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Moralde.com: YEAR 001

The Birth

Moralde.com first appeared live on April 28 last year. I recall the ecstatic feeling I had as it flashed to life before my eyes on screen. I literally jumped with a matching jubilant cry and did a little victory dance (much like Steve Carell’s dance in the movie ‘Evan Almighty’). The commotion attracted the attention of my wife and 2 kids who rushed to the scene and caught a few seconds of the ending phase of my dance.

The ‘Hello World‘ default post is still here serving as the very first post. I had edited the contents and title but was so newbie to miss changing the permalink url.

The Purpose

I put up this blog to serve as my outlet to the world for whatever I have to say. Eventually, I learned a lot about blogging and came to know of matters like traffic, linking, commenting, seo, google, etc. These subjects soon became some of my favorite topics to write about, surpassing my original intent to write mostly about family experiences, fatherhood, etc. Thus I came out with the following:

Earning Money

About a couple of months of blogging exposure later, I learned about the dirty subject of monetization. There was Google’s adsense but I found that it demands that I concentrate on a particular niche and write according to some pattern in order to work well. This, of course, threatened to put a limit to what I can write in my blog. I put in a few weeks of practice into it but found it very limiting and contrary to my original goals. Luckily, I stumbled upon the warrior forum and got tips about earning from adsense, amazon, ebay, etc. This lead me to invest into buying new domains for this purpose and saw that I’m beginning to earn my very first dollars. The following posts give hints to what I’ve learned so far as well as my personal experiences in this area:

Post Count

With my day job, I was only able to allot a few hours to my blog, hence the poor post count (7 or 8 posts per month). With the additional load of attending to my business sites (the other sites I put up which earn through amazon and adsense), the time spent on my blog got even shorter. But what the heck, my blog is a personal one. I chose not to get tied up with:

  • the need to adjust my writing to satisfy optimization rules
  • the obligation to post daily
  • to stick to a single niche
  • the need to earn backlinks even from sites I don’t personally like
  • etc.

Optimization, backlinking, keyword density and structuring, etc are concepts and activities I focus and apply only on my business sites, not here. I sometimes do a little social bookmarking work for this blog though when I feel like doing it, and do some SEO work when I need to experiment and experience an seo idea first hand.

In short, this blog is not a money earner. However, should I bump into some method later on that can convert this blog into a money earner without curtailing my freedom too much, I just might give it a shot.

Influences

What’s with the links to Extreme John and Wassupblog in the sidebar? If you are familiar with the idea of ‘imprinting’, you’ll understand. It’s like, when I first opened my eyes after my cyber-birth, these were the two blogs that met my eyes. And I imprinted. 🙂 You’ll see that most of the ideas that these 2 great blogs advocate are used or incorporated here, e.g. dofollow, etc.

This blog by the way has undergone a facelift some time ago. I should have taken a snapshot of the old look so I could show my future grandkids (my eldest kid is still 11 years old as of this writing 🙂 ) a graphical history of the blog. I’m sure I’m going to be tweaking this same theme to come up with another facelift soon. Also, the possibility of a drastic change, e.g. a complete theme change, is not far-fetched.

I wish to thank all blogger friends who commented on my posts and made my posts better with their inputs. Of course, I give praise and all gratitude to the Lord of The Universe for all these. Moralde.com is now officially 1 year old.