours, instead of the camera lens when speaking – you’ll notice the difference immediately.

Filed Under: Blog Commenting - General, Blogging

Can You Make a Ton of Money From Amazon Kindle Publishing?

February 9, 2013 by Joseph 46 Comments

Before I begin my blog post, please note that for all those folks who scrape images illegaly for their own use – don’t do it with this one. I have full copyright for it, and I’ve payed handsomely too. If you scrape it or copy it in any way, I’ll not be pleased and I’ll have no hesitation in coming after you in terms of legality. Thank you for your concern.

Lots of folks are getting involved with Amazon Kindle publishing and for good reason too. If it works for you, it can change your life around entirely.

Well, let me spell out the reality… for most folks it does not change anything at all and many (although not all) of those internet marketers who keep shouting with the loudest voice that Kindle is where it is at, and they offer a course to tell you how it’s done, are simply trying to take money from your pocket.

Sorry if I’m treading on some toes here, and surely I am (I could name a number of marketers who simply churn out one expensive product after another regards to how to be succesful at Kindle publishing and much of it is utter garbage… I’ll resist naming any names… Well, okay, now that you twist my arm, how about John Jonas and Jay Boyer. Their stuff is generally okay but the problem I have is that they churn out such a gross amount of costly products that it soon becomes apparent that all they want is to make a ton of money from unsuspecting marketers.

Anyhow, here’s my reasoning.

If you, as a marketer, are so good at crafting books for Kindle, and you are making a ton of money from it (Steve Scott comes to mind – he’s seeing some very good success and his books deserve that success – Steve is one of the few top class internet marketers that I highly admire), then why would you want to bother selling your system to the IM world?

I mean, surely you’d be happy to focus on writing (creating) books for Kindle and that’s it. I don’t know – maybe I’m missing something.

Fact is that some folks enjoy teaching others how to do stuff (me included – I like teaching when I have something to teach) so there’s motive enough for “some” marketers to create a how-to Kindle publishing course.

But I still suspect that for most IM’s it’s more about greed than anything else. They concoct a crappy Kindle publishing product then sell it to desperate marketers. Where have you heard that before?

Anyhow, let me put my own Kindle publishing experiences into some perspective here.

It makes sense for me to publish my works on Kindle because I’m actually a half-decent writer (so I like to think) and I actually really enjoy writing for some markets. Another way to put that – it’s a passion for me.

Now, kinda getting off the point here. I listened to a podcast on Pat’s blog recently (Pat Flynn, that is) about why you should NOT focus on your passions if you want to be successful online. Here’s the link – the podcast is fascinating. Nevertheless, as an experienced marketer myself, I couldn’t help but see – or sense – a number of gaping holes in the method being discussed (as the commentor TomL has also pointed out – you can see his comment at the very top. TomL is a friend of mine, and he too is a very experienced marketer). That’s besides the point though. Let’s move on…

Thus far I’ve published seven books on Kindle, covering two different niches/ markets, and honestly, none of them have been particularly successful. Okay and for sure, you can argue that seven books is no-where near enough to (necessarily) see success. Ah well, I’m still working on that… Anyhow, folks like Amanda Hocking hasn’t published a whole raft of books, and yet she makes millions in income each year.

It’s a bit strange really because for one of the niches that I focused on, when I took the books off Kindle (“unpublished” from Kindle) and republished excerpts of those books to cater to a more specific clientele, my work became very popular indeed. On Kindle though, it flopped rather pathetically, regardless the fact that Kindle attracts so many potential buyers each and every day.

That kinda suggests that Kindle is not the be-all-and-end-all to publishing stuff online.

The other niche/ market I focused on was cooking.

As you may know, I set up a website called Fatso In the Kitchen (oddly enough, in recent times I’ve lost quite a bit of weight and am now down to 73 kg. For a 6 ft guy that’s not overweight at all, so the name Fatso In the Kitchen is something of a misnomer ) which details my experiences in the kitchen.

Once again, my (cook) books on Kindle have proven to be something of a failure. For sure, I’ve sold quite a few of the two books I put together, and when gifting those books as freebies on KDP they flew off the shelves. But sales have never really gotten off the ground to any great extent. Not too bad, but not good enough.

For one of my cookery books – slow cooker desserts (you can see it over to the right in the sidebar), I popped it on KDP freebie for 48 hours and it had almost 5,400 downloads within that time. Well, does that mean I’ll make a whole load of sales off the back of the success here? Not on your nelly! I get a couple of sales per day and that’s it. A couple of sales per day nets me about 4 bucks per day. Not exactly IM millionaire status, is it?

[Makes you wonder though... if you can figure out a popular niche on Kindle, and you can figure a way to get folks to click a link within your freebie book, and then take some sort of action... then why not do lot's of KDP freebies... This is more than FOOD for thought - pardon my pun... If you can build a list from freebie books on Kindle - I mean, you get my point...]

For the other cook book which I invested more time in, it’s had quite a few freebie downloads also on KDP although not to the same extent as the dessets book. But then it’s a much more niche niche, if you see what I mean – Crock Pot Vegetarian and Gluten-Free Recipes.

I came a cropper with this book though because a couple of the reviews (the only two reviews I’ve had at the time of writing this blog post) were fairly harsh. One saying that a single fish recipe I’d included in the book was not vegetarian, and the other said that some of my recipes were not exacty gluten-free.

Erm… lesson learned. Don’t try to blag (blag means that you’re pretending to be an expert when you are not) your way through book writing. You’ve got to know what you are talking about or chances are folks will pick up on your shortcomings and book reviews will be poor. I didn’t outsource the writing – I did it all myself. It was hard labour. Hard labour, yes. But it’s not really my passion, and the couple of book reviews I’ve received thus far tend to reflect that.

And yes, I regard myself as a vegetarian, although I now learn that perhaps I am no longer regarded as vegetarian because I eat fish – I’m clinically termed as a pescotarian or something… But I am certainly not confined to a gluten-free diet, which would be close to impossible here in the Philippines, I imagine.

Who should really care though – pescotarian, vegetarian, octogenarian… If I buy a book and I enjoy reading it, I’m hardly going to critice the author for a single and relatively small oversight. People can be so harsh…

Nevertheless, regardless my persistent failures, I still persevere with Amazon Kindle publishing – for better or for worse. For richer or for poorer.

Maybe I’m banging my head on the proverbial brick wall and yet I don’t yet perceive it as such. I think in the English language, that’s termed as being a “dumb-ass”.

I’ve written a further five books specifically for Kindle over the past couple of weeks (again, writing is my passion, so it makes good sense to pursue it, regardless of what Dane Maxwell says). Short books, yes (when I say short, I mean anything between a 1,200 word count and 3,200 word count for each book).

None of which have been published as of yet.

Whether they will be successful is anyone’s guess, although I surely do have my doubts about it, I have to admit.

But… I did have fun putting the storylines together, and I surely do hope that comes across to the potential readers. (Is the word putting spelled with one ‘t’ or two?).

Not only that – I’ve also invested in some really excellent illustrative work for these particular books, and I’m hoping that this will help to get folks to dig in their pockets to find some cents to make a purchase.

There’s definitely no guarantee for success though. If your books are not exactly what folks are looking for, no matter how hard you try, you will not find much success on Kindle. That’s my experience anyhow.

Let me know what you think, thank you!

Filed Under: Amazon, Amazon Kindle - Self Publishing

The New Project – Have I Earned a Million Yet?

January 12, 2013 by Joseph 23 Comments

Vegetarian Butternut Squash Soup by FatsoInTheKitchen.com – it tasted incredible, by the way!

Oh how I wish!!

I finally got online this morning after another dumb-ass power outage of almost six hours duration. Normally I’d be a bit fuming hot, but in the circumstances I was kinda glad to get a rest from my daily work regimen. I’m currently suffering from some sort of virus, which is not pleasant and makes me feel all dozy and dreary.

Anyhow, one thing that I did notice as soon as I did manage to get back online (other than the heap of emails in my accounts) was a sudden traffic spike on my new project site. Why so?

I finally got around to feeding some images onto FoodGawker and three other cooking-type image hosting sites. To be honest, I had my doubts that I’d get any of them accepted at all. You know how it is when you do something that’s new to you – you often feel hesitant about thinking positively.

Google, How You Continue to Disappoint Me!

One disappointment I’ve experienced with the site thus far is GOOGLE. That darn monolith!

For sure, they’ve been (slowly) but surely indexing my pages and posts and categories etc., but what they are NOT doing is ranking anything much.

Damn nuisance so it is! I suspect they’ve placed my posts and pages in the supplementals. It’s almost like the site’s been given a ranking penalty, for what reason I have NO idea! It’s a damn nuisance!

After all, I’ve been relying on the graces of Google to afford me some early visitors to the site and I’ve been targeting quite a number of low-key keywords in order to gain some early-days leverage. But to no avail.

My concern now is – will Google ever see fit to rank my webpages in search, or is my site going to be entirely foresaken?

Google Images

There is one thing however, and that is I am relying on Google Images to pick up my site’s glossies and hope to see a goodly amount of visitors via that. For sure, I don’t expect Google Image type-traffic to generate me much income, if any at all, but it all helps to gain site popularity over time. If I’m providing super-duper quality content on a regular basis, then I’ll surely get a name for myself as a true bona-fide fatso in the kitchen

Now, back to the traffic spike.

The Traffic Spike From the Food Image Hosting Sites

Admittedly, I did not monetize the site with AdSense (yet).

Some of you must be wondering why I’m writing this blog post and not monetizing with AdSense right this moment. Good question! Nevertheless, I need to do a little bit of research on that to figure out best practice in terms of ad placement. For sure, it’s all about trial and error, but if I can get a good start, so much da better!

Otherwise however, even though I’ve had around almost 350 unique visitors (see the Statcounter image just below) in the previous… erm… 18 hours I think (since the first image went live on FoodGawker), there’s been no sales. That’s a very good surge of traffic to a site that is a mere 18 days old, I’m sure you would agree. And that provides me with quite a bit of “food” for thought because a regular good-sized traffic surge can offer a reasonable amount of potential to almost any website.

FatsoInTheKitchen Traffic Spike

My income from the site after it being live for those 18 days still stands at nil. Good going Joseph!

However, the only way I’ve monetized the site thus far is by way of some tools and stuff like that which pertain to those who are intent on setting up their own cooking blog. It’s not at all cuisine-focused monetization, so I can hardly expect stuff to be flying off the shelves and my bank account to be overflowing with greenbacks (as much as I’d welcome it!).

Furthermore, the way I see it is this. As I build up a “momentum” on the Food Gawkers (Alexa ranking for Food Gawker is some 10,000, so we are talking about an intensely strong website to be garnering patronage from!) and a few of the other foodie-type niche blogs that support foodie-type images, I’ll hopefully begin to get the rep of being a trusted “advisor”. Perhaps not entirely in terms of how to cook up a fantastic lump of roast beef (I am vegetarian after all ), but in terms of how to make some extra cash online from your blog if you are a foodie-type lover and you wish to embrace the online world for all it’s worth (and it’s worth a whole lot, I may add!).

One interesting point to note (I would say that the word “interesting” is a poor choice here) is that although there’s been a good-sized flow of visitors to the site over the past number of hours, there’s been NO comments, nor has there been a single Facebook Like, or Tweet.

Erm… well, okay, I’ll put that down to the fact that nobody knows me in this niche as of yet. But that’s not exactly the flying start I was looking for! This is exactly why I have a strong preference for visitors who find your webpages in Google search – they tend to be more interactive early on, and that interaction can be the difference between carrying on with a project wholeheartedly and giving up in vain because there’s little to no social feedback.

One of the KEY Points to Online Success in 2013 and Beyond

Yeah, I just read a report about a chappie (it was in fact Darren Rouse of ProBlogger.net and the link to the article is at the base of this blog post) who’s ‘relatively’ suddenly found himself doing extraordinarily well via affiliation for Amazon (thanks Paul M for letting me know about the article). Up until last year he’d done pretty well, but suddenly his income is streets ahead of where it was in a previous life. Why so?

His answer is that apart from seeing more visitors to his site (the Camera website, that is), many of whom do not convert to sale if they are first-timers. Apart from seeing more traffic to his site, he’s been intent on “getting to know” his potential customers and focusing more on their BUYING needs.

You see, what this guy (Darren) does oh so differently to the vast majority of other Amazon affiliate income wannabeeeees (me included!) is that he’s very much in touch with his website’s visitors needs.

He blogs about the products. He does NOT merely throw up some clinical review type thing and wait for the sales to arrive. Nope. And it’s the RETURN visitors who are the ones who do the buying, not the first-timers who’ve found the site via Google search (etc).

I suspect that this will be key to success as we progress through 2013 and beyond. It’s much more about trust online than it ever was previously. Gain the trust of your site’s visitors and BINGO! You’re quids in without a doubt!

More to come as I progress. I sense I’ll be seeing an income of 5 grand per month before the year’s out, from fatsointhekitchen.com

Link to the article on ProBlogger.net

Filed Under: Blogging

The New Project for 2013 (and beyond)

January 3, 2013 by Joseph 23 Comments

I’m finding that residing in the Philippines is certainly an experience which is not bereft of a variety of trials and tribulations. Power cuts left, right, and center. Internet connection going AWOL for hours on end. The amount of times I’ve lost work in the previous five months since I’ve been here in Lapu Lapu…

Anyways, we must be thankful for the good things and try not to focus on the bad – so I keep telling myself.

Hang on a mo mo – I best back up my work!

…

The New Project

My new project for 2013… and I’m sincerely hoping it’s going to be the start of the best work I’ve ever done, both online and off!

Fact is that this may turn out to be a series of projects, depending on how successful the first one is.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I took some inspiration from Pat Flynn’s podcast series whereby he interviews/ talks to a variety of folks who are successful within niches OTHER THAN the make-money-online thing. So, thanks to Pat for that!

Otherwise though, I still insist that to be successful at blogging, or at creating a personalized website in a diary-type format if you will (erm, I guess that is a weblog), you have to have a passion for the subject matter. Agreed?

Until recently, I’ve not been aware of any personal passions other than erm… make-money-online. But although I proclaimed a few months ago that I was tiring of that challenge, I think I was just kidding myself about that. Thusly, if I can take a new angle, then all the better. A successful life online is not all about SEO and Goole now, is it.

Food Comparisons and the Reason for my New Project

And I do indeed have a new angle!

How did this come about? After all, as I say, I wasn’t aware of any passions outside of the online marketing thing.

Well, living in Cebu, Philippines has forced me to grasp hold of a new “hobby”.

There’s a number of things I miss a lot about Malaysia (oddly, there are very FEW things I miss about the UK!!), and one of the uppermost is food! The food in Malaysia is awesomely fantastic, even for a vegetarian, whereas I’ve found the food in the Philippines to be lacking in almost every department you can imagine.

Supermarkets are actually pretty good, even though of course there are items that you crave for that you’ll never see on the supermarket shelves. In fact, it’s more than the food – it’s the whole eating experience. Nevertheless, to compensate to some extent, why not cook much more at home? Makes some sense, right? I really don’t enjoy washing dishes, but when needs must…

Food is a comfort thing, and I suspect because I miss Malaysia so much I’m seeking some refuge in good food. Well, as mentioned, I appear to be on a losing battle unless I harness my own culinary powers for once in my life.

Sampan on South China Sea, Malaysia

Living in Asia has really nurtured my love affair with the foods of the world. I can sit in front of the television for half the day watching cooking programs, which is cool because I can also become more familiar with the foods in both South and North America. And yes they do sell stuff like Tacos and Nachos in the supermarkets here in central Philippines, which is great!

Further however, having a child on its way makes me want to improve my own culinary abilities. For sure, it will be a while before little kiddie will be sitting with us at the dining table enjoying his or her food. Nevertheless, it’s never too soon to begin to learn about how to best present food for young kids so that they will in fact actually eat it. I remember as a young child and I was forced to eat the bland stuff that my mother laid in front of me at meal times. I really don’t want that for my own child. Therefore, I can take it upon myself now to improve my mastery of being a more creative culinary expert.

Having said that, I’ll be working on the minimalist side of minimal. The house I stay in has gas, but there’s no oven. But then, that’s hardly unusual in this part of the world. Very many homes do not possess any cooking facilities other than a log fire outside the front door. Thus oven-focused cooking will not be part of my set-up. At least for now.

None of my places in Kuching had an oven either, other than a little bitty thing that was fine for heating up frozen French fries and cooking up some toasted bread, and nothing much more than that. But eating out in Kuching was an utter delight, where eating out here in Lapu Lapu is nothing to write home about to say the least of it!

What’s more, most of my culinary wares (plates, cutlery, and a variety of other accoutrements) I’ve left in Kuching and I had little to no intention of buying a whole bunch of new stuff yet – not at least until I’m more settled (truth be told, I’m not at all settled, but that’s just between you and I).

And one other thing – space in my new place is very much at a premium. The kitchen is so damp that mushrooms are growing out of the cupboard doors. The last time I lived in such a poorly maintained property was when I was a student some 25 years ago. Oh well, life goes on… Again, the relatively poor living conditions within my rented property pale in comparison to how most people live in the Philippines, so I’m happy for the small mercy I’ve been shown in this life.

What are my intentions, and will my new project be of benefit to you?

Good question!

And yes, I think so. Even if you have little interest in cooking or are far from the best cook (I’m really not that good at cooking and probably never will be but that’s not at all the point), you can still learn from what I intend to do (the skills and knowledge will generally be transferable to other niches).

And there will be no-holds-barred either. I’ll be up front about everything I do and why I do it.

One of the main reasons. NO… The MAIN reason why people fail online is that they struggle to get visitors to their site/s. After that, the main problem is converting to sale.

Well, a cooking blog works a little differently to many other niche sites. For sure, Google can play a HUGE part, and I fully intend to make the most of that through the long tail ranking (currently that appears to be failing – Google are indexing my site, but I’ve achieved little to no decent search engine rankings). But then you’ve got sites like Pinterest with a massive Alexa ranking of 36 (and that’s constantly on the rise), thus reliance on the goodness of Google is diminshed rather nicely.

Apparently something like 70% of the images on Pinterest are cooking-related images. WOW! What if we can get a little slice of that pie?! I bet you we can! Not to say that the general punter from Pinterest is necessarily going to be our best customer, but you never know.

And then there are websites that accept foodie images other than Pinterest. If you have a few successful submissions to those sites on a regular basis you can attract many thousands of unique vistors.

And then, there’s YouTube to consider. Should you be comfortable filming your culinary works, YouTube (and perhaps other video sites besides YouTube) no doubt will be a good friend.

Monetizing a Cooking Site

What about monetizing the site? How do you successfully monetize a cooking blog or website? That’s a question I always wondered about, but never actually knew the answer to.

Yup, good old AdSense does well with cooking niches. There’s a ton of affilite stuff that sells well in the cooking niche. And that includes eBooks too – it’s not just culinary bits and bobs from Amazon. And then there’s the option to advertise (via banners and the like) for other successful sites that lend themselves to the culinary niche, for which you can gain a very nice income too, providing your blog is gaining popularity.

As you develop your own skills in this niche, you can create eBooks yourself. Recipe books are massively popular on Kindle, but that’s just for starters (pardoning my pun).

In reality, although I want to pursue my love affair with food, at the same time, I also wish to pursue my love affair with making money online. After all, if it were not for that, I would never have been able to spend the years in South East Asia that I have. And although my life at the moment is a bit more of a trial (and arguably an ERROR) than I’d like it to be, I’m sure I can turn things around rather nicely. How about you join me on that journey starting today?

As it currently stands, on 3rd of January 2013, my cooking blog is nine days old. It’s not attracted a single visitor as far as I know (I’ve only just introduced Statcounter in order to keep track of my site’s visitor count). Thus it’s a freshly hatched site and it’s raring to go.

By all means watch from the sidelines as I grow the blog from strength to strength. I’ll be updating my blog here regularly with progress made (or otherwise). Or, if you like, why not join me on the journey? All the nuts and bolts of what you need to get underway are written up on the site (I’ve been very busy with it over the past week, but do pardon any “rough” areas since progress has been a little on the erratic side).

Finally

Finally for now, I did say that my intentions were to “follow through” on this project should it be successful. What do I mean by that?

Well, let’s face what is factual. If you can successfully achieve a solid monthly income from a food blog, what’s to stop you from entering other niches and using many of the same skill sets you learned in setting up and maintaining your food blog?

For sure, not all niches are going to fit the bill here, but I would be willing to bet there are a whole bunch that do! As far as I can see it right now, I’m thinking it may be possible to outsource the work for a food blog once its’ gained some measure of success. By doing so, you’re freed up to pursue other niches in a somewhat similar fashion, because you can rely on something of a passive income from the first project to see you through.

One step at a time is best, but it’s well worth keeping your ultimate goal in mind as you progress.

The URL?

The URL to my new blog?

http://FatsoInTheKitchen.com

Filed Under: Blogging, Cooking Blog, Internet Marketing, Pinterest Tagged With: Joseph Archibald, make money 2013, make money online

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