I decided to start my own make money online blog in September, 2007. Why? There is a huge boom in the blog industry and I was reading about it for months so why not jump on the bandwagon? But I knew I could make a bigger run out of it because I’m one of those guys who you never heard but you “knew” these guys existed in the underground internet world churning up mulas. I decided to write about popular topics that are going around the internet.

I heard about this girl 17 year old girl named Ashley who started a Myspace resources website 2 years ago. I loved every minute reading her story, and got completely inspired by it. On September 3rd, 2007, I wrote about it.

www.mulamaker.com/what-everrr-life-totally

Since my blog is still new and unheard of in the world-of-blogosphere, I keep writing quality content posts knowing that eventually, traffic will follow!
After a week, I checked my traffic stats and saw that some pages have been indexed by Google and MSN search engines. It’s a slow start but oh well. I continued on, forgetting to post for few days in middle of the month. Then I set a goal to write 1-2 quality posts per day for a week straight from there. After 2 weeks into it blogging, I realized I hit a page that was receiving a good amount of traffic.

www.mulamaker.com/what-everrr-life-totally

I pat myself on the back for writing quality content articles to search term: Whateverlife.com.
(Google thinks it’s most relevant – kudos to me!) I ride the wave being ranked #5 in the search term for “whateverlife.com.”

Before I was able to capture a screen print of the #5 ranking, I was already pushed down to #7.

While I was ranked # 5, I was receiving 30-40 unique visitors a day on that page alone. I’ll bet DoshDosh and Adesblog received same or more traffic since they were ranked higher.

#Mulamaker, yes I did see a hike today for whatever traffic, I almost got 1000 hits from Google.

Comment by Ades — September 30, 2007 @ 4:32 am

Monday September 24th, I was watching CNN news then there she was! Ashbo on the TV! CNN news aired a story about Ashley and Whateverlife.com. Wow, I thought that was really cool! I had just written about her and there she was - on the news! CNN mind you, and I instantly placed bets with myself that she would begin benefiting from this exposure immediately!

That morning I wrote a follow up post about Whateverlife.com:

http://www.mulamaker.com/whateverlifecom-ashley-qualls-story-revisited/

Basically, her traffic spiked after that news story hit and I too was benefiting from it.

For the entire week traffic slowed down little by little on that search term. Friday September 28th around 10am central time, I thought there was something wrong with my wordpress stats. I saw that I had 66 users online. I honestly thought this couldn’t be true, did one of my blog post made on digg front page?… It couldn’t be, there was no way… lol but that’s what came to my mind for a minute or two.

What happened was that Whateverlife.com was down Friday morning through until 1pm central time. Her website is hosted by theplanet.com ev1servers. I’m not sure what caused her website to go down but my gears started working.

How much did Ashley @ Whateverlife.com lose that in earning this brief morning?

If it was theplanet’s fault, do they compensate for this kind of loss?

Is there any type of website-insurance for this?

Maybe someone can enlighten me if you know more on this subject.

The graph shown above is # of visitors and how long they stayed at my blog Mulamaker.com courtesy of Statcounter.com. I wasn’t surprised to see these kind of numbers. Almost all of those counted stayed less than 5 seconds then clicked out of my blog.
Most probably visited her site before, probably looking for answers in Google to find out why they couldn’t access the site. So they were looking for next best thing, or, fortunately for me, the next website listed in the search results. Hence, they were typing in “Whateverlife.com” &“Whateverlife” in the search engine.
If you look carefully at the screenshot above again with my search ranking… you’ll see that I’m the 3rd page that begins with the word “Whateverlife”

Whateverlife.com vs. PimpMySpace.org | Mulamaker.com

My determination of this situation: My blog title caught visitors attention more than other sites above me who’s sites didn’t begin with the word “Whateverlife?” It would be nice to know how other sites benefited from this traffic as well.

I bet you want to know how much I earned from this fluke of a traffic spike.

Between the few hours I was able to put up the adsense codes in place. I received about 80 clicks for about $9 in earnings. Now, you have to understand that my intention when starting this blog in the beginning was not about pushing ads in your face. I was going to wait until I had good # of return visitors before I put up any ads. But with this recent traffic spike, I decided to change my strategy. I doubt it will be any time soon that Whateverlife.com website goes down again. So this was one time lucked out deal for me.

1. My indexed page will slowly lose because I’m pushed down every week in rank.
2. Visitors are probably younger demographics and not looking for “make money online” blog so I’ll get 0 return visitors … so I figured why not milk it while it lasts.. right?

Plus, I couldn’t resist the traffic spike I received and I wanted to see how much I could earn from it. ; )

Conclusion:

1. There are now tons of articles on the internet about Whateverlife.com I just happened to write about her website twice. This just shows you that a Quality and Unique content is the way to go. Now if you just focused on “latest news topics” I’m sure you’ll get your articles indexed faster and receive good amounts of organic traffic. This is why we see many so many blogs about Technology and Celebrity news.
2. I believe CNN stated that her site receives over 250,000 visitors daily… I’m not sure this # is for real or not. But I got a little taste of the good (whatever)life she has, earning $70K+ month.

From Compete.com stats you can see that there were 5 million visitors last month but for month of September, it should be an increase!
3. I can see her visitors love to click on ads (meaning they have curiosity and interest in what they see.) I doubt all of her earnings are driven by Google Adsense ads though.
4. What we can learn from this? I learned that I have to work harder to achieve the same earning level as she created in the 2 years straight that she’s been working the Whateverlife.com website.
5. She can let go of her $200/hr consultant. I would love to work for free to just understand some data she gets from her visitors. The amount of data her site generates is worth far more than several million dollars she was offered for the site. I’m glad she didn’t sell it.
6. This shows you that if you work hard enough, things will pay off. And I’m a firm believer of this. So lets all get to work.

Thanks you for reading.
p.s. You want to learn from the best in SEO business then you should read up on #1 Selling SEO Book on the internet by Aaron Wall.

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