"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude." - Thomas Jefferson
What are Online Forums?
An Internet forum, or message board, is a place where people leave messages and discuss things with each other. These people have signed up to be a member of that particular forum or website.
It is the most brilliant experience imaginable for someone wanting to make money online...have more traffic for your site without spending a single cent. It is like, making money online free.
Definitely, it is a sure thing that many sites have articles that offer tips and guidelines in how to generate traffic using only free methods.
And mark my words, this is 100% true. It has tremendous potential for you to earn money online and the best part is... you don't need to speed a single cent.
I will not beat around the bush with you here, I will be very honest, and in fact I will border on being blunt with you. This method of making money on the internet may take time.
Your chances to make money on the internet are greatly improved by paying for your advertisements, but at least you get a fighting chance with some of these free methods I'm about to tell you.
And one of the best ways to making money on internet is to take full advantage of online forums and online communities.
The big advantage about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for.
You can chat about about lots of things about the niche money making websites that you represent or offer.
Yet another great advantage is that you are well equipped for what you are getting into and you will be prepared in your venture to earn money on internet.
With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your make money on line company. Show them what you are made of and wow them with your range of expertise about the subject,
When you do that, in time you will discover that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.
So start joining as many forums and form online communities as possible in your attempts ton how to make money on the internet,
You need of course to Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you found a good foundation for your earn money from internet site, people will trust you and your how to earn money site and will pass on to many people their trust.
You will discover that traffic will positively increase to your make money on the internet online site because they know that you can provide what they need.
That's all for now.
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta make. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta make. Mostrar todas las entradas
miércoles, 28 de enero de 2009
jueves, 22 de enero de 2009
KEEP YOUR EARNINGS UP (ADSENSE TIPS)
Users of Adsense know that although some people can make remarkable amounts of money – one person claimed to bring in $18,000 per month! – most people struggle to get started because they do not really know what they are doing. The Adsense tips below will help you move closer to the former group by gaining some important knowledge.
Affordable Marketing
One problem some people run into is they can’t afford the costs for high-volume search terms so they never get enough traffic to their site and their Adsense income remains relatively low. The good news is there is a way around this problem. First, you have to focus on building some great content around more affordable search terms, perhaps choose words that are synonymous with the more expensive terms. Now here’s an example of great Adsense tips: as you know you earn more from the Adsense ads associated with higher value terms. So add a link to the bottom of the more affordable terms’ pages that leads readers directly to the higher cost term’s page. That way you can drive traffic to your content more affordably but also boost your chances of getting the better commissions.
Add Images
If you like the above Adsense tips, here’s another good one: use graphics near your ads. You know that when you visit a site your ads are drawn towards the images and graphics. That means if you place something like this on your page near the location of your ad visitors’ attention will be drawn to the ad and that will increase the chances they will click on it. Now do be careful about adding in too many images on your page because this could reduce load times and actually drive visitors away altogether.
Always Track Ads
Even though you don’t have much control over which ads are placed on your site through the Google program, tracking is one of the best Adsense tips available. That’s because you’d be surprised at how big of a difference can be made in the results when an ad is moved from near the top to near the bottom or vice versa, for example. You could try changing the colors, removing the borders, incorporating the ad into content, and other alterations that could positively impact the performance of the ad. Tracking can also help you decide whether or not to adjust your own keywords in hopes of getting more relevant ads which will be a bigger hit with site visitors.
Operate Multiple Sites
While one tip is good, multiple Adsense tips are better. The same is true with your websites. Having one site up and running with the Google service is great but the way to really increase your profit potential is by operating multiple sites. Of course, more sites also means more work but the earnings you could be making would make the effort worth it. Plus, most of the work that needs to be done could be done easily from home or could be outsourced to freelancers.
Affordable Marketing
One problem some people run into is they can’t afford the costs for high-volume search terms so they never get enough traffic to their site and their Adsense income remains relatively low. The good news is there is a way around this problem. First, you have to focus on building some great content around more affordable search terms, perhaps choose words that are synonymous with the more expensive terms. Now here’s an example of great Adsense tips: as you know you earn more from the Adsense ads associated with higher value terms. So add a link to the bottom of the more affordable terms’ pages that leads readers directly to the higher cost term’s page. That way you can drive traffic to your content more affordably but also boost your chances of getting the better commissions.
Add Images
If you like the above Adsense tips, here’s another good one: use graphics near your ads. You know that when you visit a site your ads are drawn towards the images and graphics. That means if you place something like this on your page near the location of your ad visitors’ attention will be drawn to the ad and that will increase the chances they will click on it. Now do be careful about adding in too many images on your page because this could reduce load times and actually drive visitors away altogether.
Always Track Ads
Even though you don’t have much control over which ads are placed on your site through the Google program, tracking is one of the best Adsense tips available. That’s because you’d be surprised at how big of a difference can be made in the results when an ad is moved from near the top to near the bottom or vice versa, for example. You could try changing the colors, removing the borders, incorporating the ad into content, and other alterations that could positively impact the performance of the ad. Tracking can also help you decide whether or not to adjust your own keywords in hopes of getting more relevant ads which will be a bigger hit with site visitors.
Operate Multiple Sites
While one tip is good, multiple Adsense tips are better. The same is true with your websites. Having one site up and running with the Google service is great but the way to really increase your profit potential is by operating multiple sites. Of course, more sites also means more work but the earnings you could be making would make the effort worth it. Plus, most of the work that needs to be done could be done easily from home or could be outsourced to freelancers.
MAKE MONEY (WITHOUT SPENDING A DIME) GENERAL REPORT
Making money online used to pretty much require you to have your own Web site, products to sell and some marketing savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know and who you know without you having to be a web designer or a marketing genius.
But it's hard to tell hype from the real deal. I did a search on "make money online" and "making money online", and much of the information out there is just promoting various infoproducts, mostly about Internet marketing. I see why people sometimes ask, "Is anyone making money online besides Internet marketing experts?"
So I put together a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:
Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win money
Don't require you to have your own Web domain or your own products
Don't involve any hard-selling
Aren't just promoting more Internet marketing
Give a good return on your time investment
In the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.
Help friends find better jobs.
Sites like ReferEarns, Zyoin, Who Do You Know For Dough?, Bohire and WiseStepp connect employers with prospective employees, many of whom are already employed and not actively job-hunting, via networking - the people who know these qualified candidates. Rewards for referring a candidate who gets hired range from $50 on up to several thousand dollars - not chump change. If you know a lot of job-seekers (and who doesn't these days?), this is a great way to break into the recruiting business with no overhead.
Connect suppliers with buyers.
Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven't been used much in online networking sites because there was no way to track them. Sites like Salesconx, InnerSell and uRefer now provide that. Vendors set the referral fees they're willing to pay (and for what), and when the transaction happens, you get paid. uRefer also allows merchants to set up referral programs for introductions and meetings, as well as transactions.
Write.
A growing number of sites will pay for your articles or blog posts. Associated Content and Helium will "pay for performance" based on page views for just about anything you want to write about. Articles on specific topics they're looking for can earn direct payments up to about $200. The rates are probably low for established writers, but if you're trying to break into the field and have time on your hands, they're a great way to start. Also, a lot of companies are looking for part-time bloggers. They may pay per post or on a steady contract. Our Weblogs Guide posts blogging jobs weekly in the forum.
Start your own blog.
You don't have to have your own Web site, or install blogging software, or even figure out how to set up the advertising. At Blogger you can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes without knowing a thing about web design, and Blogger even automates setting up Google AdSense so you can make money off your blog by displaying ads and getting paid when people click on the ads. To make even more money from it, set up an affiliate program (see below) for books, music, etc., and insert your affiliate links whenever you refer to those items. You'll have to get a lot of traffic to become a six-figure blogger, but pick an interesting topic, write well, tell all your friends, and you're off to a good start.
Related: Monetizing Your Blog
Create topical resource hubs.
Are you an expert on a particular niche topic? Can you put together an overview of the topic and assemble some of the best resources on the topic from around the web? Then you can create topical hubs and get paid through sites like Squidoo, HugPages and Google Knol. Payments are based on a combination of ad revenue and affiliate fees. You'll get higher rates doing it on your own, but these sites have a built-in supply of traffic and tools to make content creation easier.
Advertise other people's products.
If you already have a Web site or a blog, look for vendors that offer related but non-competing products and see if they have an affiliate program. Stick to familiar products and brands - they're easier to sell. To promote those products:
Place simple text or graphical ads in appropriate places on your site
Include links to purchase products you review or recommend in a blog, discussion forum or mailing list you control
Create a dedicated sales page or Web site to promote a particular product
They all work - it just depends on how much time you have to spend on it and your level of expertise with Web design and marketing.
Related: How to Really Make Money on the Internet With an Amazon.com Affiliate Site
Microstock photography.
You don't have to be a professional photographer to sell your photos for money. People are constantly in need of stock photography for websites, presentations, brochures and so on, and are willing to pay for the right image. People generally search for images on stock photography sites by keywords, not by photographer, so you have the same chance as anyone else of having your image picked. Just be careful that you don't have images of trademarked brands, copyrighted art or people's faces that are readily identifiable (unless you have a model release), but just about anything else is fair game, and I promise - you'd be amazed what people need pictures of, so don't make any assumptions. If it's a decent photo, upload it. Some sites to get you started include Fotolia, ShutterStock, Dreamstime and iStockphoto. The great thing about this is that it's truly "set it and forget it".
The above list is by no means comprehensive, but it highlights some of the new and interesting ways to make money online without investing any money, without having a product of your own, and without having expert sales and marketing skills. Most of all, unlike taking surveys or getting paid to read e-mail, the potential return on your time investment is substantial.
But it's hard to tell hype from the real deal. I did a search on "make money online" and "making money online", and much of the information out there is just promoting various infoproducts, mostly about Internet marketing. I see why people sometimes ask, "Is anyone making money online besides Internet marketing experts?"
So I put together a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:
Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win money
Don't require you to have your own Web domain or your own products
Don't involve any hard-selling
Aren't just promoting more Internet marketing
Give a good return on your time investment
In the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.
Help friends find better jobs.
Sites like ReferEarns, Zyoin, Who Do You Know For Dough?, Bohire and WiseStepp connect employers with prospective employees, many of whom are already employed and not actively job-hunting, via networking - the people who know these qualified candidates. Rewards for referring a candidate who gets hired range from $50 on up to several thousand dollars - not chump change. If you know a lot of job-seekers (and who doesn't these days?), this is a great way to break into the recruiting business with no overhead.
Connect suppliers with buyers.
Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven't been used much in online networking sites because there was no way to track them. Sites like Salesconx, InnerSell and uRefer now provide that. Vendors set the referral fees they're willing to pay (and for what), and when the transaction happens, you get paid. uRefer also allows merchants to set up referral programs for introductions and meetings, as well as transactions.
Write.
A growing number of sites will pay for your articles or blog posts. Associated Content and Helium will "pay for performance" based on page views for just about anything you want to write about. Articles on specific topics they're looking for can earn direct payments up to about $200. The rates are probably low for established writers, but if you're trying to break into the field and have time on your hands, they're a great way to start. Also, a lot of companies are looking for part-time bloggers. They may pay per post or on a steady contract. Our Weblogs Guide posts blogging jobs weekly in the forum.
Start your own blog.
You don't have to have your own Web site, or install blogging software, or even figure out how to set up the advertising. At Blogger you can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes without knowing a thing about web design, and Blogger even automates setting up Google AdSense so you can make money off your blog by displaying ads and getting paid when people click on the ads. To make even more money from it, set up an affiliate program (see below) for books, music, etc., and insert your affiliate links whenever you refer to those items. You'll have to get a lot of traffic to become a six-figure blogger, but pick an interesting topic, write well, tell all your friends, and you're off to a good start.
Related: Monetizing Your Blog
Create topical resource hubs.
Are you an expert on a particular niche topic? Can you put together an overview of the topic and assemble some of the best resources on the topic from around the web? Then you can create topical hubs and get paid through sites like Squidoo, HugPages and Google Knol. Payments are based on a combination of ad revenue and affiliate fees. You'll get higher rates doing it on your own, but these sites have a built-in supply of traffic and tools to make content creation easier.
Advertise other people's products.
If you already have a Web site or a blog, look for vendors that offer related but non-competing products and see if they have an affiliate program. Stick to familiar products and brands - they're easier to sell. To promote those products:
Place simple text or graphical ads in appropriate places on your site
Include links to purchase products you review or recommend in a blog, discussion forum or mailing list you control
Create a dedicated sales page or Web site to promote a particular product
They all work - it just depends on how much time you have to spend on it and your level of expertise with Web design and marketing.
Related: How to Really Make Money on the Internet With an Amazon.com Affiliate Site
Microstock photography.
You don't have to be a professional photographer to sell your photos for money. People are constantly in need of stock photography for websites, presentations, brochures and so on, and are willing to pay for the right image. People generally search for images on stock photography sites by keywords, not by photographer, so you have the same chance as anyone else of having your image picked. Just be careful that you don't have images of trademarked brands, copyrighted art or people's faces that are readily identifiable (unless you have a model release), but just about anything else is fair game, and I promise - you'd be amazed what people need pictures of, so don't make any assumptions. If it's a decent photo, upload it. Some sites to get you started include Fotolia, ShutterStock, Dreamstime and iStockphoto. The great thing about this is that it's truly "set it and forget it".
The above list is by no means comprehensive, but it highlights some of the new and interesting ways to make money online without investing any money, without having a product of your own, and without having expert sales and marketing skills. Most of all, unlike taking surveys or getting paid to read e-mail, the potential return on your time investment is substantial.
domingo, 18 de enero de 2009
CAN YOU MAKE A LIVING BLOGGING?
“Is it a truth, based on your experience, that anyone can make a living blogging if they understand how SEO works”
OK it’s a bit of a big question, but the short answer is yes. However you will need to have a game plan, and here’s how I’d approach the problem.
The first thing you really need to consider is your subject matter. Rand did a much better job covering that than I could so check out “Blogging in an Oversaturated Market is Usually a Poor Decision“. When deciding what to write about there are two schools of thought “write about what you like” or “write about what’s profitable”. It’s something of a catch-22, it’s much easier to write about something you like, but there’s not always money in it, and let’s be honest how many of us are really interested in the intricacies of reverse mortgages. My advice try to find something that interests you and step up to a slightly wider focus where the money is. For example maybe you really enjoy raising African cichlids in your aquarium, I’d step up and cover freshwater aquariums as whole and focus (maybe 10-25% of total posts) ever so slightly on your specific topic of interest.
Once you’ve got your topic down, work on your writing. You don’t need to be a Pulitzer prize winning author, but you do have to be interesting. Don’t think you can use your mad SEO SKILLZ to compensate for lack of quality content. You used to be able work around it, but those days are drawing to a close, and at this stage it’s not a long term solution, or something I’d advise starting today. What if you can’t write, take a community college writing course, read and learn from people who can write online. Hiring someone is an option, but that can get expensive, and not really viable if you’re boot strapping, if all else fails try to take advantage of family members whenever possible.
Next up I’d say come up with a realistic posting schedule. IMHO the bare minimum you need to update your blog is at least once a week. I’d recommend 3-5 times a week if possible, and if the subject is right daily is ideal. It doesn’t matter to some people, but I’m a big advocate of publishing on a schedule as much as possible. For some readers knowing you publish something new every Wednesday is important. If the leading bloggers in your space are updating daily and you can only get the time to blog once a week you’re going to have a hard time competing. Try to take advantage of pre-blogging or remote posting whenever possible. I’m not going to recommend you post from your job … but I can tell you I did it and lots of businesses got their start on some one elses time … not that I’m recommending that … nope … not me
One of the hardest things many bloggers face is keeping on target, people get lured into thinking they can be the next dooce and blog about their lives. Remember the link to Rand’s post a few paragraphs ago, the first question he asks is are you a top writer, unless you really are that good a writer, advertisers won’t be interested in buying space on your lifestyle blog. Your friends may read it, but you’ll never attract hundreds or thousands of readers writing Aunt Millie’s Christmas letter and you won’t make a living blogging. Until you have at least 1000 subscriber stay 100% on target, after that you can deviate ever so slightly, anything more than 10% scares me professionally.
I’m a big fan of using wordpress because it’s well supposed has lots of plugin’s you can use, and it’s written in PHP and cheap and easy to do yourself or find someone to do it for you. That said out of the box it’s not search engine friendly, here are some tips to help you fix that. Next realize many of the templates are wonka-doodle. Find a good clean one and work from there, take out the crap, add in only what you need, and for heaven sakes use CSS dammit. Don’t add any more widgets or other nonsense if you can avoid it, those things usually don’t help. I like liquid layout but check out Fluid, Fixed, and 1024 Resolutions and Maximizing Profits With Website Design and Layout: Part I for more discussion. Once things are rolling if you have the skills or budget to create a distinctive web design that builds your brand.
Next come the discussion of how many blogs can/should you run. If you’ve never run a blog/website before stick with one until you are really really confident. If you have I’d say three is my recommendation and if you go beyond five you’re crazy unless you really know what you are doing or are paying high quality writers. IMHO it’s better to have one or two exceptional blogs instead of five to ten mediocre blogs. Mix things up a bit with the subject matter, you don’t want to have the ‘South American Knitting Blog’ and the ‘South American Crochet Blog’, it just looks funny.
Next you’re going to want to start promoting your blog. Do the usual stuff, like adding your blog address to your email signature, link begging from your friends, and so on. Most blog directories require you have at least 6 months posting history to get listed, so put that on hold for now. Cover whatever is hot in your industry and try to get the attention of A-Listers in your space with comments or trackbacks. Use things like Google trends and Yahoo Buzz Log to spot tie in’s and blog like there’s no tomorrow. Try to take advantage of events in real life, especially TV, don’t be afraid to shell out a $100 on some PPC for a few days, to gain some readers, lots and lots of people totally miss that as an opportunity, and don’t forget predictive SEO. Go to an industry event do some live blogging, meet up with people and build some connections, try to get interviewed on the radio or podcasts. The press release is not dead and try to put out a few year and make it as enticing and exciting as possible.
Develop a flexible social media strategy. For a new blog social is by far the quickest way to jump start the process of getting readers. Make it easy for people to bookmark/submit your website using these services. Write stories that are directly targeted to each of these services regularly/monthly. Prime the pump by submitting yourself or asking friends but don’t be a spammer/beger. Only submit the good stuff. Clueless where to start here is a guide to using Digg and Delicious. Plan social bookmark targeted stories and follow them up with good content to keep the readers/subscribers coming back. Monitor trends, adapt, react and grow.
There you have it my quick, down and dirty 10 mile up plan for making a living blogging. If you want me to go into more detail on something drop a comment or question in the comments section, and I’ll see if I can answer it or elaborate it into a full post.
OK it’s a bit of a big question, but the short answer is yes. However you will need to have a game plan, and here’s how I’d approach the problem.
The first thing you really need to consider is your subject matter. Rand did a much better job covering that than I could so check out “Blogging in an Oversaturated Market is Usually a Poor Decision“. When deciding what to write about there are two schools of thought “write about what you like” or “write about what’s profitable”. It’s something of a catch-22, it’s much easier to write about something you like, but there’s not always money in it, and let’s be honest how many of us are really interested in the intricacies of reverse mortgages. My advice try to find something that interests you and step up to a slightly wider focus where the money is. For example maybe you really enjoy raising African cichlids in your aquarium, I’d step up and cover freshwater aquariums as whole and focus (maybe 10-25% of total posts) ever so slightly on your specific topic of interest.
Once you’ve got your topic down, work on your writing. You don’t need to be a Pulitzer prize winning author, but you do have to be interesting. Don’t think you can use your mad SEO SKILLZ to compensate for lack of quality content. You used to be able work around it, but those days are drawing to a close, and at this stage it’s not a long term solution, or something I’d advise starting today. What if you can’t write, take a community college writing course, read and learn from people who can write online. Hiring someone is an option, but that can get expensive, and not really viable if you’re boot strapping, if all else fails try to take advantage of family members whenever possible.
Next up I’d say come up with a realistic posting schedule. IMHO the bare minimum you need to update your blog is at least once a week. I’d recommend 3-5 times a week if possible, and if the subject is right daily is ideal. It doesn’t matter to some people, but I’m a big advocate of publishing on a schedule as much as possible. For some readers knowing you publish something new every Wednesday is important. If the leading bloggers in your space are updating daily and you can only get the time to blog once a week you’re going to have a hard time competing. Try to take advantage of pre-blogging or remote posting whenever possible. I’m not going to recommend you post from your job … but I can tell you I did it and lots of businesses got their start on some one elses time … not that I’m recommending that … nope … not me
One of the hardest things many bloggers face is keeping on target, people get lured into thinking they can be the next dooce and blog about their lives. Remember the link to Rand’s post a few paragraphs ago, the first question he asks is are you a top writer, unless you really are that good a writer, advertisers won’t be interested in buying space on your lifestyle blog. Your friends may read it, but you’ll never attract hundreds or thousands of readers writing Aunt Millie’s Christmas letter and you won’t make a living blogging. Until you have at least 1000 subscriber stay 100% on target, after that you can deviate ever so slightly, anything more than 10% scares me professionally.
I’m a big fan of using wordpress because it’s well supposed has lots of plugin’s you can use, and it’s written in PHP and cheap and easy to do yourself or find someone to do it for you. That said out of the box it’s not search engine friendly, here are some tips to help you fix that. Next realize many of the templates are wonka-doodle. Find a good clean one and work from there, take out the crap, add in only what you need, and for heaven sakes use CSS dammit. Don’t add any more widgets or other nonsense if you can avoid it, those things usually don’t help. I like liquid layout but check out Fluid, Fixed, and 1024 Resolutions and Maximizing Profits With Website Design and Layout: Part I for more discussion. Once things are rolling if you have the skills or budget to create a distinctive web design that builds your brand.
Next come the discussion of how many blogs can/should you run. If you’ve never run a blog/website before stick with one until you are really really confident. If you have I’d say three is my recommendation and if you go beyond five you’re crazy unless you really know what you are doing or are paying high quality writers. IMHO it’s better to have one or two exceptional blogs instead of five to ten mediocre blogs. Mix things up a bit with the subject matter, you don’t want to have the ‘South American Knitting Blog’ and the ‘South American Crochet Blog’, it just looks funny.
Next you’re going to want to start promoting your blog. Do the usual stuff, like adding your blog address to your email signature, link begging from your friends, and so on. Most blog directories require you have at least 6 months posting history to get listed, so put that on hold for now. Cover whatever is hot in your industry and try to get the attention of A-Listers in your space with comments or trackbacks. Use things like Google trends and Yahoo Buzz Log to spot tie in’s and blog like there’s no tomorrow. Try to take advantage of events in real life, especially TV, don’t be afraid to shell out a $100 on some PPC for a few days, to gain some readers, lots and lots of people totally miss that as an opportunity, and don’t forget predictive SEO. Go to an industry event do some live blogging, meet up with people and build some connections, try to get interviewed on the radio or podcasts. The press release is not dead and try to put out a few year and make it as enticing and exciting as possible.
Develop a flexible social media strategy. For a new blog social is by far the quickest way to jump start the process of getting readers. Make it easy for people to bookmark/submit your website using these services. Write stories that are directly targeted to each of these services regularly/monthly. Prime the pump by submitting yourself or asking friends but don’t be a spammer/beger. Only submit the good stuff. Clueless where to start here is a guide to using Digg and Delicious. Plan social bookmark targeted stories and follow them up with good content to keep the readers/subscribers coming back. Monitor trends, adapt, react and grow.
There you have it my quick, down and dirty 10 mile up plan for making a living blogging. If you want me to go into more detail on something drop a comment or question in the comments section, and I’ll see if I can answer it or elaborate it into a full post.
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.
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