Thursday, June 25, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
make money blogging
Hey, are you trying to make some money online? Well I am not sure if I can say this is the absolute program that can make you the most money, but these are one of my high earners among the hundreds that are out there. I am using these services on Balkhis, and on my other projects. Remember if you don’t make a good chunk from one, then try out another one. Thats why I have four in the list. If you like any one of them or have any issues, feel free to contact me, and I will see what I can do to help.
Google Adsense
Google AdsenseGoogle adsense is one of the best ways to make money online as the ads are very targetted toward your niche (Depending on which niche you have). They Pay you Per Click, so it is one of the better PPC programs that you will see. Google is very strict with their guidelines, so I hear alot of people getting banned. But don’t try to cheat the system, and you will be good. There are some people who make a good chunk of money with adsense, while others don’t. Those who does not make alot of money with this system, go against adsense. They talk smack about it. In my opinion, if you don’t make alot of money with adsense then there can be two problems. Either it is not for your niche, or you have wrong ad placement. The better you embed your ads in your content, the better results you will get. So ads of 125 x 125 might not work as well as ads like 200 x 200 or 336 x 280 would work. I personally don’t add adsense on all of my posts because it cheapens the look of the website, but in the inner pages of posts where I think I can add it. I do embed my 336 x 280 banners. Which tend to make me a good chunk. Adsense ads work very well on tutorial pages. There are few downsides of adsense. They limit you to 3 ads on one page, and their is a $100 minimum payout. They only pay via Check, Direct Deposit (Read More Adsense Tips). Having that said, try out your luck. Join Google Adsense.
Bidvertiser
Bidvertiser Bidvertiser is another PPC Program like Google Adsense. This is good for you if you are either banned from Google, or you want to display more than 3 ads. Or if you want to get paid via paypal. Now you are thinking, with all the good sides why people just don’t pick Bidvertiser over Google Adsense. The reason is simple. Google have a much better payout. Bidvertiser although have a minimum payout of $10, so that works very well. Bidvertiser, approves your application almost immidiately. You can advertise your site on bidvertiser as well via their PPC system. I am making a couple hundred from Bidvertiser, but they are not entirely from this site. Join Bidvertiser Now
Commission Junction
Commission JunctionCJ is a company that offers you affiliate programs related to your niche. Before I start even reviewing them, I want to tell you that Affiliate Advertisement only works with specified niche. It doesn’t do very well on general websites. Comission Junction is my number one earner on this blog. I have embedded alot of commission junction affiliate links through out my posts that tends to get me alot of signups and referrals. Out of all the affiliate programs, they have the most offers available for you. The minimum payout is $25 which is not that hard to get at all. Heck I passed it within the first few days, and after that my revenue stream picked up as Balkhis grew. They pay you via Direct Deposit. Which is perfectly fine with me. Some offers are auto approved, while others you have to wait for approval. All to all CJ is the #1 affiliate program in my list as of now. They offer you html and javascript option to display the links, so it is entirely upto you. They have higher payout from companies. For instance, if you join host gator affiliate program directly via hostgator you will get $50 / referral, but if you sign up through CJ then you get $100 / referral. So join CJ now and try your luck. Join CJ Now
Market Leverage
Market LeverageMarket Leverage is a relatively new company compared to CJ and others, but they are the fastest growing one right now. Market Leverage has done numerous campaigns over the blogosphere to get exposure. The one thing that I can say about them is that they have the best support. Market Leverage still does not have as much variety as Comission Junction, but the ads they have are very good. There are some email submits, and zip submits that are exclusively for Market Leverage publishers. If you have a good email list, then you can make a good chunk from those because all your audience have to do is enter a zip code. So if they don’t go through with the rest, it doesnot matter. Those are the best thing I saw with Market Leverage. Now there are a few downsides that I have reported to Market Leverage staff and hopefully they will get it fixed. The url tracking system, they are using generates non-w3c friendly urls. So these urls will make your site xhtml invalid if you put their ads on. Which is one of the reasons why I try not to use alot of their ads on Balkhis. But if your site is not valid anyways, then go ahead and try them because they are very good. Minimum payout is $25. Join Market Levearge Now.
**Note: These are just a few companies that I am recommending that makes me money online. There are tons others that I use but the amount from them are not significant. Majority are referrals, so I don’t think those are worth the mention. There are alot more ways you can make money online, so explore your options. Be Imaginative and Be Creative and you will make the most money.**
Google Adsense
Google AdsenseGoogle adsense is one of the best ways to make money online as the ads are very targetted toward your niche (Depending on which niche you have). They Pay you Per Click, so it is one of the better PPC programs that you will see. Google is very strict with their guidelines, so I hear alot of people getting banned. But don’t try to cheat the system, and you will be good. There are some people who make a good chunk of money with adsense, while others don’t. Those who does not make alot of money with this system, go against adsense. They talk smack about it. In my opinion, if you don’t make alot of money with adsense then there can be two problems. Either it is not for your niche, or you have wrong ad placement. The better you embed your ads in your content, the better results you will get. So ads of 125 x 125 might not work as well as ads like 200 x 200 or 336 x 280 would work. I personally don’t add adsense on all of my posts because it cheapens the look of the website, but in the inner pages of posts where I think I can add it. I do embed my 336 x 280 banners. Which tend to make me a good chunk. Adsense ads work very well on tutorial pages. There are few downsides of adsense. They limit you to 3 ads on one page, and their is a $100 minimum payout. They only pay via Check, Direct Deposit (Read More Adsense Tips). Having that said, try out your luck. Join Google Adsense.
Bidvertiser
Bidvertiser Bidvertiser is another PPC Program like Google Adsense. This is good for you if you are either banned from Google, or you want to display more than 3 ads. Or if you want to get paid via paypal. Now you are thinking, with all the good sides why people just don’t pick Bidvertiser over Google Adsense. The reason is simple. Google have a much better payout. Bidvertiser although have a minimum payout of $10, so that works very well. Bidvertiser, approves your application almost immidiately. You can advertise your site on bidvertiser as well via their PPC system. I am making a couple hundred from Bidvertiser, but they are not entirely from this site. Join Bidvertiser Now
Commission Junction
Commission JunctionCJ is a company that offers you affiliate programs related to your niche. Before I start even reviewing them, I want to tell you that Affiliate Advertisement only works with specified niche. It doesn’t do very well on general websites. Comission Junction is my number one earner on this blog. I have embedded alot of commission junction affiliate links through out my posts that tends to get me alot of signups and referrals. Out of all the affiliate programs, they have the most offers available for you. The minimum payout is $25 which is not that hard to get at all. Heck I passed it within the first few days, and after that my revenue stream picked up as Balkhis grew. They pay you via Direct Deposit. Which is perfectly fine with me. Some offers are auto approved, while others you have to wait for approval. All to all CJ is the #1 affiliate program in my list as of now. They offer you html and javascript option to display the links, so it is entirely upto you. They have higher payout from companies. For instance, if you join host gator affiliate program directly via hostgator you will get $50 / referral, but if you sign up through CJ then you get $100 / referral. So join CJ now and try your luck. Join CJ Now
Market Leverage
Market LeverageMarket Leverage is a relatively new company compared to CJ and others, but they are the fastest growing one right now. Market Leverage has done numerous campaigns over the blogosphere to get exposure. The one thing that I can say about them is that they have the best support. Market Leverage still does not have as much variety as Comission Junction, but the ads they have are very good. There are some email submits, and zip submits that are exclusively for Market Leverage publishers. If you have a good email list, then you can make a good chunk from those because all your audience have to do is enter a zip code. So if they don’t go through with the rest, it doesnot matter. Those are the best thing I saw with Market Leverage. Now there are a few downsides that I have reported to Market Leverage staff and hopefully they will get it fixed. The url tracking system, they are using generates non-w3c friendly urls. So these urls will make your site xhtml invalid if you put their ads on. Which is one of the reasons why I try not to use alot of their ads on Balkhis. But if your site is not valid anyways, then go ahead and try them because they are very good. Minimum payout is $25. Join Market Levearge Now.
**Note: These are just a few companies that I am recommending that makes me money online. There are tons others that I use but the amount from them are not significant. Majority are referrals, so I don’t think those are worth the mention. There are alot more ways you can make money online, so explore your options. Be Imaginative and Be Creative and you will make the most money.**
Ways Used In Promoting My Blog
I have been wanting to share how I have promoted Balkhis in the beginning and still am doing it. I will share all the ways that worked for me and which ways I kept on going with and which roads I have slowed down. I will try to go as much depth into it as I can. Don’t worry about the tip number. Usually 13 is a bad one but in this case as you continue reading it will become the best number of your life.
Before I start, I will mention that I launched Balkhis on Feb 1, 2008 and its 6 months old now. I think this website has grown tremendously. I have 538 subscribed readers via feedburner and numerous that are not subscribed. Balkhis has made me $1923.58 in the month of July from my older posts which contains Affiliate links and adsense. Affiliates were a big part of that income. Direct sales were low but affiliates dominated.
Let me share I did I get to this point. Blog is such a broad subject you can promote it just about anywhere.
Promoting your Blogs through Social Media
Promoting your blogs through Social MediaFirst Road that I took toward promoting my blog was Social Media. Ofcourse I had content on the site, but that is the default. I went on many different social media services, some I stayed on and some I didn’t. These social media services includes Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Plurk, Entrecard, Mybloglog, and more which I won’t mention otherwise this post will get too long.
Stumbleupon – One that gets you the most traffic. Well atleast it did for me in the beginning. So apparently I was getting visitors in thousands. Not even a big amount were continuing to be loyal readers. Subscriber count wasn’t increasing. But atleast I was getting the words across. Many of the stumble visitors find your site by just clicking the stumble button in the toolbar and it increases the bounce rate also if you don’t have a targetted user. So it cuts down your adsense revenue. Therefore I don’t stumble alot of my own posts. I let others take the initiative. I have made mistakes with stumble in the past with my other sites by stumbling alot of my own pages and got under the radar. They didn’t ban me but banned the site and I had to talk to them to get it out.
My Advice to people who use stumble: It is a very good tool to get alot of exposure. Specially for contests and others, but it won’t convert to alot of regular readers. Ofcourse learn from my mistake and don’t overdo your own site. Let others stumble it for you if they find it interesting. Stumble is a keeper for special events such as contests and other.
Promoting your blog on DiggDigg – Digg is definately a keeper. Why? Well because you can digg your own new story if you think other people will be interested in it. Like I will with this story. I don’t digg all of my posts but occationally I do digg my posts. The main advantage that I saw from Digg is the SEO. If you haven’t noticed Digg tends to rank well in Search Engines. I use alot of long-tailed keywords, so if someone searches the main keyword Digg will pop up and through that users will read my site. This actually gain loyal readers and increase your subscriber count. Ofcourse if your post hit the mainpage than you will get alot of traffic. I haven’t wrote one that hit the first page. Maybe this will be one? With your help ;) (Add me as your Friend)
My Advice to people who use Digg – Fellas, definately go ahead and use this social media site. It is very good to promote your blog for obvious reasons I mentioned above. Once again don’t abuse it just use it.
Entrecard – Entrecard was a big hype when I joined it. Heck I even recieved some nice traffic from it and I wrote a review with tips. But it didn’t quiet work out for me in a long run. In the beginning when I wanted more and more users. I took the route to Entrecard. It gained me some readers that are still here on Balkhis who comment regularly. It was just a time eater. You would have to spend that 30 minute constantly to drop cards otherwise you won’t get drop. So this was more like a traffic exchange system. When I stopped dropping cards while I was in Seattle for a week, other people stopped dropping on my site. Therefore I stopped period! Now I am thinking about even removing the entrecard icon. It will be soon gone when I redesign Balkhis. Its a while away…
My Advice to Readers – Definately use it in the beginning. But don’t make it a habit because its not worth your time. In the beginning you want exposure but now that I have 538 readers its not worth my time. I’d rather write quality content.
MyBlogLog – A service from yahoo that displays your recent readers on your blog. I have their widget on Balkhis. But do I use anything else but the widget now? Not really. I kinda got to know some people from there, but not that much beneficial. Once again, I did everything to gain the exposure, but this was just another boat that I abandoned.
My Advice to users – First Read my review of Mybloglog. It is definately a good tool in the beginning because more people see your blog but now I only use it to use the widget. If you want to get more exposure than thats a way to go.
Promote your blog on TwitterTwitter – One of the major social media that I put sometime in. Well I put alot of time in to following people. If you haven’t seen my witter profile, I am following 19k people. Well I was trying a technique there. Well to this day Twitter brings me a good chunk of traffic. I am using Twitter Feed to display an excerpt of my recent blog posts so my followers can see it. Which does bring in alot of traffic. I have over 1500 followers on Twitter. Recently in the update my twitter profile also got a PR 4.
My Advice to users – Definately use twitter as it is still one of the largest microblogging site right now. Ofcourse Plurk will catch up soon but until than twitter it is. It has been bringing me alot of traffic so it is a good one. Also it got me some good chunk of readers.
Plurk – Last in the social media list, but definately not the least is Plurk. I am on Plurk alot recently. Why? because I am making alot of new friends and alot of new contacts. This is the best place to find out about new stuff. Share your new posts and others. It is not as big as twitter thats why the potential is even higher. I have been getting alot of designing contracts via Plurk as well as new loyal readers at Balkhis. My ebook did so well and I credit Plurk because alot of my friend wrote to their friends on Plurk about my ebook on How to make a Magazine Style theme in Wordpress. It has recieved over 2k downloads so far. Another good thing that came out of Plurk was that I have been getting alot of natural backlinks from other people who I met on Plurk who now mention me on their blogs. I think it is a must for everyone. I have wrote a Plurk 101 Guide. No advices here. Just join.
That concludes our list of Promoting via Social Media. Definately add me on all the social medias that you see me as.
Promoting your Blog on Forums
When I launched Balkhis, I added the link into all my forum profiles. Signature, Avatar, Homepage and others. Sites like Digitalpoint, Bloggeries are excellent. There are many more forums but not alot will just let you write about your site. You have to put some content of your site. Or even better start a viral thread with your link somewhere in the post. More people reply the better it is for you. Forums help alot in SEO as well. Most forums have very high rankings and they play a good role in the SEO of your site. Alot of users spam forums with their links and thats not the way to go. You will get banned from the forum, and I have seen cases where people get penaltised in Google for posting your links on forum alot. If you just want traffic, a good way is to use shortcut urls. Such as tinyurl.
Promoting your Blog on Blog Directories
You can always submit your sites to general directories but you know niche directories are better. Blog Directories are a good way to begin. There are paid blog directories and free blog directories, and some are free that require backlinks. I am on some of the blog directories, but when I was submitting my site in blog directories, I looked at list by Search Engine Journal. I will post some from their list:
Best of the Web Blog Search, EatonWeb Blog Directory, Blog Hub, Bloggernity, Blogarama, Blog Search Engine, Blog Catalog, Globe of Blogs, Bloggeries, Blogflux.
There are countless others. So do your search. But blog directories are a good backlink to have.
Promoting your Blog through Giveaways
Promoting your blog through GiveawaysYup that is exactly how users react when they see giveaways. I have had multiple giveaways on Balkhis. First Balkhis Contest where I gave away multiple non-cash prizes, then the second one was a mini contest. Than I had Balkhis ML Contest, and I always have Pimp My Blog. Well giveaways are a biggie. Sometimes contests fail. Why because you don’t have enough exposure. This is the time when you need stumble, and alot of forum promotion. You need lots of friend who will help you promote this. But freebies are always a good one to have. I also have the link love going on where I am rewarding my readers with a free review on Balkhis. The best part is that my readers get excited and make them want to come back over and over again to this blog. Giveaway attracts loyal readers to your blog. Specially the winners. Most of the time I have seen people who won prizes at Balkhis are regular readers.
Promoting your blogh through Paid Advertising Campaigns
Paid advertising campaigns are for people who have alot of $$$ to invest. Well not exactly because you can do it on a smaller level too. You can buy ads on other bloggers blog. You can buy Paid Reviews. You can do PPC. Its all upto you. Let me share with you what I have done that was paid.
Pay Per Click (PPC) – I didn’t pay any money for Balkhis. I just used the msn starter money that they gave me. Same is what I did on Bidvertiser. I don’t think site like Balkhis needs PPC campaigns because my content is good enough.
Other than PPC, I have not done any Paid Advertising Campaigns for Balkhis.
Promoting your Blog Locally
When I say locally, I mean in person or in a smaller area. I have done some local advertisement and that was by giving away Balkhis Shirt to random people in school and at concerts. I have been reviewed on a local News Paper. I attended conferences and handed out Business cards and others. I have stores that keep my flyers of Make Money Online Blog. So it worked out well. The newspaper caused a sudden boom in my subscribers. I think alot of local people subscribed as well as more people online started taking this blog seriously. I think more and more people know about my site via business card as well. I got flyers, and business cards for free. (Read my post about Free Business Supplies). I am also sending out mails with my stamp on it and a free stamp for the people to use when they send their mail. Local Advertisement pays off if done right.
Promoting your Blog through Indirect Marketing
Indirect marketing is when you are trying to market your blog by sending people gifts and others. I have that option available at Balkhis. People send me gifts and I write about them. Market Leverage advertised their site on alot of blogs by just buying their t-shirts and wearing it. I have sent in my shirt at Shoemoney but I think he got too big of a pile, so didn’t get reviewed. He probably threw mine away, who knows.
Last but the best Technique I used was:
Promoting your Blog by commenting on others blog
Promoting your Blog by commenting on others blogThis is by far the most effective way to promote your blog. In many ways it is. Let me start by saying is that you get more exposure. Comment on all size of blogs. Try to comment on those blog that reward you. Meaning allow top commentators and have do-follow. Balkhis is one of those blog. Two of my regular readers have created a list of alot of blogs that reward you. Here and Here.
There are many reasons why this technique is the best one. First if they reward you then you can be in the top commentator which means a sitewide link. That means you get exposure from that plus where you commented. Make useful comments and that blog’s reader will come to your blog. The other blogger will see that you read his/her blog often and they will check out your blog. Even subscribe to yours. Most likely than not if they can they will write about you also if they can. You also get to see what others are writing about to get inspiration. This is the best technique so make this a habit.
Share with me the tricks that worked well for you in the comment area. If you try the tips I mentioned above, let me know how it worked out for you.
Digg this post if you like i
Before I start, I will mention that I launched Balkhis on Feb 1, 2008 and its 6 months old now. I think this website has grown tremendously. I have 538 subscribed readers via feedburner and numerous that are not subscribed. Balkhis has made me $1923.58 in the month of July from my older posts which contains Affiliate links and adsense. Affiliates were a big part of that income. Direct sales were low but affiliates dominated.
Let me share I did I get to this point. Blog is such a broad subject you can promote it just about anywhere.
Promoting your Blogs through Social Media
Promoting your blogs through Social MediaFirst Road that I took toward promoting my blog was Social Media. Ofcourse I had content on the site, but that is the default. I went on many different social media services, some I stayed on and some I didn’t. These social media services includes Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Plurk, Entrecard, Mybloglog, and more which I won’t mention otherwise this post will get too long.
Stumbleupon – One that gets you the most traffic. Well atleast it did for me in the beginning. So apparently I was getting visitors in thousands. Not even a big amount were continuing to be loyal readers. Subscriber count wasn’t increasing. But atleast I was getting the words across. Many of the stumble visitors find your site by just clicking the stumble button in the toolbar and it increases the bounce rate also if you don’t have a targetted user. So it cuts down your adsense revenue. Therefore I don’t stumble alot of my own posts. I let others take the initiative. I have made mistakes with stumble in the past with my other sites by stumbling alot of my own pages and got under the radar. They didn’t ban me but banned the site and I had to talk to them to get it out.
My Advice to people who use stumble: It is a very good tool to get alot of exposure. Specially for contests and others, but it won’t convert to alot of regular readers. Ofcourse learn from my mistake and don’t overdo your own site. Let others stumble it for you if they find it interesting. Stumble is a keeper for special events such as contests and other.
Promoting your blog on DiggDigg – Digg is definately a keeper. Why? Well because you can digg your own new story if you think other people will be interested in it. Like I will with this story. I don’t digg all of my posts but occationally I do digg my posts. The main advantage that I saw from Digg is the SEO. If you haven’t noticed Digg tends to rank well in Search Engines. I use alot of long-tailed keywords, so if someone searches the main keyword Digg will pop up and through that users will read my site. This actually gain loyal readers and increase your subscriber count. Ofcourse if your post hit the mainpage than you will get alot of traffic. I haven’t wrote one that hit the first page. Maybe this will be one? With your help ;) (Add me as your Friend)
My Advice to people who use Digg – Fellas, definately go ahead and use this social media site. It is very good to promote your blog for obvious reasons I mentioned above. Once again don’t abuse it just use it.
Entrecard – Entrecard was a big hype when I joined it. Heck I even recieved some nice traffic from it and I wrote a review with tips. But it didn’t quiet work out for me in a long run. In the beginning when I wanted more and more users. I took the route to Entrecard. It gained me some readers that are still here on Balkhis who comment regularly. It was just a time eater. You would have to spend that 30 minute constantly to drop cards otherwise you won’t get drop. So this was more like a traffic exchange system. When I stopped dropping cards while I was in Seattle for a week, other people stopped dropping on my site. Therefore I stopped period! Now I am thinking about even removing the entrecard icon. It will be soon gone when I redesign Balkhis. Its a while away…
My Advice to Readers – Definately use it in the beginning. But don’t make it a habit because its not worth your time. In the beginning you want exposure but now that I have 538 readers its not worth my time. I’d rather write quality content.
MyBlogLog – A service from yahoo that displays your recent readers on your blog. I have their widget on Balkhis. But do I use anything else but the widget now? Not really. I kinda got to know some people from there, but not that much beneficial. Once again, I did everything to gain the exposure, but this was just another boat that I abandoned.
My Advice to users – First Read my review of Mybloglog. It is definately a good tool in the beginning because more people see your blog but now I only use it to use the widget. If you want to get more exposure than thats a way to go.
Promote your blog on TwitterTwitter – One of the major social media that I put sometime in. Well I put alot of time in to following people. If you haven’t seen my witter profile, I am following 19k people. Well I was trying a technique there. Well to this day Twitter brings me a good chunk of traffic. I am using Twitter Feed to display an excerpt of my recent blog posts so my followers can see it. Which does bring in alot of traffic. I have over 1500 followers on Twitter. Recently in the update my twitter profile also got a PR 4.
My Advice to users – Definately use twitter as it is still one of the largest microblogging site right now. Ofcourse Plurk will catch up soon but until than twitter it is. It has been bringing me alot of traffic so it is a good one. Also it got me some good chunk of readers.
Plurk – Last in the social media list, but definately not the least is Plurk. I am on Plurk alot recently. Why? because I am making alot of new friends and alot of new contacts. This is the best place to find out about new stuff. Share your new posts and others. It is not as big as twitter thats why the potential is even higher. I have been getting alot of designing contracts via Plurk as well as new loyal readers at Balkhis. My ebook did so well and I credit Plurk because alot of my friend wrote to their friends on Plurk about my ebook on How to make a Magazine Style theme in Wordpress. It has recieved over 2k downloads so far. Another good thing that came out of Plurk was that I have been getting alot of natural backlinks from other people who I met on Plurk who now mention me on their blogs. I think it is a must for everyone. I have wrote a Plurk 101 Guide. No advices here. Just join.
That concludes our list of Promoting via Social Media. Definately add me on all the social medias that you see me as.
Promoting your Blog on Forums
When I launched Balkhis, I added the link into all my forum profiles. Signature, Avatar, Homepage and others. Sites like Digitalpoint, Bloggeries are excellent. There are many more forums but not alot will just let you write about your site. You have to put some content of your site. Or even better start a viral thread with your link somewhere in the post. More people reply the better it is for you. Forums help alot in SEO as well. Most forums have very high rankings and they play a good role in the SEO of your site. Alot of users spam forums with their links and thats not the way to go. You will get banned from the forum, and I have seen cases where people get penaltised in Google for posting your links on forum alot. If you just want traffic, a good way is to use shortcut urls. Such as tinyurl.
Promoting your Blog on Blog Directories
You can always submit your sites to general directories but you know niche directories are better. Blog Directories are a good way to begin. There are paid blog directories and free blog directories, and some are free that require backlinks. I am on some of the blog directories, but when I was submitting my site in blog directories, I looked at list by Search Engine Journal. I will post some from their list:
Best of the Web Blog Search, EatonWeb Blog Directory, Blog Hub, Bloggernity, Blogarama, Blog Search Engine, Blog Catalog, Globe of Blogs, Bloggeries, Blogflux.
There are countless others. So do your search. But blog directories are a good backlink to have.
Promoting your Blog through Giveaways
Promoting your blog through GiveawaysYup that is exactly how users react when they see giveaways. I have had multiple giveaways on Balkhis. First Balkhis Contest where I gave away multiple non-cash prizes, then the second one was a mini contest. Than I had Balkhis ML Contest, and I always have Pimp My Blog. Well giveaways are a biggie. Sometimes contests fail. Why because you don’t have enough exposure. This is the time when you need stumble, and alot of forum promotion. You need lots of friend who will help you promote this. But freebies are always a good one to have. I also have the link love going on where I am rewarding my readers with a free review on Balkhis. The best part is that my readers get excited and make them want to come back over and over again to this blog. Giveaway attracts loyal readers to your blog. Specially the winners. Most of the time I have seen people who won prizes at Balkhis are regular readers.
Promoting your blogh through Paid Advertising Campaigns
Paid advertising campaigns are for people who have alot of $$$ to invest. Well not exactly because you can do it on a smaller level too. You can buy ads on other bloggers blog. You can buy Paid Reviews. You can do PPC. Its all upto you. Let me share with you what I have done that was paid.
Pay Per Click (PPC) – I didn’t pay any money for Balkhis. I just used the msn starter money that they gave me. Same is what I did on Bidvertiser. I don’t think site like Balkhis needs PPC campaigns because my content is good enough.
Other than PPC, I have not done any Paid Advertising Campaigns for Balkhis.
Promoting your Blog Locally
When I say locally, I mean in person or in a smaller area. I have done some local advertisement and that was by giving away Balkhis Shirt to random people in school and at concerts. I have been reviewed on a local News Paper. I attended conferences and handed out Business cards and others. I have stores that keep my flyers of Make Money Online Blog. So it worked out well. The newspaper caused a sudden boom in my subscribers. I think alot of local people subscribed as well as more people online started taking this blog seriously. I think more and more people know about my site via business card as well. I got flyers, and business cards for free. (Read my post about Free Business Supplies). I am also sending out mails with my stamp on it and a free stamp for the people to use when they send their mail. Local Advertisement pays off if done right.
Promoting your Blog through Indirect Marketing
Indirect marketing is when you are trying to market your blog by sending people gifts and others. I have that option available at Balkhis. People send me gifts and I write about them. Market Leverage advertised their site on alot of blogs by just buying their t-shirts and wearing it. I have sent in my shirt at Shoemoney but I think he got too big of a pile, so didn’t get reviewed. He probably threw mine away, who knows.
Last but the best Technique I used was:
Promoting your Blog by commenting on others blog
Promoting your Blog by commenting on others blogThis is by far the most effective way to promote your blog. In many ways it is. Let me start by saying is that you get more exposure. Comment on all size of blogs. Try to comment on those blog that reward you. Meaning allow top commentators and have do-follow. Balkhis is one of those blog. Two of my regular readers have created a list of alot of blogs that reward you. Here and Here.
There are many reasons why this technique is the best one. First if they reward you then you can be in the top commentator which means a sitewide link. That means you get exposure from that plus where you commented. Make useful comments and that blog’s reader will come to your blog. The other blogger will see that you read his/her blog often and they will check out your blog. Even subscribe to yours. Most likely than not if they can they will write about you also if they can. You also get to see what others are writing about to get inspiration. This is the best technique so make this a habit.
Share with me the tricks that worked well for you in the comment area. If you try the tips I mentioned above, let me know how it worked out for you.
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Thursday, June 11, 2009
Best Email Services
1. Gmail - Free Email Service
Gmail (Google Mail) Free Email and Chat Account
Gmail is the Google approach to email and chat. Practically unlimited free online storage allows you to collect all your messages, and Gmail's simple but very smart interface lets you find them precisely and see them in context without effort. POP and powerful IMAP access bring Gmail to any email program or device.
Gmail puts contextual advertising next to the emails you read.
2. AIM Mail - Free Email Service
"AIM Mail - Free Email Service"Heinz Tschabitscher
AIM Mail, AOL's free web-based email service, shines with unlimited online storage, very good spam protection and a rich, easy to use interface.
Unfortunately, AIM Mail lacks a bit in productivity (no labels, smart folders and message threading), but makes up for some of that with very functional IMAP (as well as POP) access.
3.GMX Mail - Free Email Service
"GMX Mail - Free Email Service"Heinz Tschabitscher
GMX Mail is a reliable email service filtered well of spam and viruses whose 5 GB of online storage you can use not only through a rich web interface but also via POP or IMAP from a desktop email program.
More and smarter ways to organize mail could be nice.
4.Yahoo! Mail - Free Email Service
"Yahoo! Mail - Free Email Service"Heinz Tschabitscher
Yahoo! Mail is your ubiquitous email program on the web with unlimited storage and RSS news feeds, SMS texting and instant messaging to boot.
While Yahoo! Mail is generally a joy to use, free-form labelling and smart folders would be nice, and the spam filter could catch junk even more effectively.
5. Inbox.com - Free Email Service
"Inbox.com"Heinz Tschabitscher
Inbox.com not only gives you 5 GB to store your mail online but also a highly polished, fast and functional way to access it via either the web (including speedy search, free-form labels and reading mail by conversation) or through POP in your email program.
Unfortunately, IMAP access is not supported by Inbox.com, and its tools for organizing mail could be improved with smart or self-teaching folders.
Gmail (Google Mail) Free Email and Chat Account
Gmail is the Google approach to email and chat. Practically unlimited free online storage allows you to collect all your messages, and Gmail's simple but very smart interface lets you find them precisely and see them in context without effort. POP and powerful IMAP access bring Gmail to any email program or device.
Gmail puts contextual advertising next to the emails you read.
2. AIM Mail - Free Email Service
"AIM Mail - Free Email Service"Heinz Tschabitscher
AIM Mail, AOL's free web-based email service, shines with unlimited online storage, very good spam protection and a rich, easy to use interface.
Unfortunately, AIM Mail lacks a bit in productivity (no labels, smart folders and message threading), but makes up for some of that with very functional IMAP (as well as POP) access.
3.GMX Mail - Free Email Service
"GMX Mail - Free Email Service"Heinz Tschabitscher
GMX Mail is a reliable email service filtered well of spam and viruses whose 5 GB of online storage you can use not only through a rich web interface but also via POP or IMAP from a desktop email program.
More and smarter ways to organize mail could be nice.
4.Yahoo! Mail - Free Email Service
"Yahoo! Mail - Free Email Service"Heinz Tschabitscher
Yahoo! Mail is your ubiquitous email program on the web with unlimited storage and RSS news feeds, SMS texting and instant messaging to boot.
While Yahoo! Mail is generally a joy to use, free-form labelling and smart folders would be nice, and the spam filter could catch junk even more effectively.
5. Inbox.com - Free Email Service
"Inbox.com"Heinz Tschabitscher
Inbox.com not only gives you 5 GB to store your mail online but also a highly polished, fast and functional way to access it via either the web (including speedy search, free-form labels and reading mail by conversation) or through POP in your email program.
Unfortunately, IMAP access is not supported by Inbox.com, and its tools for organizing mail could be improved with smart or self-teaching folders.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Make Money Blogging
pesa.co.nr was launched on Oct 1st, 2008. By April 2009 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day . I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $10 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?
This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.
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 2008, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2009. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 1,000 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 2009 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.
Automated income
With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.
I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.
Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.
Blogging software and hardware
I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.
The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.
I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.
Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a starter hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.
As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). This web site is hosted by ServInt. I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome host. What I like most about them is that they have a smooth upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.
Comments or no comments
When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.
But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.
If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.
Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.
I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.
Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.
Build a complete web site, not just a blog
Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.
Testing and optimization
In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.
A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.
For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.
It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.
Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small
Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.
Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.
Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.
A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.
Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.
Posting frequency and length
Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.
Expenses
Blogging is dirt cheap.
I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.
My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.
The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.
Perks
Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.
My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.
Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.
I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.
Motivation
I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.
What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?
Blogging lifestyle
Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.
Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.
On the other hand, I can offer you a good alternative to recommend if you don’t have the technical skills to build a high-traffic, income-generating blog. Check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for details
This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.
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 2008, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2009. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 1,000 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 2009 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.
Automated income
With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.
I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.
Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.
Blogging software and hardware
I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.
The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.
I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.
Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a starter hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.
As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). This web site is hosted by ServInt. I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome host. What I like most about them is that they have a smooth upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.
Comments or no comments
When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.
But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.
If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.
Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.
I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.
Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.
Build a complete web site, not just a blog
Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.
Testing and optimization
In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.
A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.
For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.
It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.
Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small
Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.
Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.
Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.
A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.
Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.
Posting frequency and length
Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.
Expenses
Blogging is dirt cheap.
I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.
My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.
The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.
Perks
Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.
My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.
Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.
I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.
Motivation
I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.
What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?
Blogging lifestyle
Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.
Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.
On the other hand, I can offer you a good alternative to recommend if you don’t have the technical skills to build a high-traffic, income-generating blog. Check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for details
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
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Monday, June 8, 2009
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Secret, Never-Before Seen UNIQUE content that should not be penalized as duplicate.
Highly-targeted rotating keyword definitions. When Google™ AdSense reads your page, the rotating definitions act as a sampling keyword backbone. And this foundation of relevant definitions and keywords helps keep your AdSense ads on topic. Talk about unique content!
Several rotating RSS feeds to ensure that all pages are unique and fresh
Customized PPC ads or any javascript of your choice.
Highly-profitable contextual ad links within the article-content based on the chosen keywords. (This "contextual ads" marketing strategy goes much further, and I'll go into more detail after you download).
Extremely optimized on-page ranking factors so the search engines will rank your pages higher right from the get-go.
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