Christian Blogger's Journal

I’ve been blogging now for 13 years and strategy has always been top of mind. Getting views to your articles and posts is half the battle, and if it isn’t happening, blogging seems like a waste of time.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) sounds smart and helpful, yet how does it really help bloggers and article writers? I’ve come to the conclusion that for most writers, it plays a very minor role in getting views.  I’ve had some success in getting traffic from Google searches (which is mostly what SEO is about), yet it was only because a big publication mentioned my article in one of their articles (mocking it). Whatever the reason for the mention, it still helps me get views from searches even a decade later.  Besides this anomaly, I’ve had very little success generating views to my articles from searches. Unless you are writing exclusively for one site and about a specific topic, SEO isn’t as important as writing for separate platforms.  My strategy has gone through phases of syndicat

The pros and cons of each from an experienced user.   I started a blog on both WP and Blogger around the same time in 2013 when I first started blogging. I went on to start 6 more Blogger blogs and no more WP blogs.  Blogger is easier to work with, but you can also monetize it without paying for a yearly subscription like at WP.  To put advertisements on WP, you have to pay for a pro plan for at least $96/year. In my experience with advertising on my blogs, you won’t make this money back.  I have Google Adsense on 3 of my Blogger blogs now and at the rate I’m earning it will take me thousands of years to cash out at $100.  All my blogs together, including WP, bring in about 500 to 1,000 visitors each month. You need to bring in at least 10k to start making any significant money with advertisements, affiliates, etc.  The plus about WP is the community aspect, which I’ve started appreciating more recently. The Blogger community is much smaller and the reader feed and app are not quality.

I’ve been a blogger since 2013 and have 8 different blogs altogether; 7 are hosted on Blogger and 1 on WordPress. One of these blogs is associated with my Medium account (the one below), one is for my music, one is for golf, one is just a mirror blog, two are ministry blogs, one is about blogging, and the other is a review blog.  Business and Society Articles Really, I’ve been neglectful with most of these blogs over the better part of these 9 years, which shows with the stats I’ll show. There is one main blog I regularly post at and two others I keep up with decently.  Lately, I have updated my blogs with a new magazine theme and have started posting on them again. It is the off-season for me as a golf course greenskeeper, so I have some time to write and blog. This includes coming back to Medium and doing some work here the last two weeks.  I’ve written 9 articles on Medium in this time; most of these I also posted in the blog associated with this account.  That is the backdrop infor

Don’t ask me why I decided to create 8 different blogs in the last 9 years. The fact is, the blogs are there and have been given life and even longevity — long as many dogs sad to say (for the dogs). The strange part is, right after I wrote a piece about perhaps offing them with honors , the next day I decided to get ‘er done and do a massive update. This is good news for this blog.  I have to admit, CBJ was one of those blogs I was considering old yellering, but the good news is I found the strength to spend an entire day and a half upgrading all of my Blogger blogs with a new theme. If anyone else knows about blogging, they know this is a massive deal, especially when you have numerous widgets and links to arrange.  Instead of trying to describe all of this to you, let me show a picture of the old and new theme from Blogger (yes, Blogger.com, I’m still there).  Now, let me show you the new updated version: Now, let me show you below the featured story: Now you can see the cool cards

What started in 2012 has become a reality in 2022, yet the reality isn’t quite what I had in mind. Writing is what started, originally for a website called All Voices, which was a citizen journalist site working from a revenue-sharing model (is no longer around). This was very exciting to me at the time, an ambitious writer in his early 30s, a person who had been internet starved throughout his twenties and early thirties and now had access to the online world — the world was awaiting my opinions, so I hoped. The reality ten years later is what could be called a scrambled blogger or a scatterbrained writer, forlorn in the shadows of obscurity and lost in the wide efforts of his ambition. The whole “eggs in the basket” idea has turned into ashes in the woodstove, as little efforts spent far and wide equal little payoffs in the proverbial basket. It’s not even the stretched-too-thin problem that has rendered my efforts nearly penniless, it is the lost ambition to write and the loss of fo

cc from flickr.com Languishing in the "no rank" section of website ranking obscurity, CBJ has seen better days, although perhaps the best is yet to come for this well-colored and named blog. Maybe all I needed was a better strategy to blog more, to blog better, to continue on in this blogging effort. While this seems easy enough to simply create a new strategy, the challenge is in the consistent effort over the months, years, and even decades. For CBJ, it has been 8-9 years since it started in 2014. If I'm into my blogging, I'll be here writing about it; well, I haven't blogged here since February of 2021, and before that not since 2019... Keep in mind, I have 6 creator blogs, including CBJ. The main blog I post to is LDT, which has been lean over the last 5 years as well. I started out quickly in 2013,14,15, but then I faded and have been mostly subsisting and maintaining.  The strategy may sound elementary to some, but don't overlook the insight, as it refle

  cc from pixabay.com      The massive censorship campaign against the truth by big tech has been happening right before our eyes in the last year; from an acting President being censored by Twitter and Facebook to thousands of independent media truthers with large followings being canceled and deleted by YouTube and their brainless bands of fact-checkers, sighting they were going against community standards. This is an ominous sign for bloggers and content creators, thus, we need alternative places to create and share our content to ensure continuity in our work.       By the way, community standards are simply their flexible ethical reasoning to censor information and truth the powers to be (and that pay them off) don't want the public to know, especially the mainstream public. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Instagram, Medium, Amazon, and others have all ganged up on the truth to spread lies that destroy people.      The major lies of the #coronavirushoax and the #gl

cc from bluediamondgallery.com I just looked at the date of the last post here at CBJ and it was July 13, 2018. So, it's been over a year since I've written a post here. Not the best marketing strategy, yet here I am, writing another post to keep the blog alive and give any readers out there hope the author is still alive and in the same blogging mind.  Of course, blogging is something I think about all the time. Having created the perfect blogs for every article I could imagine to write, I constantly think of articles and topics I could write about -- if only I had the time is usually the culprit I point to, and not without reason, still, the blogs go un-published and my ideas are seemingly lost in the daily routine of modern slavery.  Specifically, God has opened the door and I've been working as a greenskeeper for the last 5 months. Golfing is one of my passions and lawn care is one of my trades, the match has been great, especially since I get free golf at

cc from maxpixel.net Joining the over 600 million other blogs in the world is an exciting experience for the first-timer, yet could also end up being disappointing if they're trying to make money from it. While some bloggers do make enough money through their blogging efforts to make a living, most of us don't even come close. Let's talk about the challenges and possibilities of blogging by examining how to monetize a blog: my experience. Types of Blogs Among the hundreds of millions of blogs online, there are many different types of blogs to consider. Many blogs are monetized and professional, to the point where visitors can't even tell they're a blog. Really, they're simply a website where someone posts their writings, drawings, paintings, pictures, videos, audio, videos, affiliate posts, etc. What is a blog then, if it's just a website with a unique domain? Blogs are websites where individuals or businesses can craft and pu

cc from flickr.com This article is going to be unique from what you'll typically find about affiliate blogging or building a website. I have a different perspective from most of the websites out there: talking about affiliate blogging.  Really what I'm discussing here is professional blogging, where people are ambitious to make money online through a website. They don't usually care about what the site is about, as long as they can make a full-time living with copious amounts of residual income. Yet, is it really as easy as people are saying? My Experience A couple months ago I wanted to start an affiliate blog about the topic of golfing, so I started another blogger blog here and called it “Better Golfing Days” . As of now, I'm only an affiliate with Amazon, so I put some relevant products there and an Adsense ad. For me, creating a free blog at blogger is within my capabilities. Now, about a week ago I found out about Wealthy Affilia