Want to make your web page or website attractive? Then it's time to learn on how to use free blog themes.
Most of the webmasters spend a lot of time and energy on making their websites as attractive as possible to maintain and capture a sizable traffic for it. They also make the website as accessible as possible to improve web traffic. For neophytes, this task may be very challenging as well as hard. But there are a lot of ways to make our sites attractive and to catch sizable traffic.
Free blogs themes are the easiest and the most convenient way to decorate and make our web pages attractive and up to date. It offers a lot of choices for all types of users and tastes and most of all it's free. It offers users a very easy way to maintain and keep their websites. It also offers a whole make over to our blogs like changing its background, its font and even its color, just by several clicks.
Before, it was so hard to make blog themes because one has to make it from scratch. But with a lot of people making the free blog themes, it became easier to utilize. This is made simple because it doesn't use HTML codes and scripts that are usually very hard to understand and what more to use. That is the reason why free blog themes became so popular that even the mediocre users of the computer can use them and place them in their very own websites.
Free blog themes are readily available for download in various sites in the internet. Just knowing where to find the best theme can make a difference in anyone's blog or webpage. They can also be changed easily from one theme to another. The best thing about it is that it's free and doesn't require any subscription or membership fees. All you have to do is look for a site that offers free download and start creating and recreating your web page. There would definitely no boring days for you and your webpage.
Free blog themes are also very easy to use. They only require programs like WordPress to integrate the new look into your site. All you have to do is to download the blog theme into your computer (which is normally a ZIP file), extract and view its content. Then all you have to do is import the theme onto your blogging application without manually inserting the images one by one.
Free blog themes are totally not boring since they are simple, easy to use and flexible. Right. They are flexible. Even by using these free download, they can be changed and edited to integrate more of your style into your site. These download help by actually letting you use your imagination and your taste into creating and recreating your website. These downloads are not hard to use and they will allow changes into its design and layout to make you choose the best look for you.
If you want some free blog themes, feel free to check http://jump2top.com/themes
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta blog. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta blog. Mostrar todas las entradas
miércoles, 4 de febrero de 2009
HOW TO WRITE INTERESTING BLOG CONTENT
Blog is a free platform where you can write almost anything you like. Now everyone can create a blog and starting posting on it. However, it is your content that determines whether you can make money with blog or not. Below are some tips to help you to create profitable blog content.
According to studies, most readers love to read light and relax materials. So, the next time you publish your blog post, write things that appeal to your readers' interest. Let your readers get the necessary information and enjoy their read.
The next thing you need to know is that every bloggers have their own style and you might have a different opinion on some matters. You can express your personal opinions in your blog and your readers will appreciate that you show them a different side of the story. So, show your unique personality in your blog content.
Most of the writing guides nowadays agree that you need to address your readers as 'you'. This is because people like the feeling of being special. When you address your readers as you in the blog content, they will think that you are giving them your full attention. When you are able to make your readers feel special, they will visit your blog regularly.
Speaking of attending to your readers, you need to add some human touch to your blog content to make it interesting. Always remember that your readers are real people with real emotion. Your job as a successful blogger is to rouse their emotion and one of the best ways is to add some sense of humor in your posts.
Sometime your readers will be bored with your writing. Relax. Your blog content is still interesting. Just that they grew bore of looking at words. So, it is good that you can add videos, audios or search engines as your content once in a while so that your readers will feel something fresh from your blog.
As making a living is becoming more and more challenging, do you want to know how to make some extra cash online? Take a look at
According to studies, most readers love to read light and relax materials. So, the next time you publish your blog post, write things that appeal to your readers' interest. Let your readers get the necessary information and enjoy their read.
The next thing you need to know is that every bloggers have their own style and you might have a different opinion on some matters. You can express your personal opinions in your blog and your readers will appreciate that you show them a different side of the story. So, show your unique personality in your blog content.
Most of the writing guides nowadays agree that you need to address your readers as 'you'. This is because people like the feeling of being special. When you address your readers as you in the blog content, they will think that you are giving them your full attention. When you are able to make your readers feel special, they will visit your blog regularly.
Speaking of attending to your readers, you need to add some human touch to your blog content to make it interesting. Always remember that your readers are real people with real emotion. Your job as a successful blogger is to rouse their emotion and one of the best ways is to add some sense of humor in your posts.
Sometime your readers will be bored with your writing. Relax. Your blog content is still interesting. Just that they grew bore of looking at words. So, it is good that you can add videos, audios or search engines as your content once in a while so that your readers will feel something fresh from your blog.
As making a living is becoming more and more challenging, do you want to know how to make some extra cash online? Take a look at
HOW IMPORTANT IS YOUR BLOG LAYOUT?
Your Blog layout is of the utmost importance. It should be designed around what is called 'minimalism' this means you should not "cram" your Blog pages too much because this makes it difficult for visitors to decide what to read first. It is easy for them to get lost if the main content of the Blog is not clear to them and if they can not decide what it is they will find in the other pages of the Blog.
So many Bloggers are so engrossed in driving people to their Blog that they eventually forget how they should treat them once they are there. Even though when it comes to blogging, a Blog publisher must keep in mind that though there is one contributor and many readers there should be some level of interactivity. So the layout of the Blog must have a prominent "comment" space for the visitors. This will ensure a long term residual traffic to your Blog consisting of visitors who are really interested in the kind of content you keep posting.
If you have a business Blog you must keep in mind that people do not like to do business with anonymous people. You will need to add credibility to your business Blog by displaying your contact information prominently. This sends out the message that you are approachable and available should your visitors need any assistance. A business Blog bust be crisp and to the point, much like a business letter. Remember business letters are concise and precise, there is no 'Hello, how are you' and 'what is the weather like?' in business writing. The same holds true to a business Blog.
The fundamentals of blogging will dictate that the links that take your visitors to other pages of the Blog must be places at the top or the side of the page where the visitors can easily see them. You could have an attractive banner at the top of the page and any advertisements if any, just below the additional links towards the right side of the page.
In the end it is the layout of your Blog that will prove to be of most importance to your traffic. They must not get lost among irrelevant content and know at once that the various categories of your Blog are structured in a regular manner.
So many Bloggers are so engrossed in driving people to their Blog that they eventually forget how they should treat them once they are there. Even though when it comes to blogging, a Blog publisher must keep in mind that though there is one contributor and many readers there should be some level of interactivity. So the layout of the Blog must have a prominent "comment" space for the visitors. This will ensure a long term residual traffic to your Blog consisting of visitors who are really interested in the kind of content you keep posting.
If you have a business Blog you must keep in mind that people do not like to do business with anonymous people. You will need to add credibility to your business Blog by displaying your contact information prominently. This sends out the message that you are approachable and available should your visitors need any assistance. A business Blog bust be crisp and to the point, much like a business letter. Remember business letters are concise and precise, there is no 'Hello, how are you' and 'what is the weather like?' in business writing. The same holds true to a business Blog.
The fundamentals of blogging will dictate that the links that take your visitors to other pages of the Blog must be places at the top or the side of the page where the visitors can easily see them. You could have an attractive banner at the top of the page and any advertisements if any, just below the additional links towards the right side of the page.
In the end it is the layout of your Blog that will prove to be of most importance to your traffic. They must not get lost among irrelevant content and know at once that the various categories of your Blog are structured in a regular manner.
YOUR BLOG AS A SHOP
We constantly hear the mantra "Treat your blog as a business", and of course, if we are here to make money from blogging, then that's exactly what we should do. So I started thinking about what exactly that might mean, and that lead me to think about Henri.
Henri owns the hardware store in my village, and he has a fantastic business, despite the fact that there is a cheaper, much bigger DIY superstore a few kilometers away. His business is great because he (and his wife who works there part time) give amazing personal service. Let's analyze what he does and see if we can relate it to giving great service to our blog "customers".
He has Incredible Product Knowledge
Even when you don't know exactly what you need to fix that tap, or make that joint, Henri does. I've rarely seen him defeated, and even when he is, he'll find a workaround to the problem. When he's not serving customers, he's reading DIY manuals or websites. When a new tool comes in, he takes it out of the box and learns how to use it. He's passionate about his subject and proud of his knowledge.
As bloggers, we need to follow his example - we need to invest time in learning our craft, both as writers and as experts in whatever field our blog is all about. We do this by reading other blogs, researching our subjects and investing our time and money into learning other people's knowledge.
He has the right Stock
The store is one of those old fashioned places, with hundreds of drawers full of little washers that cost 3 cents! He also has a huge basement area full of other hidden treasures - his stock taking must be a nightmare, but I have never caught him out! Staples for an ancient Stanley staple gun? Of course! Left hand widget for a pie flange? How many would you like?
Our stock is our content, and it does take time to build. The trick is to stay broad within your niche, if that makes sense. There may be one area of your niche you are particularly interested in, and the temptation is to keep writing on that, but you need to open up your stock by blogging about all the other areas as well. Have a look at Problogger for an example - that is a well "stocked" site - you could actually spend a week in there searching on various terms!
He's Open When We Need him to be
Henri opens all over the weekend - which is when we need his stuff!
We don't open and close our blogs, but we should aim to be there when our clients are around - that means being on hand to answer comments quickly, and that can be pretty inconvenient, but so what? If you're posting your blogs at 7PM because most of your readers are in the US and you're in Europe, then you need to be online at 7PM!
He interacts with his customers outside work
Henri is a big personality in the village - he's in the cafés, the bars, the bakery - he has coffee at the same time every day, and lunch in the plaza. He knows everybody and we all know him, and we all join him and chat with him about football or local news.
We have Twitter, Facebook and a number of other platforms which allow us to interact with our clients outside of our blogs. So if you're not a social animal, it's time you became one - use these platforms to start to establish your online personality by doing things other than Tweeting about your latest blog post - people buy from people they like.
He has Time
Even if you're just buying a box of screws, Henri has time for you. He'll ask about the family, he'll greet you when you walk in and he'll say goodbye when you leave.
We should also give people our time, no matter how busy we are. When you answer comments or questions, invest your time and effort into what you write, and think about the impact of what you say.
He Sells Add-Ons
Henri is brilliant at turning a one product sale into a two or three product sale, by simply asking a question - "Do you need a new brush to go with that paint?" "Have you got the right socket for those nuts?" As a customer we don't feel we're being sold to, more often than not we're grateful to be reminded of the extras we need.
We can learn from this in two ways. One is to add related content to our posts, and that means actually checking our past post inventory to see what would benefit a reader of this new one. The other way we can learn is to start to link our products together in packages. I sell some excellent TV viewing software via one of my blogs, and it took two minutes to add a link to sell the cable people need to connect their PC's to their TV's - result? Just over half the buyers of the software also order a cable! Look back through your pages and see where you can add related sales.
He's a Nice Guy and a Real Person
Henri is a good, honest, likable guy. You instinctively know that he's not trying to rip you off, he's straightforward to deal with and when he occasionally gets something wrong he rectifies the situation. It means people keep coming back to him, year after year.
If we're going to successfully draw customers to our blogs and sell products to them, we need to adopt some of that style. We need to cut the hype, get rid of the bullshit and offer our clients value for money products which we know will work for them and give them real benefits. That way, they too will keep coming back to our blogs, year after year.
Have you seen examples in other businesses which have lead you to apply the principles to blogging?
Henri owns the hardware store in my village, and he has a fantastic business, despite the fact that there is a cheaper, much bigger DIY superstore a few kilometers away. His business is great because he (and his wife who works there part time) give amazing personal service. Let's analyze what he does and see if we can relate it to giving great service to our blog "customers".
He has Incredible Product Knowledge
Even when you don't know exactly what you need to fix that tap, or make that joint, Henri does. I've rarely seen him defeated, and even when he is, he'll find a workaround to the problem. When he's not serving customers, he's reading DIY manuals or websites. When a new tool comes in, he takes it out of the box and learns how to use it. He's passionate about his subject and proud of his knowledge.
As bloggers, we need to follow his example - we need to invest time in learning our craft, both as writers and as experts in whatever field our blog is all about. We do this by reading other blogs, researching our subjects and investing our time and money into learning other people's knowledge.
He has the right Stock
The store is one of those old fashioned places, with hundreds of drawers full of little washers that cost 3 cents! He also has a huge basement area full of other hidden treasures - his stock taking must be a nightmare, but I have never caught him out! Staples for an ancient Stanley staple gun? Of course! Left hand widget for a pie flange? How many would you like?
Our stock is our content, and it does take time to build. The trick is to stay broad within your niche, if that makes sense. There may be one area of your niche you are particularly interested in, and the temptation is to keep writing on that, but you need to open up your stock by blogging about all the other areas as well. Have a look at Problogger for an example - that is a well "stocked" site - you could actually spend a week in there searching on various terms!
He's Open When We Need him to be
Henri opens all over the weekend - which is when we need his stuff!
We don't open and close our blogs, but we should aim to be there when our clients are around - that means being on hand to answer comments quickly, and that can be pretty inconvenient, but so what? If you're posting your blogs at 7PM because most of your readers are in the US and you're in Europe, then you need to be online at 7PM!
He interacts with his customers outside work
Henri is a big personality in the village - he's in the cafés, the bars, the bakery - he has coffee at the same time every day, and lunch in the plaza. He knows everybody and we all know him, and we all join him and chat with him about football or local news.
We have Twitter, Facebook and a number of other platforms which allow us to interact with our clients outside of our blogs. So if you're not a social animal, it's time you became one - use these platforms to start to establish your online personality by doing things other than Tweeting about your latest blog post - people buy from people they like.
He has Time
Even if you're just buying a box of screws, Henri has time for you. He'll ask about the family, he'll greet you when you walk in and he'll say goodbye when you leave.
We should also give people our time, no matter how busy we are. When you answer comments or questions, invest your time and effort into what you write, and think about the impact of what you say.
He Sells Add-Ons
Henri is brilliant at turning a one product sale into a two or three product sale, by simply asking a question - "Do you need a new brush to go with that paint?" "Have you got the right socket for those nuts?" As a customer we don't feel we're being sold to, more often than not we're grateful to be reminded of the extras we need.
We can learn from this in two ways. One is to add related content to our posts, and that means actually checking our past post inventory to see what would benefit a reader of this new one. The other way we can learn is to start to link our products together in packages. I sell some excellent TV viewing software via one of my blogs, and it took two minutes to add a link to sell the cable people need to connect their PC's to their TV's - result? Just over half the buyers of the software also order a cable! Look back through your pages and see where you can add related sales.
He's a Nice Guy and a Real Person
Henri is a good, honest, likable guy. You instinctively know that he's not trying to rip you off, he's straightforward to deal with and when he occasionally gets something wrong he rectifies the situation. It means people keep coming back to him, year after year.
If we're going to successfully draw customers to our blogs and sell products to them, we need to adopt some of that style. We need to cut the hype, get rid of the bullshit and offer our clients value for money products which we know will work for them and give them real benefits. That way, they too will keep coming back to our blogs, year after year.
Have you seen examples in other businesses which have lead you to apply the principles to blogging?
jueves, 29 de enero de 2009
BLOGGING FOR QUICK AND EASY PROFIT
Blogging serves lots of useful purposes, some social, some charitable, some designed to grow traffic and generate profits for your business. But getting visitors to visit your blog and buy your product just once is a waste of your blogging skills; you need to turn your visitors into regular visitors and send your profits soaring. It's called making your blog ''Sticky' and you do it like this:
* Update your blog daily and end each posting by mentioning what you'll be blogging about next time. And make that 'something' appealing, a little mysterious, and generate curiosity that forces your visitors to call daily to read your blog.
* Offer regular free gifts and get visitors to sign up to your mailing list for these free gifts. Give clues to what future gifts are about, but don't give too much information, give just enough to make readers curious and keen to know more and eager to visit your blog daily.
* Be friendly and approachable to visitors, get them to trust you, get them to email you for help and advice. Once you get their trust you can use blogging to pre-sell your own or affiliate products. You should only recommend products you like, not products you find lacking, otherwise all that trust you gained will be lost forever.
* If you promise regular postings make sure to keep your promise or visitors will become disillusioned, they'll accuse you of wasting their time, they'll lose faith in you, and they'll eventually stop visiting your blog.
* Include postings that require visitors to call back for updates, such as competitions for which you'll reveal the winners later, let readers ask questions which you again answer later at the blog, treat them to a few jokes and anecdotes, and let visitors see there's more to your blog than just making money.
All in all, give lots of reasons for people to visit your blog and one day, maybe soon, they'll buy one or more of your products.
* Update your blog daily and end each posting by mentioning what you'll be blogging about next time. And make that 'something' appealing, a little mysterious, and generate curiosity that forces your visitors to call daily to read your blog.
* Offer regular free gifts and get visitors to sign up to your mailing list for these free gifts. Give clues to what future gifts are about, but don't give too much information, give just enough to make readers curious and keen to know more and eager to visit your blog daily.
* Be friendly and approachable to visitors, get them to trust you, get them to email you for help and advice. Once you get their trust you can use blogging to pre-sell your own or affiliate products. You should only recommend products you like, not products you find lacking, otherwise all that trust you gained will be lost forever.
* If you promise regular postings make sure to keep your promise or visitors will become disillusioned, they'll accuse you of wasting their time, they'll lose faith in you, and they'll eventually stop visiting your blog.
* Include postings that require visitors to call back for updates, such as competitions for which you'll reveal the winners later, let readers ask questions which you again answer later at the blog, treat them to a few jokes and anecdotes, and let visitors see there's more to your blog than just making money.
All in all, give lots of reasons for people to visit your blog and one day, maybe soon, they'll buy one or more of your products.
domingo, 18 de enero de 2009
BLOG VS. WEBSITE
“What is the difference between Blogging and having a Website”.
The biggest difference between the two is one is Dynamic and the other is Static. I think you can guess which is which.
Blogging is the Dynamic choice for someone who has something to say, sell or portray. Once you start a Blog it is best to try to update it every day. That way you can build a readership and potential customers since that should be your objective. You want to keep to the subject matter as much as possible. Put a link to anything you find that is pertinent to your content (just don’t over do it). If you DO have a Website, make sure to put a link to it in an accessible spot on the Blog so that people can see your main products and services.
A Website is Static. This is where you actually describe your products and/or services. You can update a website as often as you like, but this is usually only done if your products change, you have a Sale, or something of that nature. You should have a link to your Blog on this site to allow customers to get updates as often as you post them.
If you have both Blog and Website, use them in conjunction with each other. Make sure people can find both as easily as possible. If you use RSS and Blog Feeds, list each in the appropriate catagory, the more exposure the better.
Remember, BOTH could have a place in your plan for Working at Home. Optimize your use of the Internet for your Business.
The biggest difference between the two is one is Dynamic and the other is Static. I think you can guess which is which.
Blogging is the Dynamic choice for someone who has something to say, sell or portray. Once you start a Blog it is best to try to update it every day. That way you can build a readership and potential customers since that should be your objective. You want to keep to the subject matter as much as possible. Put a link to anything you find that is pertinent to your content (just don’t over do it). If you DO have a Website, make sure to put a link to it in an accessible spot on the Blog so that people can see your main products and services.
A Website is Static. This is where you actually describe your products and/or services. You can update a website as often as you like, but this is usually only done if your products change, you have a Sale, or something of that nature. You should have a link to your Blog on this site to allow customers to get updates as often as you post them.
If you have both Blog and Website, use them in conjunction with each other. Make sure people can find both as easily as possible. If you use RSS and Blog Feeds, list each in the appropriate catagory, the more exposure the better.
Remember, BOTH could have a place in your plan for Working at Home. Optimize your use of the Internet for your Business.
BEWARE OF AFFILIATE SPAMMING!
The modern variation of the practice of paying finder's-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business is a popular method of promoting Internet businesses called affiliate marketing. An affiliate marketer is paid for every visitor, subscriber, or customer provided to an Internet business because of his efforts. The affiliate marketer earns compensation based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.
You can see where an affiliate marketer would be sorely tempted to send out email advertising the products he makes money on for promoting. This resulted in so much SPAM being generated that anti-spam laws were enacted. Spammers are severely fined and the newest twist in the anti-spam laws are that the merchants whose affiliates spam are being held responsible for the spamming as well. So caution is well advised to merchants.
Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel should research the different technological solutions available to them. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.
Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.
Right now there is a lot of debate about the affiliate practice of Spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of automatically generated web pages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of search engine optimizing their sites. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. Spam is the biggest threat to organic Search Engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users.
You can see where an affiliate marketer would be sorely tempted to send out email advertising the products he makes money on for promoting. This resulted in so much SPAM being generated that anti-spam laws were enacted. Spammers are severely fined and the newest twist in the anti-spam laws are that the merchants whose affiliates spam are being held responsible for the spamming as well. So caution is well advised to merchants.
Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel should research the different technological solutions available to them. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.
Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.
Right now there is a lot of debate about the affiliate practice of Spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of automatically generated web pages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of search engine optimizing their sites. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. Spam is the biggest threat to organic Search Engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users.
sábado, 17 de enero de 2009
WRITING FOR INCOME
Did you know that the average person can make an excellent second income writing articles about some of their favorite subjects?
Virtually anyone can write reasonably well if they put their mind to it and just copy a few "tricks of the trade" from others.
It's a well-known fact that the ability to write is directly tied into the degree of a person's success in just about any kind of career endeavor. And, for the aspiring entrepreneur, the ability to write effectively can mean the difference between success and failure.
Next time you go out, take a look at the hundreds of magazines on the racks at your local magazine store. Literally, there are hundreds of them, covering just about every conceivable subject. From knitting, to auto mechanics, to baseball, to flower arranging.
And those are just the ones carried at your local store. There are hundreds more that your local store just doesn't have room to stock on its shelves. Not only that, but most of these magazines are published monthly!
Can you imagine how much written material the publishers of these magazines need on a regular basis to keep their pages filled with articles? Do you have any idea how happy they are to find sources that can supply new and fresh original informative content? Very happy.
Well, guess what? You too can help them keep those pages filled and have fun while doing it. Not only that, they'll pay you real money for doing it!
All you have to do is research and write short articles, and then sell them to these magazines. I'm talking here about researching and writing articles on subjects that you personally are interested in. Ideally, subjects that you know and love.
For example, you could write about such things as: your hobby(ies), your favorite TV show(s), the sport(s) and the sports figures you follow, your favorite film stars, your pet, your exercise program, your summer vacation, and on and on.
Believe me, there are hundreds of magazines out there that will be happy to pay you good money for writing short, informative articles about the things that you love.
And remember, they aren't expecting you to write like Hemingway or a J.D. Salinger. All these special interest magazines really want, are articles of interest to their readership, written clearly and logically, using reasonable sentence structure and grammar. (Don't forget, these magazines all have editors whose job it is to tidy these things up).
The primary thing the magazine wants from you is, original and interesting content for their readers. That is what you can deliver if you are writing about something that you know, follow, and enjoy.
Here is a simple fast-track strategy to get you started writing for income:
1- Make a list. Itemize on paper your personal special interests, ranging from hobbies, to sports, to writers, to movie stars, to computer software, etc., etc. Every subject that you can think of that interests you, even if only slightly. It can even be work-related if you like. Say you're an insurance agent. What about a short article (750 to 1,000 words) on the basics of life insurance? If gardening is one of your things, you could write about how you decide which flowers to grow each spring.
2- Do some research. Spend some time in your local magazine stores and check out which magazines they carry that correspond to your interests. Choose two or three that interest you the most, to start with. Take these magazines home and study them. Note the general writing style and the average length of articles in each magazine. What special feature columns do they have? Think about where your material would fit best. Is there a unique angle that you could cover? (The Internet is an excellent research resource for this).
3- Write your article. Choose subjects that you know best for your first few articles. This will minimize the outside research that you will have to do. Draft an article that copies the style and approach of the particular magazine(s) that you are targeting. (Insider's Secret: Write in language as if you are explaining your subject out loud to a friend). Revise the article until it is the preferred length for that magazine, and until it reads as if it was written by one of the authors already published there.
4- Send it out. Use a short cover letter that explains your background and interest in the subject, and ask them if they would be interested in publishing the attached article. Send a copy to all of to the magazine(s) that you are targeting, You will be surprised at how many positive responses you can get for an article that is original and informative and that appeals to the readers of your targeted magazines.
The main point is this. Virtually anybody can write for income about something they know and love. Even if you don't know and love it yet, but a subject interests you, you can still research it and write about it. During the process, you will become somewhat of an expert on the subject, and you may even grow to love it too.
Yes, you too can write for income. Just make the decision and do it! It really is that simple.
Virtually anyone can write reasonably well if they put their mind to it and just copy a few "tricks of the trade" from others.
It's a well-known fact that the ability to write is directly tied into the degree of a person's success in just about any kind of career endeavor. And, for the aspiring entrepreneur, the ability to write effectively can mean the difference between success and failure.
Next time you go out, take a look at the hundreds of magazines on the racks at your local magazine store. Literally, there are hundreds of them, covering just about every conceivable subject. From knitting, to auto mechanics, to baseball, to flower arranging.
And those are just the ones carried at your local store. There are hundreds more that your local store just doesn't have room to stock on its shelves. Not only that, but most of these magazines are published monthly!
Can you imagine how much written material the publishers of these magazines need on a regular basis to keep their pages filled with articles? Do you have any idea how happy they are to find sources that can supply new and fresh original informative content? Very happy.
Well, guess what? You too can help them keep those pages filled and have fun while doing it. Not only that, they'll pay you real money for doing it!
All you have to do is research and write short articles, and then sell them to these magazines. I'm talking here about researching and writing articles on subjects that you personally are interested in. Ideally, subjects that you know and love.
For example, you could write about such things as: your hobby(ies), your favorite TV show(s), the sport(s) and the sports figures you follow, your favorite film stars, your pet, your exercise program, your summer vacation, and on and on.
Believe me, there are hundreds of magazines out there that will be happy to pay you good money for writing short, informative articles about the things that you love.
And remember, they aren't expecting you to write like Hemingway or a J.D. Salinger. All these special interest magazines really want, are articles of interest to their readership, written clearly and logically, using reasonable sentence structure and grammar. (Don't forget, these magazines all have editors whose job it is to tidy these things up).
The primary thing the magazine wants from you is, original and interesting content for their readers. That is what you can deliver if you are writing about something that you know, follow, and enjoy.
Here is a simple fast-track strategy to get you started writing for income:
1- Make a list. Itemize on paper your personal special interests, ranging from hobbies, to sports, to writers, to movie stars, to computer software, etc., etc. Every subject that you can think of that interests you, even if only slightly. It can even be work-related if you like. Say you're an insurance agent. What about a short article (750 to 1,000 words) on the basics of life insurance? If gardening is one of your things, you could write about how you decide which flowers to grow each spring.
2- Do some research. Spend some time in your local magazine stores and check out which magazines they carry that correspond to your interests. Choose two or three that interest you the most, to start with. Take these magazines home and study them. Note the general writing style and the average length of articles in each magazine. What special feature columns do they have? Think about where your material would fit best. Is there a unique angle that you could cover? (The Internet is an excellent research resource for this).
3- Write your article. Choose subjects that you know best for your first few articles. This will minimize the outside research that you will have to do. Draft an article that copies the style and approach of the particular magazine(s) that you are targeting. (Insider's Secret: Write in language as if you are explaining your subject out loud to a friend). Revise the article until it is the preferred length for that magazine, and until it reads as if it was written by one of the authors already published there.
4- Send it out. Use a short cover letter that explains your background and interest in the subject, and ask them if they would be interested in publishing the attached article. Send a copy to all of to the magazine(s) that you are targeting, You will be surprised at how many positive responses you can get for an article that is original and informative and that appeals to the readers of your targeted magazines.
The main point is this. Virtually anybody can write for income about something they know and love. Even if you don't know and love it yet, but a subject interests you, you can still research it and write about it. During the process, you will become somewhat of an expert on the subject, and you may even grow to love it too.
Yes, you too can write for income. Just make the decision and do it! It really is that simple.
viernes, 16 de enero de 2009
MONETIZE YOUR BLOG
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, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.
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. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…
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. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. 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. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.
If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.
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. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.
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.
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, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.
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. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…
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. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. 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. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.
If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.
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. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.
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
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.
GOOGLE ADSENSE
Google AdSense, Google's advertising program that lets webmasters display ads from Google's extensive list of advertisers, has taken the Internet by storm. Through this successful program, unobtrusive text-based ads are served in member sites, who then earn a commission every time someone clicks on the advertisers' links.
At this point in time, the jury is still out on whether this program will continue to enjoy its initial success. That is why, through this article, we want to give you some highlights and insights on how the Google Adsense program has worked for us, one month after we signed up for it, so that we can use it as a checkpoint for future analysis.
Why is Google AdSense so Popular?
Google AdSense uses Google's proprietary PageRank™ search technology to deliver ads that are highly relevant to the content of a page. Google's engine will scan through the content of the page to determine its topic, and will then serve ads that are relevant to the page's content.
Running Google AdSense is simple and straightforward: Google gives you a snippet of HTML code that you can paste in the desired location on your page, and the ads start appearing immediately after you upload the changes to your server.
However, Google AdSense's main claim to fame is that, by displaying text-based ads, it is able to deliver much higher click-through rates than traditional graphic banner ads. As usability studies have widely shown, users are already conditioned to ignore banner ads (or anything else that looks like them). As a result, banner ad click-through rates have dropped below a dismal 0.5% (in other words, it takes 200 page views, on average, to get someone to click on a banner ad).
By using text based ads instead of graphic banners, Google has been able to overcome banner ad blindness, delivering click-through rates that are much higher than the industry's average (some put the figure around the 1.5% mark).
How much can you expect to earn by running Google Ads on your site?
The pay-off per click varies widely depending on what each advertiser decides to offer, based on the profitability of their products and their expected conversion rate (percentage of clicks that deliver a sale). Google is not saying what the average pay-off is nor how does it share the revenue per click with their AdSense partners, but how much you will earn per click will really depends on the topic and the product being advertised. Products with profit margins of $3.00 for the advertiser will probably give you a smaller pay-off per click than a product with a $300 profit margin. Similarly, ads with high conversion rates will normally give you higher payouts than less effective ads, since they can afford to pay more dollars per click, with a portion of that money going to you.
So, just for the sake of giving an example, lets say that your site receives 1,000 page views per day. At a 1.0% click-through rate and $0.50 pay-off per click to you, in a 30-day month you can expect to make:
1,000 x 30 x 1.0% x $0.50 = $150
The more traffic your site has, the more clicks (and the larger the pay-off) you will get.
Will Google's AdSense continue to be successful?
This is the big question, and nobody has a definite answer yet.
On the downside:
The program will most likely face strong competition from other search engines in the near future.
The proliferation of text based ads could make users "text-ad blind" the same way as they have already become "banner-ad blind", causing click-through rates to drop.
There is always the potential for abuse, since some unscrupulous program members may violate the program's rules and click on their own ads, inflating the advertisers' click-through rate and forcing them to decrease their pay-off per click.
On the positive side, I believe that Google AdSense's success is not only due to the fact that they deliver text based ads instead of banners, but because those ads are served by Google. The credibility and brand equity that Google enjoys is huge, and I expect them to continue to beat other search engines and advertising networks that may eventually jump on the bandwagon.
However, it is reasonable to expect at least a slight decrease in click-through rates and pay-off as a result of the increased competition.
At this point in time, the jury is still out on whether this program will continue to enjoy its initial success. That is why, through this article, we want to give you some highlights and insights on how the Google Adsense program has worked for us, one month after we signed up for it, so that we can use it as a checkpoint for future analysis.
Why is Google AdSense so Popular?
Google AdSense uses Google's proprietary PageRank™ search technology to deliver ads that are highly relevant to the content of a page. Google's engine will scan through the content of the page to determine its topic, and will then serve ads that are relevant to the page's content.
Running Google AdSense is simple and straightforward: Google gives you a snippet of HTML code that you can paste in the desired location on your page, and the ads start appearing immediately after you upload the changes to your server.
However, Google AdSense's main claim to fame is that, by displaying text-based ads, it is able to deliver much higher click-through rates than traditional graphic banner ads. As usability studies have widely shown, users are already conditioned to ignore banner ads (or anything else that looks like them). As a result, banner ad click-through rates have dropped below a dismal 0.5% (in other words, it takes 200 page views, on average, to get someone to click on a banner ad).
By using text based ads instead of graphic banners, Google has been able to overcome banner ad blindness, delivering click-through rates that are much higher than the industry's average (some put the figure around the 1.5% mark).
How much can you expect to earn by running Google Ads on your site?
The pay-off per click varies widely depending on what each advertiser decides to offer, based on the profitability of their products and their expected conversion rate (percentage of clicks that deliver a sale). Google is not saying what the average pay-off is nor how does it share the revenue per click with their AdSense partners, but how much you will earn per click will really depends on the topic and the product being advertised. Products with profit margins of $3.00 for the advertiser will probably give you a smaller pay-off per click than a product with a $300 profit margin. Similarly, ads with high conversion rates will normally give you higher payouts than less effective ads, since they can afford to pay more dollars per click, with a portion of that money going to you.
So, just for the sake of giving an example, lets say that your site receives 1,000 page views per day. At a 1.0% click-through rate and $0.50 pay-off per click to you, in a 30-day month you can expect to make:
1,000 x 30 x 1.0% x $0.50 = $150
The more traffic your site has, the more clicks (and the larger the pay-off) you will get.
Will Google's AdSense continue to be successful?
This is the big question, and nobody has a definite answer yet.
On the downside:
The program will most likely face strong competition from other search engines in the near future.
The proliferation of text based ads could make users "text-ad blind" the same way as they have already become "banner-ad blind", causing click-through rates to drop.
There is always the potential for abuse, since some unscrupulous program members may violate the program's rules and click on their own ads, inflating the advertisers' click-through rate and forcing them to decrease their pay-off per click.
On the positive side, I believe that Google AdSense's success is not only due to the fact that they deliver text based ads instead of banners, but because those ads are served by Google. The credibility and brand equity that Google enjoys is huge, and I expect them to continue to beat other search engines and advertising networks that may eventually jump on the bandwagon.
However, it is reasonable to expect at least a slight decrease in click-through rates and pay-off as a result of the increased competition.
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)