Blog GilaChess

This kid just made USD 18,000 in a week. His name is Wesley So. He is a Phillipino. I had the opportunity to bump into he and his father when they were in Malaysia. His father speaks Hokkien by the way..

Anyway, this kid is only 14 years old and he already made that amount of money a few days ago.

How? I hear you ask. Yeah getting to that..

He is a professional chess player you see. He played in the Dubai Chess Open 2008 last week and tied for first place. He got USD 18,000 for his one week effort. All in all, he only had to play 9 games of chess.

Comparatively speaking, I think being a pro-chess player like this kid is more profitable then being a pro-blogger. His is a story of pure hard work and a little talent. Of course, not everybody can be as good has this kid.

Anyway, just wanted to highlight this to bloggers out there. If you have the talent, monetizing comes automatically. Even talent in playing a board game.

I made a new year resolution this year in general to be more organised. One of the things I've done religously was to document all the new blogs that I've created. In the past there I created so many new blogs that I've forgotten their URLs.

Each one had Google Adsense on it so sometimes I received a spike but since no channel information was attached to those Adsense codes, I could not tell which blogs were generating those clicks. That was damn frustrating. I couldn't go back to those blogs and develope them further.

What a waste!

Anyway, I keep my new blogs created using a spreadsheet. Details such as Google PR, URL, Alexa rank, email used to create those blogs are recorded.

To date, I already have over 50 blogs created. It's all experimental though. Many were created because I liked the name.

Perhaps I should change my tag to "Andrew the GilaBlogger" :)

Yes I rank no.1 on Google for a single keyword. It's not an easy thing to do. What's the word?

"Zerofied"

Yeah I'm proud of that. The articles are about what to do with blogs that have been punished by Google with PR0 for various reasons like writing paid post and selling text links. Do you rank no.1 on Google for any keyword? :)

Online advertising has taken off in a big way last year when several companies began to leverage blog advertising. Traditional media is being replaced by electronic advertisement which is becoming more and more effective as the newer generation practically spending a whole lot of time online.

If you are a blogger with an established blog, you can really monetize it by going into blog reviews and advertisement. However finding and advertiser yourself is usually daunting. Luckily there are companies that offer services that can help. One of this advertising company, Smorty, offers a service to connect advertisers and bloggers.

Here's how it works.  Smorty matches you with an advertiser to write opinion posts about a current advertiser. You can get paid to blog with sums that are quite substantial if you can consistently write good quality reviews.

I have more chess blogs than I can count on my fingers. But currently the one that is most active is http://blog.gilachess.com

It's strange that I got into being a full time blogger because of chess too. The income that I made in the beginning from ads was pretty small and laughable. But as the years went, it really grew slowly. It reached the point that I quit my job last year just to concentrate on blogging full time.

Life is not as easy as it sounds. There is so much to do. In fact, I think I work even harder now compared to my day job. I have to if I want to survive...

But overall, I like this lifestyle compared to the 9 to 5 grind.