Tags::::::::Earn, Money, Internet
Do you
actually want to monetize your blog?
Some people have
strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their
blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral,
unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then
don’t commercialize it.
If you have mixed
feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first.
If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you
think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously
consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must
be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough
— you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It
should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven
by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value,
you fully deserve to earn income from it. If you do decide to
generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re
going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a
puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request
donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a
barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to
sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best
quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to
buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t
take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.
You can reasonably
expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will
complain, depending on how you do it and start to join with
Google Adsense ads on the
site and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it
was pretty low, Adsense is still my single best source of revenue
Can you make
a decent income online?
Yes,
absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is
certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from
home. . If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate
a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to
devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.
Can most
people do it?
No, they
can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site
use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who
say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their
blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development
for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending
on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while
most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people
can.
This kind of 99-1
ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field
with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors,
musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to
support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these
days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the
talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets
you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one
particular talent.
If you are very web
savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an
excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your
living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more
than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit
your day job.
Web savvy
What do I mean by
web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent
functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What
technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your
means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these
elements as significant:
- blog publishing software
- HTML/CSS
- blog comments (and comment
spam)
- RSS/syndication
- feed aggregators
- pings
- trackbacks
- full vs. partial feeds
- blog carnivals (for
kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
- search engines
- search engine optimization
(SEO)
- page rank
- social bookmarking
- tagging
- contextual advertising
- affiliate programs
- traffic statistics
- email
Optional:
podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.
I’m sure I missed a
few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your
head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from
blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a
serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t
expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.
If you want to sell
downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce,
SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the
list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic
understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to
handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting
into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you
won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun
is.
A lack of understanding
is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For
example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll
probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who
understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in
isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between
them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance
the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you,
social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others.
Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are
significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take
all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is
attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields
relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and
social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide
genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my
articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning
cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s
little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after
month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your
traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web
savvy to understand, respect, and apply.
This sort
of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups
may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their
efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an
article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You
really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them
routinely.
Whenever you come
across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on
Google or
Wikipedia,
and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it.
To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of
all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades
is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any
of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s
the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto
mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move
on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I
don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really
care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it
would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient
functional knowledge to apply several of them.
Thriving on
change
Your greatest risk
isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is
that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial
mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of
loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what
you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst.
Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be
minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would
have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can
listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to
Darren Rowse’s
Problogger
blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for
bloggers.
The blogosphere
changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to
decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they
disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting,
you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And
every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have
earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your
audience, and benefit more people.
I used to get
annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more
rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And
the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn
about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead
to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in
itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused
then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this
part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they
aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand
these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on
some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high.
Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web
entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a
college
student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever
idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s
success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.
What’s your
overall income-generation strategy?
I don’t want
to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes
to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly
with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a
strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require
that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will
just create a mess.
Take a moment
to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site.
If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for
how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business
plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever
your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first
started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure,
but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push
it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a
meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months
after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s
continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is
actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a
regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I
can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…
Are you going to
generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales,
donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these
things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy
down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of
my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review
it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on
where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are
inconsistent with my plan.
Refer to your
monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions
for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income,
decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site
around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or
will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies
suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you
want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and
design your site accordingly.
When devising your
income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel.
Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you
too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s
copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making
money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and
affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated
income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective
combo.
Traffic,
traffic, traffic
Assuming you feel
qualified to take on the challenge of generating income
from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most
important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and
traffic.
Just to throw out
some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million
visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it
was just six months ago.
Why is traffic so
important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your
income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll
probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly
consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious
traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the
realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web
site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).
When I first
launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my
biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build
traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult
to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first
several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19
months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization
plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site,
but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the
site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.
Traffic is the
primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means
more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations,
more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for
you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.
With respect to
traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get
richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities
that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at
least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can
easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like
del.icio.us,
and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier
this year I was featured in
USA Today and in
Self Magazine, which
collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding
me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities
were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites
have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can
attract.
If you’re
intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to
eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to
leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.
How to build
traffic
Now if traffic is so
crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from
rock bottom?
I’ve already written
a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there:
How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or
Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to
bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general
philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides
genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.
There is one
other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.
Blog Carnivals.
Take full advantage of
blog
carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and
read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already
know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate
carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and
traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes
minutes if you use a
multi-carnvival submission form.
Do
NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit
to the carnivals that are a match for your content.
In my early
traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it
helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per
month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a
free shot at marketing your unknown blog. Free marketing is precisely the
kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss. Carnivals are like
an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off
their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while,
but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much
difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need
11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much
traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers
from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start.
Plus it’s very easy.
If your traffic
isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something
wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again,
making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.
Will putting
ads on your site hurt your traffic?
Here’s a common fear
I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:
Putting ads
on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people
away, and they’ll never come back.
Well, in my
experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and
totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my
traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to
my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I
could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic
continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my
site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers
actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad
layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about
this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already
that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if
they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say
publicly.
Most mature people
understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her
work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature
— immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To
create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the
hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone
took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s
perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no
value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than
that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into
it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment
and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded
13
episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also
planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead.
More income = better service.
At the time of this
writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if
I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to
contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the
one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this
configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on
them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something
else.
I do avoid putting
up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites,
including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your
screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they
degrade the visitor experience too much.
I also provide two
ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my
content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and
at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a
donation
request in the bottom of my feeds.
If you want to see
some actual traffic data, take a look at the
2005 traffic growth chart.
I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t
cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before
then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on
Alexa. You can select
different Range options to go further back in time.
Multiple
streams of income
You don’t need to
put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income.
On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you
count them all? Here’s a list:
- Google Adsense ads (pay per
click and pay per impression advertising)
- Donations
(via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
- Text Link Ads (sold
for a fixed amount per month)
- Chitika
eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
- Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare
(commission on products sold,
mostly books)
- Advertising sold to
individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)
Note:
If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date,
then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with
different streams.
Adsense is my
biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well
too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.
My second biggest
income stream is actually
donations. My
average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations
too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even
if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily
contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the
visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I
notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me
I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.
These aren’t my only
streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since
1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty
income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free
articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets
really ridiculous: advertising, direct book sales, book
sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense
income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive
a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s
also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand
existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your
blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.
Automated income
With the exception
of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to
do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t
even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank
account.
I love automated
income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no
products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no
customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and
growing) income.
Why get a regular
job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work
for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your
computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s
a really nice situation to be in.
Blogging
software and hardware
I use
WordPress for
this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features
and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.
The rest of this
site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I
coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an
existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this
site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site.
Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the
Million
Dollar Experiment.
I don’t recommend
using a hosted service like
Blogger if
you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough
control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a
service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to
build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you
want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you
can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use
a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the
future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit
more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.
Web hosting is
cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend
Pair.com for
a starter hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very
reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host
with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.
As your traffic
grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server
(VPS). This web site is hosted by
ServInt.
I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome
host. What I like most about them is that they have a smooth
upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several
upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing
about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the
server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it
doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.
Comments or
no comments
When I began this
blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the
level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I
noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to
question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with
continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in
comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can
easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many
follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands
of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up
more and more of my time as well.
But after looking
through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever
look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well
below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in
October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of
my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.
Do you need comments
to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw
no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it
actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks
enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to
publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs
and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it
just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable,
and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites
and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate
because the discussion isn’t on my own site.
I realize people
have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building.
Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a
blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t
support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post
comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about
comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but
I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite.
Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a
trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own
blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my
preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real
results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.
Now if you want to
support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making
new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments
are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test
this assumption yourself.
Build a
complete web site, not just a blog
Don’t limit your web
site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my
traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it.
For example, the
home
page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the
site, including the blog,
article section,
audio
content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is,
so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.
Testing and
optimization
In the beginning you
won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you.
So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a
new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure
the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t
working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show
real promise.
A few months
ago, I signed up for an account with
Text Link Ads. It took
about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the
revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal
account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if
they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive.
If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.
For many months I’ve
been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different
colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I
have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for
me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data,
but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter
though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by
converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why
during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income
grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major
positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my
income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my
Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.
It’s cheap to
experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve
tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income
stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it
does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does
well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should
always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried
anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some
golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test
things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here
— you either succeed, or you learn something.
Pick your
niche, but make sure it isn’t too small
Pick a niche for
your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big
enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs a
popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s
just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal
development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested
in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like
productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more.
It’s all relevant to personal development.
Pick a niche that
you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still
feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at
all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very
knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t
imagine a better topic for me to write about.
Don’t pick a niche
just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to
do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think
about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a
massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your
visitors. It’s all about what you can give.
A broad enough topic
creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the
same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an
income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same
umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the
appeal of my site at the same time.
Make it clear to
your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a
clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents.
In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on.
I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better
results than cleverness.
Posting
frequency and length
Bloggers have
different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some
bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per
week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do
pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per
week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer
than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s
because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to
write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that
deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building
traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but
those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t
believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad
impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their
time.
Expenses
Blogging is dirt
cheap.
I don’t spend money
on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil.
Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll
probably find many more gems in the
archives.
My only real
expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the
web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year).
Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This
trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income
tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.
The reason I pay so
much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much
lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting
account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high
traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues
to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny
fraction of total income.
Perks
Depending on the
nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic
grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the
mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will
send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of
books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development
products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two
dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do
plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy
of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I
have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I
receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of
audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m
sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.
My criteria for
reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and
profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if
there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing
my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money
is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to
grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.
Your blog can also
gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic
blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of
yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few
days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a
free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per
person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week.
I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high
expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.
I’m also using the
popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to
learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value
for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted
an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire
Marc Allen as well as a
review of his latest book, and
I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone
to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.
Motivation
I don’t think you’ll
get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have
to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s
the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love
personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on
infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s
my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire,
but the fire is still there with or without the money.
What’s your
passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?
Blogging
lifestyle
Perhaps the best
part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it
brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m
inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my
time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do
the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.
Perhaps it’s true
that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet.
But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.
How to make money from your blog: 5 tips
Many people who write blogs today simply want to
share their opinion on something. But then there are the business-minded folks,
who have found a way to use blogs, or Web logs, to bring in a little extra cash
too.
If you're interested in taking it further —
blogging for bucks, if you will — here are five strategies that could turn your
blog into a moneymaker.
1. Sell advertising.
This is likely the most
common means of leveraging a blog to generate income. If yours happens to
become a well-known blog, or one that is well-received in a particular niche,
it's always possible to sell ad space on your own.
For
Bing Blogs and services such as Google's AdSense or BlogAds,
bloggers can establish ad programs. AdSense's — which lets you select several
ads that are consistent with the content of your blog — pays you based on how
many readers click on the ads for further information. Even better, it's free. BlogAds,
on the other hand, hooks bloggers up with would-be advertisers and levies a
commission in return for any ad placements that result. "The nice thing,
too, is that the ads are relatively unobtrusive," says Scott Allen,
co-author of
The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online.
2. Help sell others' products. Here is
another click-through opportunity. Affiliate programs enable your blog to serve
as a conduit between readers and online sites offering various goods and
services. One popular choice is Amazon.com. If, for instance, you offer book
reviews or even just mention a book in passing in your blog, an affiliate
program provides a means for your readers to click directly from your blog to
Amazon to obtain further information about the book.
If they break out the checkbook or charge card, you
get paid as well.
3. Solicit contributions. Not every
blog-related income opportunity involves hawking goods or services. As Blanche
DuBois said in A Streetcar Named Desire, consider relying on the
kindness of strangers. Ask for contributions. If, for instance, your small-business
blog supports a cause or issue in some fashion — say you repeatedly mention
tax reform, health care or some other topic — you can always ask for reader
support. Even if you've attracted a group of regular followers who simply enjoy
reading what you have to say, they may be willing to underwrite their loyalty
with a little financial help. Programs such as PayPal make it easy to establish
a simple on-site contribution collection button. "There are lots of worthy
'cause' blogs that would qualify for donations from grateful members of the
blog community," says Las Vegas communications consultant Ned Barnett.
4. Market your services in your blog. Many
people associate blogs exclusively with a cyberspace-based soapbox — a place to
shout your opinions and little more than that. Granted, blogs are an ideal
venue to share your thoughts with others, but don't overlook their capacity to
generate new business as well. When appropriate, work in references to what you
do and, in turn, what you may be able to offer any would-be client or customer
who may be reading your blog. That can spread your opinion and your business
moxie at the same time."Instead of short commentaries that begin a
dialogue with readers, as many blogs do, I write the equivalent of journal
articles that demonstrate my abilities, strategies and perspectives on specific
issues," Barnett says. "When it resonates, it means money. Since starting
this approach, I have generated three new paying clients and brought in about
$10,000 on revenue — directly attributable to specific blogs."
5. Use a blog to deepen your existing customer
relations. Nor does any marketing material inserted in blog content have to
be limited to bringing in completely new business. By using a blog to regularly
communicate with existing clients as well as other readers, you can take
advantage of the opportunity to fully inform them about everything your
business does. That may expand your readers' understanding of the full scope of
your products or services."My blog has helped existing clients determine
the range of my skills and services," says Ted Demopoulos of Demopoulos
Associates, a Durham, N.H. consulting and training concern. "One client
who had only used me for training in the past was surprised at my range of
expertise and is now using me for a consulting project. Another who only used
me on technical projects is now considering me for a more business-oriented
project."
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