Vegetarian Butternut Squash Soup by FatsoInTheKitchen.com – it tasted incredible, by the way! 
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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
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7 Top Bloggers Tips on How to Create and Grow a Successful Blog
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.