It’s quite easy to forget these days that not everyone is on the same time zone as you. Just because it’s the middle of the day for you, it doesn’t mean that everyone is up and voting on Digg.

Take as example this story that I posted about an hour ago and submitted it to Sphinn soon after. If you take a look at what Alexa has to say about the country that sends the biggest number of visitors to Sphinn, you’ll see that the US has about 55% of traffic. Anyone cares to guess what time it was in the US when I submitted my story? 1PM in my country and probably around 5AM in US. Now, by the time the americans will start waking up, my story will slip from the upcoming page and its chances of hitting the front page are reduced considerably. Granted, it may just as well be too weak to make it in the first place, but now I’ll probably never know.

Same goes for stories submitted to Digg, Reddit or any other social media site where there is a 24 hour window to get enough votes for the front page.

But this doesn’t apply just to social media. It’s the same case with online auctions. If you open an auction on DigitalPoint or a thread where you offer your services, you got a better shot if it’s not 4AM in the US. If you start an auction that ends in 48 hours and it starts at 4AM, then it will end at the same hour, and there will be less people online that would bid.

Of course, this can also be to your advantage if you’re the one trying to buy something. Bidding in an auction that ends when there is less activity on the site should improve your chances of getting it at a cheaper price.

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Probably the number one advice given when it comes to increasing revenue from Adsense is to blend the ads into the content. In most cases, blending is the best thing to do, but that’s not always the case.

Take the case of a site that has children as an audience. In this case ads that stand out, with brightly colored backgrounds, have a much higher CTR then the standard ads that look like text.

Another case, that I haven’t tested yet, is showing ads to webmasters. I don’t care how well the ads are blended, most webmasters will spot them a mile away. In the last twelve months, I was fooled only once by an ad as far as I can remember, and it was a video ad, when they first showed up.

Which makes me wonder. What ads are better to show if you have as readers advanced webmasters? Blended ads that most will ignore anyway, or ads that stand out and are well targeted and interesting to them? You know what ads I find myself clicking? Image ads that say something that interests me. Not text ads, not well blended ads, but images, exactly the thing I’m not using on any of my sites. So, to me it seems that if you have as readers people that make money online and know everything about blending and Adsense, the best thing is to make it an image, and to make it visible.

But, since I only use Adsense here as a placeholder for direct ads, and I don’t use any large sizes on this blog, I can’t really test this theory. If anyone has any experience with areas where blending produces worst results then making them obvious, please let me know in the comments and I’ll update this post.

The best tip might be to blend in 9 cases out of 10, but people also say that you should experiment to see what works best with your audience and design.

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Don’t believe everything you hear, making money from blogs isn’t as easy as some make it seem. It’s not enough to just write content and hope to be discovered by an A list blogger which will blog about you and you’ll strike gold. If all you do is write, and you don’t have a game plan, it’s more like playing the lottery. You might win something, but for every guy that does, there are 1000 more who fail.

You need a plan, and you need to keep to it if you want to quit your day job. So, just in case you don’t know where to start, here is a game plan for a successful blog. I do realize that there is no such thing as a blueprint to success, but there are some steps that you can take to help your odds. Obviously, if you can’t write great content, what I wrote below might not help you much.

Don’t use it as a bible, it’s not meant to be that. Adapt it to your situation.

1. Find Your Niche

I’ve talked about keyword research before. Look for them in areas that interest you. It’s really hard to keep working on a blog when you have no interest in the subject. It might work for a mini site, but for a long term blog you need to be able to write about it regularly.

2. Blog Setup

You probably know how to install WordPress by now. I would recommend using the All In One SEO plugin and the Home Excerpts Plugin. There are others of course, like Related Posts, an Adsense Plugin , and many more, but I’ll talk about the first two for now.

Now, the reason for the All In One SEO and the Home Excerpts plugins is a little experiment that I’m running elsewhere, on a WP 2.3 installation. For each post you write, you have an optional excerpts field that you can use, to set up a description of the article. The Home Excerpts plugin allows you to keep full articles on the main page, while using the excerpt descriptions for category, archive, tag pages.

Block categories and archives from being indexed with the SEO plugin, leave the tags to be indexed, and use excerpts so that the tag pages don’t use the article text. This way you keep duplicate content to a minimum, and you still get the benefit of tag pages. The full article text will be found only on the front page and on the article page.

Now, when you write those excerpts, you use some long tail keywords in them, and write tags for the articles that fit those keywords. This way you can focus on some long tail keywords from your niche, and have tag pages focused on those keywords, with fresh content on them at regular intervals.

3. Start By Writing 10 Good Articles

I know that people say write your pillar content first, but I’d prefer writing 10 good articles (1-2 hours each), because you can’t really promote the blog when you have only 2-3, and by the time you will start promoting and get people to come, those first articles will already be on the second page. Not that many people look there.

Make them interesting though, don’t waste the time by writing something weak.

4. 5 Pillar Content Articles

Now, the pillar content. Great articles, resources, lists, linkbait. Don’t hurry through them, take at least 4-5 hours for each and make them great. Apply the "would I bookmark this article" test. Link to articles from other bloggers in your pillar articles where it applies, and they might come to check out the trackback.

Start promoting through social media, get links to each of the articles, mail other bloggers about them (make a list of all the successful bloggers in your niche and write to them, introducing yourself and telling them about your best articles), promote in forums and so on. If you spend 4-5 hours writing an article, spend at least 1-2 hours promoting each of them.

5. Networking

When you contact each of those bloggers, you can include your IM id’s and together with your best articles, ask if you can talk with them on IM and if they might be interested in a guest post.

Spend a couple of hours every week, staying in contact with other bloggers from your niche, exchanging tips and making friends, voting each others articles on social media sites. Blogging is rarely a quest of you against the entire world.

6. 5 Guest Posts And Another 5 Pillar Articles

By the time you finish writing your first 5 pillar articles, you should already have some contacts in your niche. See which ones want some guest posts, and get working.

For each guest post you write, make sure you write at least one pillar article that people can see when they come to your blog. Make them great guest posts! I’ve said it before, if you’re in the beginning and you have a chance to write for a blog with couple of thousand subscribers, you should give it your best, and make sure those people come to your blog and check it out. Also make sure they find some great content when they come visiting.

7. Link Building

Don’t forget this part. Bookmark every article you write, submit to niche Social Media sites and promote every single article you write. There is some great content out there, and nobody sees it because it’s not promoted.

I’ve written about different link building methods a few days ago.

8. Offer something extra

Offer something extra, that other people will bookmark and other bloggers might be interested in linking to.

• top 100 bloggers in your niche lists
• plugins
• themes
• resource list (for an astronomy site you can offer some good deals on telescopes with your affiliate link included)

Also, make sure you include your best posts on a special page or in the sidebar (I know, I should do that too), so that people can find them fast.

9. Don’t Quit

If the content is good and you promote it well, you can rise pretty fast. But even if you don’t, keep working on it. Great content + heavy promotion will get you where you want to be, to the A list of your niche. Just don’t quit if you didn’t make it in 2-3 months. Most do that, and never manage to make serious money online.

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