How to Make Money From Your Blog
StevePavlina.com was launched 19 months
ago. 12 months ago 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 $9 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 talks about how to find the right
balance between your needs and those of others.)
If you do decide to generate income from
your blog, then don't be shy about it. If you're going to put up ads, then
really put up ads. Don't just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner
somewhere. If you're going to request donations, then really request
donations. Don't put up a barely visible 'Donate' link and pray for the best.
If you're going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the
best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to
buy. If you're going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don't take a
half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.
You can reasonably expect that when you
begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how
you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google
Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I
expected that ' it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors
actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were
surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks,
and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty
low ' a whopping $53 the first month. If you'd like to see some month-by-month
specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense
is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it's certainly
not my only source. More on that later'
Can you make a decent income
online?
Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a
high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual
working full-time from home. I'm making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com,
and the site is only 19 months old' barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it
will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done
part-time if you're willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I've
always done it full-time.
Can most people do it?
No, they can't. I hope it doesn't shock
you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen
to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious
income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is 'Personal
Development for Smart People.' And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on
your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people
can't make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. What if
you don't 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 would
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. Which 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 exactly what you're getting into.
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 will 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. Plus I want each article to provide genuine value to my
visitors. So 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 decent web savvy to understand.
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 mental processing goes into those 60
seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can
apply them fairly 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. But 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
utilize several of them.
Thriving on change
I would say that your greatest risk isn't
so much 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 could 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 very rapidly, and
change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these
opportunities and figure out how 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.
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 likely 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 that 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 quickly 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 some kind of 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.
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. 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 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. Use the easy sign-up form at Conservative Cat. Do NOT spam the
carnivals with irrelevant material ' only submit to the carnivals that are match
for your content.
In my early traffic-building days, I
would 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
up to a certain level. 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 the 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. I think
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.
I think most mature people understand
that it's reasonable for a blogger to earn income from their 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 would 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 simple donation request in the bottom of my
feeds.
If you want to see some actual traffic
data, take a look at my 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:
1.
Google Adsense ads (pay per click
and pay per impression advertising)
2.
2.
Donations (via PayPal or snail mail
' yes, some people do mail a check)
3.
3.
Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed
amount per month)
4.
4.
Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per
click)
5.
5.
Affiliate programs like Amazon and
LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
6.
6.
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: VegFamily.com
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 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). My web server
is hosted by ServInt.net. What I like about ServInt is that they have a nice
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. In fact, 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 test failed and 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 under and hour and then just wait a month
and 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 VegFamily.com, 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 usually 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.
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 do 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 this 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 setup 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.
source by Steve Pavlina
