How To Market Your Blog

Get Your Own House In Order

1. Write well, write consistently, don’t give up: All the marketing in the world won’t help you if you have a lame-duck blog. In your search for more traffic, more promotion, and more publicity, never forget it starts with great content — and needs to continue with great content on a regular schedule. There’s no question that maintaining quality and regularity is difficult while you’re starting out, particularly if you’re time strapped … but hang in there, because if you sacrifice this, all of your marketing efforts will be for naught.


2. Become an expert on something: Develop a keen interest, continue to read and write intelligently, and after a while, your experience will grant you this informal title; bloggers will seek you out, your reknown will grow, and it will be easier to be noticed, linked to, and get cross promoted (see below)


3. Design is more important than you think: Your mother’s right — first impressions count, and they can count for cash money. If you’re serious about blogging, don’t stick with a n unaltered top10 Wordpress theme no matter how cool you think it is. You want to separate and elevate yourself from the blogging masses, and its impossible to do if you look exactly the same as them. Easy to say, hard to do, but absolutely necessary if you don’t have the money to pay for a private ground-up theme: learn CSS and a photoeditor of choice, and learn to tweak your theme yourself, so that your blog looks professional, stands out, and screams “yes, I am worthy of your attention!”.


4. Get Your SEO On: An entire post in and of itself — get your own domain name, host your own blogging software, enable permalinks, create keyword rich headlines, create unique title tags, enable trackback and ping functionality, ensure your blog pings pinging-services.


5. Publish full feeds: A controversial topic. Publishing full feeds puts you at the mercy for content scrapers who will scrape your RSS feeds and repost your content, create traffic, and reap adsense bucks. On the other hand, some data suggests that it can also increase your traffic, and a few pundits swear by it. Feed subscriptions are critical; get your feeds burned through Feedburner so you can track how many are subscribing. People who subscribe to feeds rarely unsubscribe, and every single feed subscriber is a potential source of traffic to your blog.


6. Do interviews with other bloggers: Score interviews with newsworthy individuals (who may be linked to newsworthy content), to create link worthy content, but more importantly, create news on THEIR blog to get back to YOUR blog.


7. Break important stories: See the post on how to find news. Long story short: if you have an interest in an area, it is still possible to do this as long as you’re willing to put in the time and energy to find stuff. Benefit: being picked up by A-list blogs, mainstream news outlets and more.


8. Have a contest: Or, have regular contests, which encourage participation and buzz in your corner of the blogosphere.


9. Publish original research: If you’ve got the time, start with a question, try and figure it out with the data available, and “publish it”. For fun, I asked myself “How many of the Top 30 Diggers actually blog?” And I just went through their profiles and created a table of how many blogged. I then talked about what it meant, and tried to answer the question “why?” [answer: not many do blog, its because being a top 30 digger requires a huge time investment]


10. Put out Press Releases: Particularly if you have something new, unique, or particularly important to say (such as an important story, or research)


11. Work your long tail: A tip based on your SEO efforts; there is a free service called Hit Tail that will analyze the search terms leading to your blog traffic, and yank out high quality key words you should be focusing on that you might not immediately think of. This can help you focus your future posts as you are already getting traffic for those key words.


12. Answer your comments, in your comments, and off blog: Of course you have enabled comments on every post, right? So, when you do get comments, answer as many as humanly possible, and if its an interesting enough issue or question, contact the poster directly for a friendly follow up. Treat every potential poster as a potential subscriber to your feed, and a future friend and contact.


13. Spend time to create links and trackbacks: In every post spend as much time as you can to create outbound links to relevant and high linking blogs; many blogs automatically have trackbacks enabled, so in their comments section they will have a link back to your blog. If its a highly trafficked and ranked blog, this can mean traffic BACK to your blog, and it can draw notice from the author themselves — because, let’s face it, we’re all vain in a fashion, even A-listers, and we’re all interested in who is linking to us.


14. Get Your MyBlogLog widget and work it, work it, work it (in a nice way): MyBlogLog — know it, love it, and embrace it. Since its been acquired by Yahoo, it has the potential to explode all over the blogosphere. The two sentence run down is that it offers a free widget that enables you to build a free community around your blog, and to easily see which other bloggers have been to your blog. You can “add” friends, and generate traffic, but more importantly, your own network of like-minded blogging colleagues in a way that is relatively easy and efficient. Just go easy on the unsolicited messages. I wrote a complete review over here.

Getting the Word Out

1. Join a blog carnival: Where every blogger who joins one blogs about a topic, then each blog gets promoted. Here’s an index of blog carnivals to get you started.


2. Join blog network: Between 9rules, b5media, and others, there is networking potential, income potential, and a link-a-palooza waiting for you (through the linkroll as every member may have to link to every other member) if you’re able to get into one. Goes back to tip #1 — don’t forget to keep up your blog.


3. Participate in forums: Forums with tons of pages, huge lists of members, and a responsive community are an easy way to not only connect with other individuals, but an opportunity to tastefully demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog


4. Participate on larger blogs in comments: Like number three, except that by participating directly in another blogger’s comments you a) get their recognition and b) get the recognition of the blogging community. Also, here’s a tip: try and be one of the first few commenters on heavily trafficked sites to get recognized — most people won’t read past the first 10-20 comments. Here’s another tip for traffic: IF (and ONLY IF) you have posted something relevant that is pursuant to the ongoing conversation and IF the blog has a commenting policy that will allow you to do so, post a link back to a post on your own site (”hey guys, I wrote about how we can solve this problem! — check out the link over here, but let me summarize it for you … “). Sometimes you’ll be surprised at how much traffic comes back.


5. Join Blogburst: Blogburst is a type of “blog network”, which syndicates content across American newspaper’s websites, such as USA Today and Reuters. That’s right, you could get a post syndicated on Reuters. Trust me — it can happen . Highly ranked inbound links + traffic + bragging rights to your mom that your post got featured in a newspaper. Not too shabby. Also on the upside, they have a new revenue sharing scheme. The bad: read their terms of service carefully — you give up certain rights when they republish your content, and the revenue sharing works on the top100 publishers only.


6. Participate in Darren’s contests: He has enough of them, and often publishes links to all of the participants.


7. Submit to blog directories: So people can find your blog.


8. Submit to Google sitemaps: Really part of “get your house in order”, but when you do, Google will be able to find you so much easier; translation — more Google juice, more traffic, higher rankings faster. Tip: for Wordpress fans, this plugin is particularly useful.


9. Submit to article directories: You might want to submit your favourite posts to article directories, where they will enable you to have a biobox / blurb with a link back to your own blog. Again, demonstrating your expertise, and moreover, the article might get picked up in a ezine or another blog, leading to more traffic and more inbound links.


10. Get interviewed: If you’ve demonstrated your expertise, or have done something newsworthy, or reported on something newsworthy, try and get interviewed. As long as its done in a fair way (doesn’t need to be a completely puffpiece) by a site or blogger with some reknown, its more traffic for you.


11. Get listed on a news aggregator, or blog aggregator: Like Techmeme for technews, or Tailrank for blogging news. Hint: some news aggregators will actually accept submissions if you ask them nicely; double hint: try and get listed by linking to a top story within your first 100 words.


12. Create free stuff for yourself and give it away: Like ebooks, digests of your favourite posts, pdfs, and so on. Make sure to include a link back in the document, back to your site.


13. Create free stuff for other people: the same, let them distribute it, get a link back.


14. Pay for pub: Efficient means of using your cash is to buy targeted Adwords, or keywords in Yahoo’s advertising network; you could get other bloggers to write about you using PayPerPost or ReviewMe; or you purchase text link ads through Text-Link-Ads.com

Connect, Connect, Connect

1. Make friends with other bloggers: Ridiculously simple, but its true. Benefits of “networking” (making friends) include more mentions on other blogs, more requests for interviews, more partnerships in future deals, more “adds” into their MyBlogLog network, more “ads” into someone else’s blogroll (and therefore links back to your blog) — it goes on and on.


2. Guest blog: Offer to do it for free, and you’ll be able to demonstrate what you know to an entirely new audience. Gives you great credibility, and of course, most will allow a courtesy link back to your own blog. A free foot-in-the-door to some communities as well.


3. Volunteer, intern, scut-monkey your way into a blogger’s graces: Maintaining a highly trafficked site is a lot of work. Offer to volunteer your time with menial behind the scenes stuff (moderating posts, acting as a bird dog for news) for free and with a smile, and you’ll get a foot-in-the-door with the blogger, their network, and future opportunities.


4. Get hired: You never know which blog organizations are looking to hire new bloggers; again, an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, meet new bloggers, and open tons of professional “doors” … because now that you’re getting paid? You’re a “pro-blogger”, mate!


5. Network in person: Find other local bloggers using services like Meetup, and see if they’re literally getting together to commiserate about blogging or their topic of blogging. If you’ve got the time, there’s nothing that makes an impression as actually meeting someone in person. Tip: bring a business card; Another tip: if you don’t have any, make some; yet another tip: if important people are going to be there, really — try and go. Remember, you didn’t know me before Problogger, but I met Darren in person at a function in Toronto that played a part in me writing this. Think about that.


6. Join virtual groups: Through Yahoo Groups, Usenet, and more; then bring the conversation off the group with emails and instant messages. Be friendly, be helpful, and it will pay dividends.


7. Cross promote: Once you’ve gotten to know people, you can kindly remind them to promote posts that you’re particularly proud of; or, vote for your submissions on Digg or your social bookmarking site of choice. Reciprocate.

Make Social Media Work For You

1. Facebook: Its a social network that has opened its doors behind its college beginnings. Anyone can sign up. Start connecting with old friends and colleagues, like any other social network. But, unlike other social networks (as far as I know), you can import your own blog’s RSS feed, so that your connections can see what you’re blogging. Who knows where that might lead? Update: Myspace also allows this function, i believe.


2. Join Helium: Helium is a new site that is actively looking people to head new categories of content. Think a paid “about.com” — for its authors. If you have a particular interest that isn’t yet served on Helium you might want to check it out; besides giving you cash for content, it’ll also demonstrate your authority in a topic, and you’ll be able to leverage Helium’s own traffic for your own blog through a linkback on your profile.


3. Yahoo Answers! A similar idea; but this time, you’re answering questions that people are posting. Yahoo! is quite careful about spam, however, and including a “signature” is a dicey proposition at times. There is a fairly sophisticated registry and voting system that tries to prevent “gaming”, but given how much traffic yahoo! answers gets, AND its inclusion as a separate result area in Yahoo SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) it might be something worth looking into.


4. Create a Squidoo Page Lens: On a given related topic to your blog; participate in the Squidoo community; Squidoo has a ton of traffic, and you could funnel traffic and tastefully include links to other relevant sites and perhaps your own blog.


5. Use MySpace Marketing: Far beyond the confines of this post, but in a similar fashion to Squidoo, the idea is to capitalize on the HUGE amount of traffic MySpace gets (some interesting thoughts over here). Create a profile, create relevant content and links back. Start adding friends. Comment on your friends space. Join groups. Start enjoying the trickle back traffic.


6. Get Dugg / Netscaped / Reddited / Stumbled upon: Whole articles (and sites) are written about the intricacies of socially bookmarking. Here’s a tip: focus on creating great content, make friends on these sites if they allow you to, and submit your stories judiciously. ‘Nuff said (for now).

[Yes, I excluded “create viral videos”, because I thought that extended beyond blogging and into video casting — which, I’ll admit isn’t tremendously different, but hey … gotta draw the line somewhere. ]

And at this point, we open the floor to comments, questions, cheers and jeers. If you have any further tips, share’em so we can all learn together! :)

Source: Pro Blogger

How to Make Money with Your Blog Site

Which are the best and most effective ways to make a profit on your blog or independent news site?

[Will be a PIC]

Photo credit: Georgios M.W.

1) Google AdSense

AdSense is by far the best, most rewarding monetization resource for blogs, news sites and small, content-rich information sites. Google offers AdSense, a service that lets independent publishers, bloggers and news site owners to publish text-based, context-relevant ads next to the content on their sites. This is done automatically without you, the publisher, having to worry about anything else except putting small-sized code inside each of your Web pages.

For every click on Google AdSense contextual ads, the publishing sites receives credit for a small amount of money, while Google keeps an undisclosed amount of the total advertising share. Though many lament lack of relevance for the ads and little return for the increased info clutter on their pages — many silent publishers — probably the ones who consciously make less noise about this, are making serious money with this program.

What few understand, is that to make AdSense work for you ($$),it involves strategic work. Just placing the code on your pages isn't enough. The focus of your site, the way the content is organized, the way web pages are coded, the titles you use and the color and position you select for placing your AdSense ads on your Web pages all make a difference to the results you get. Significant.

What is important is that different rules apply to different types of pages and content. So no set of rules equally apply to all sites. The key is for the publisher to keep questioning the integration of contextual, text-based ads by doing systematic, ongoing testing, experimentation and optimization. For a focused blogger, this can mean from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month. For a dedicated publisher covering high-paying information areas, it is possible to get into the 5-digit range without any major investments and with a relatively short time-to-market. I am not talking about a blogger in the traditional sense, but rather to focused and very professional independent information resources like SearchEngineWatch.com or Paidcontent.org, for example.

AdSense offers also the opportunity to monetize site searches while providing a powerful, lightning-fast search engine for your own site at no extra cost. By providing search-relevant ads on your site's search results pages. Google AdSense adds another great opportunity to monetize premium service and access with relevant text-based information about products and services.

Too bad Google AdSense doesn't let you select your contextual advertisers from its inventory.

Here some great examples of AdSense at work.

Alternative solutions to AdSense: Chitika, Kanoodle, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Publisher Network (in beta).

2) Blogads

Blogads is an effective solution for taking control of your advertisers and comparing your profit share with your online ad agency. As the name clearly implies, Blogads is an advertising service for blogs. When the service first came out, As I mentioned that Blogads offers a great opportunity for small, independent publishers, blogs and news sites to sell their ad space in a direct and useful way. Blogads keeps 20 percent of your net revenue and sends you the rest by Paypal or check as soon as you reach a predetermined amount.

For your advertisers Blogads provides a great bonus in terms of speed and simplicity: "Ordering an ad takes just two or three minutes. Submit your image and/or text ad. Define its duration. Pay with Paypal's secure forms. You are done. After the blogger approves the ad, return to tweak and optimize clickthroughs, renew or order on new blogs."

In the case of Blogads the publisher has control over which ads to accept and which ones to reject.

Alternative services:

Crispads is an advertising network focused on blogs. Crispads allows publishers to place ads in blog entries so that they're included in their RSS/ATOM feeds to generate revenues for syndicated content.

grokAds - an advertising clearinghouse for both buyers and sellers which works with any type of site. Offers quick and easy advertising to a specific market.

Tagword - Much like Blogads, Tagword also lets you to select which kinds of ads you want to sell to your site visitors as well as setting the prices you want to charge. Add the code provided to your selected web pages and you are selling text ads on your site! Users can create their text ads directly and submit them in minutes. Purchased ads appear on your site as soon as you're ready.

or

Create your own Text-based Ads service

TextAds is an open source text ad management system for web sites using PHP. It's been deployed with content management systems like PostNuke and should work with any PHP-based website.

The Idya AdSystem is a text ad management solution for web sites. It supports keyword-driven text-ads and PayPal payments. Installing takes a few minutes. Simply upload it to your site, use the installer to install it, and your site is ready to show text ads. You can check the entire list of its features. The AdSystem uses PHP 4 and MySQL, though it port to other DBMSs. The AdSystem has been undergoing re-engineering for version 2, however, it looks like the site is at a standstill and hasn't been updated since 2003.

3) Amazon Associates

The Amazon Associates program lets independent online publishers with the opportunity to promote any product in Amazon's inventory as affiliate agents. All it takes is adding a small, identifying code to the links that take your site's visitors to a specific Amazon product page (books, DVDs, electronics, etc.). If the visitors who clicked on your link buy an item even if it's not the item you point to — you earn a small commission.

Though the amount of return with the Amazon Associates program is small, nonetheless, it is another way to get income without adding clutter or not-relevant disruptive information to your valuable content. References to relevant books add to the user experience as it helps those who want to search for more information on a topic to see immediate and hand-picked recommendations.

As a matter of fact, it is possible to earn as much as 10 percent per sale as an Amazon Associate.

4) Text Links

Text links are controversial for some purists, but for those seeking a way to monetize content without adding clutter and intrusive ads — it is an interesting opportunity to explore further. Text links are an emerging advertising market that brokers small, text-only links, which often don't need prominent placement (the payback is not on the clicks) on your site pages.

What the advertisers want is a link presence on your site to gain extra "authority" (like the Google PageRank indicator) in an artificial way. This is why you may have noticed many of these text links being placed at the bottom of content pages or in other non-premium positions. The goal is to increase a site's value in search engines. The good thing is that as this market grows, the independent publisher has more and more options from which to select. Also, the publisher can approve and accept text links that are complementary and relevant to the site's content.

Though many text links point to second-rate services and products (online casinos, poker, Viagra, etc.) — this marketplace is growing and becoming more visible, therefore more advertisers of mainstream products and tools are popping up in numbers. Since you are the one accepting such advertising contracts, the selection of what you display is up to you.

To play this game, it is helpful to have a Google PageRank of 4 or more. (Here is an article where you can find out how to measure Google PageRank). For those having a PR value of 6, 7 or more, there is great opportunity for serious monetization. As an indicator, five or six text ads can easily bring in a few hundred dollars every month on a PR 6 site/blog.

A Google generated list of companies brokering text link ads: http://tinyurl.com/66pc4

The example above: FaganFinder
(check the bottom of the home page to see what I mean)

Other online text link agencies: LinkAdage Auctions - Offers blog owners the chance to sell text links on their site at market value through a private online auction.

Text Link Brokerage

Paid Text Links

See also: Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule? (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

5) Premium Content Sponsorships

Selling sponsored space is another option for the independent publisher. While this was associated with prominent flashy banner ads, this is changing and expanding in many ways. In my view, the successful strategy is to use selected and relevant sponsors to introduce, give access or extend the value offered by premium content.

A relevant product or service can sponsor a news channel or RSS feed. Sponsors can also sponsor a rich section of additional related content to a standard article. Having a resourceful bibliography or annotated resources section in your next ebook or mini-guide is also fertile ground to effectively showcase relevant sponsors.

X-events, podcasts, live and recorded web conferences, online interviews are great unobtrusive and relevant sponsorship opportunities.

See also: New Online Advertising Strategies: No More Interruptive Ads

6) Related Reports

Another opportunity should see more in the near future is affiliate marketing of related research reports. For sites that cover specific industry or niche topics, this is an opportunity to play an effective marketing role for research clearinghouses and large publishers of intelligence reports, analyst insider briefings, white papers and research findings.

These types of reports usually carry a higher price tag than normal ebooks and physical publications. The reason for the high price tag is because their content is focused on specific industries and topics, and it has information that's hard to find elsewhere.

The technology that makes this possible is available from 21Publish (the blog hosting provider) in partnership with Market Research.

7) Affiliate Sales

A good monetization channel for select products and services is affiliate sales. This approach involves signing up to become an affiliate reseller of specific products.

As long as the affiliate products do not affect the publisher's credibility and provide pointers to useful, high-value products that the publisher fully endorses, affiliate sales are a rewarding monetization channel.

The commissions received for these sales vary depending on the product and the original vendor sales and marketing strategy. LinkShare and Commission Junction are two of the largest affiliate program brokers. Check out their catalogs to get a good idea of what products and commissions are available.

If you write and publish your own e-books and other premium content publications, you may want to consider using an affiliate sales program to give your products greater reach and exposure.

My preferred provider for this is Share-It!, which offers full payment and an ecommerce infrastructure to online publishers while integrating a customizable affiliate program. You can set the commission and the products that you want your affiliates to manage. Share-It! automatically takes care of payments and accountability of the transactions; it sends updates and timely sales reports both to you and to your registered resellers. The system even automatically creates content pages that the reseller can link to from her own site.

8) Online Guides and E-Books

Self-published books, e-books, mini-guides, tutorials and other types of premium content generate a respectable source of income for those with relevant and useful content to share. Focused guides and reference publications in niche areas are a growing demand from qualified customers, especially when these products can be easily pre-evaluated in some form.

For bloggers, news sites and small independent publishers' ebooks and online guides should make a natural monetization channel. Much of the content written for a site is easy to re-edit and re-purpose for commercial use. Reviewing editors, topic-specific bloggers can use their writing talent to put together the best content they have on a specific topic.

Selling ebooks requires good online marketing skills, lots of exposure, visibility and honest testimonials from satisfied buyers. A little army of affiliate resellers can go a long way in helping your ebook get extra exposure and visibility. Plus partnering/bundling your product with those who are already the best in your class helps get more copies out the door.

9) Bookstore Distribution and POD Publishing

You can also increase profitability and exposure of your e-books by using a company like Lightning Source, which can distribute your digital content on Amazon bookshelves while allowing you to offer printed versions of your masterpieces using POD technology (print on-demand).

See also: Turn your weblog into a book

Self-publishing with Lulu.com

Trafford Publishing

10) Merchandising

Selling your branded t-shirt or baseball cap makes sense when your publishing project has a strong brand, a powerful message or an issue that it stands behind.

Why would people shell out USD $20 or more to buy a branded t-shirt promoting a web site? If a bold tagline spells out a strong message or slogan about something of which many are passionate, readers want to support the cause by wearing them.

I think this works effectively where a) the personal brand is good enough to create a desire in readers to "stand" for it (few bloggers or news sites have this kind of charisma, but I people like Joi Ito or Howard Rheingold most likely can command some of this), or b) the author or blog / site stands for something clearly identifiable. It may be an overarching mission or a number of changing issues that make effective marketing themes for such products.

CafePress offers an extensive catalog of shorts, caps, calendars, mugs with over 80 customizable merchandise products waiting for your logo and tagline to be printed on them. CafePress provides the raw merchandise that you can customize by uploading your artwork and interactively adjusting it on through its online command center.

While CafePress charges a base cost for the material (e.g.: USD $13.99 base price for T-shirts), you can price your branded merchandise however you like and CafePress dutifully manages the transaction, payment, shipment and your monthly payments for your hard-earned commissions. In the process CafePress, also creates a full web-based shopping center that can be customized to match your Web site's design.

11) Collections, Anthologies, Compilations and Curated Content on CD-ROM

Thanks to CafePress and similar services, independent online publishers also have the opportunity to deliver vast amounts of content such as aggregated anthologies of articles, reports, audio and video files, or research collections on CD-ROM. All with complete infrastructure support for the mastering, duplication, labeling and shipping of these.

Again, the publisher pays a wholesale cost for the production of each CD-ROM ordered and the profit comes from the markup that the publisher decides on for each item sold. CafePress clears payments from customers, prints the CD, packages it and ships it to your customer. It sets aside your profit margin and cuts a check for you at the end of the month.

The publisher base price is USD $4.99 per CD (excluding shipping). You can mark up the price as much as you want and CafePress collects payments and sends your profit margin to you.

More info: CafePress Data CD

12) Paid Assignment

While many find this very controversial, more companies are using bloggers and independent sites to talk about, promote or cover specific products and issues. The Marqui program, in which I've participated, is a good example. But there are other ways to go about it. A person can go to a company and become its official online blogger. A person can take specific assignments for prominent sites and work for them, with or without credit, covering specific issues.

The important thing here is to be clear and upfront about it. People are inflexible about this because they're afraid that the people they trusted and read without question before may now write articles because they are paid for it.

From my point of view, I say the following:

a) question your sources, no matter how good they are and how fanatical you are about them.

b) take that ham away from your eyes: there is no objectivity, outside of the transparency of the reporter, blogger or news reporter. Everyone is influenced in one way or another. You don't need to take money from a customer to be influenced. What about all those journalists and bloggers who routinely receive free evaluations of gadgets and software that everyone else has to pay for? Doesn't that influence them? Invitations to press dinners? Product launches? Come on.

What counts, and what I think readers value the most, is being upfront, transparent and credible. Assuming you have been, like everyone else, "exposed" to cover certain issues rather than others — what matters is how "transparent" you are about revealing your driving motives, interests and goals while writing on that topic. Can you be influenced while remaining true to your opinions? I believe you can.

Taking money per se is not a disreputable act, neither is getting paid to write about a certain topic: isn't this what newspapers command their editors to do?

What the critics of paid assignments have underestimated is the large demand out there for this. If the paid writers are transparent, accountable and professional with their assignment, then this is as legitimate as any other activity.

I guess you only need to decide if you are in it for the art or the part.

Marqui paid USD $800 to the bloggers who did the assignment. Each one was required to write four articles a month that at least mentions and links to Marqui.

13) Donations

If you support a cause that goes beyond the mere reporting of news in your areas of interest, why not consider asking your readers for support?

People like to take a stand for the people whom they think can make a difference, so why not use this strategy to finance some of your effective communication campaigns? PayPal Donations, Amazon's Honor System and BitPass all offer a simple way to add a snippet of code to your site to make it easy for people to donate.

Depending on the system adopted, you may opt to receive money in euros, U.S. dollars, Japanese yen, pounds sterling and other currencies.

If all of the above fails:

a) Join a publishing network
If you are just starting up with your blog or small news site — and need either more traffic, exposure or experience before you feel you can do any of the above on your own — then joining a group blog may work for you.

Metafilter, Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome Channels, Blogcritics, WikiNews, Blogit or any of these group blogs, if not at my own MasterNewMedia, MasterViews and Kolabora.com, where I am always looking for additional contributors.

Working in a group blog can ease the pressure of having to post on a daily basis, gives you greater exposure in less time and exposes you and your ideas to an existing community of interested readers and other writers.

In some cases, like at Weblogs Inc., Creative Weblogging, Squidoo and elsewhere, contributing bloggers are also paid a share of the advertising revenue their blog generates.

Another great alternative is to look into the creation of local news sites and Get Local News has a smart idea ready to be picked up.

b) Blog your best without worrying about making money in any direct way. Money comes as a consequence of your extra exposure and visibility. Blogging creates extra income by allowing you to enter in close contact with relevant people in your areas of interest, and by facilitating exchange and contact with prospective customers through your online presence.

Simply blogging with no strings attached increases your credibility and authority in the field and earns you extra income when you are called to give advice. Having a blog to showcase your ability to review, explore or analyze issues and products is the best way to market yourself and to provide a living showcase of your talents and abilities.

Listen:
Making Money - session from Bloggercon III
Doc Searls leads the Making Money session at Bloggercon III. Audio from IT Conversations. [runtime: 01:24:31, 38.7Mb, recorded 2004-11-06]

True Voice: The Business of Blogging
Session hosted by Stowe Boyd at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle on January 24, 2005, with Robert Scoble and Get Real contributor Greg Narian.

Read:
Make Money off Your Blog
The Washington Post - January 30, 2005

The Blogs' Long Tail: Blogs And RSS Profit Potential

All of the above are non-exclusive strategies that can be used in parallel with other activities to create multiple income streams for bloggers, news sites and other content-focused online resources.

A few guiding principles have stood out from my own experience in the search for creating multiple income streams for an independent online publisher, blogger or small news site:

Relevance, Value
People want to see relevant information. Related to the main subject. If they like what they find, what better opportunity to give them more of what they want? Make your readers kings and queens at your site! The products and services a publisher selects should fit the editorial line of the blog/site as much as possible; this ensures a true continuum between articles and promotional messages.

Complementary
The additional ad or sponsorship information has to bring in value to the overall content. Selling prestigious and prominent content space for money without considering the relevance of the sponsoring firm to the sponsored content is a wasted opportunity for both sides. Given that no one enjoys being distracted by brand x or product z when trying to find something unrelated — why not leverage this natural and reasonable defense mechanism and match sponsors to relevant events and content spaces? Why not allow sponsors to provide extra value to the content/event offered by providing access/integration to premium-quality complementary resources?

Visual unobtrusiveness - Non-interruptiveness
Sponsorships, text-based ads, promotional messages don't have to scream for visual attention. If they complement and enrich what is already out there, they only need to be properly and intelligently juxtaposed, formatted and legible, scannable and printable, just like any other content on their hosting page. A site's web developer should have full control over the layout and positioning of these items by using CSS.

Publisher Control
The publisher must be king (or queen)
This is what I think. It is the publisher and not the advertising agency or some obscure algorithm that should control which ads show up on my web pages. It should be the publisher who takes the role of information director in full; not just in respect to what is written, but also about what is promoted. Separation of editorial and marketing offices is not an advantage in the type of new-media universe I envision.

Services like Blogads and the text-link clearinghouses facilitate this by allowing publishers to maintain full control of who are going to be their advertisers.

Google AdSense provides some control of which ads are displayed by letting publishers filter out up to 200 advertisers that may not complement their content. Ideally, as I have advocated, a publisher should be able to select from a large inventory of relevant and complementary advertisers in the ads he wants to carry.

Endorsement
A publisher should also in some way endorse the products she advertises as a way to provide value to her readers with such "recommendations." I have repeatedly refused to be a well-paid affiliate reseller or advertiser for products that I didn't believe in, while many times I have offered my space for free to companies and products which I thought deserved my readers' attention (proof is available, if needed). A sense of personal ethics and editorial coherence is all it takes.

Which monetization strategy to use?

Diversify income streams
Don't bet all your money on one horse and think like a coffee shop where money is made with many small transactions across a good variety of (generally low-cost) related offerings.

What I am learning is that you can make money by creating and cultivating multiple, small, income streams. Relying on one big source of income is always dangerous. If that resource disappears, so does your ability to survive.

[Will be a PIC]

Photo credit: Elliott Scott

What are other blog / site monetization ideas that small publishers can utilize to make their passion a full-time job?

What do you think?

Source: Master New Bedia

Seven reasons why you should be a Blogger

There are many ways that you can make money online by using your website or blog. There are ways that aren’t commonly used and then there are ways that are commonly used. We’re going to go over some of the ways that are commonly used and have been proven to be effective for others who have used these options.

Affiliate Marketing
There are many bloggers and webmasters that have turned themselves into affiliate marketers. Why is that? Well, it seems that money speaks many languages and when someone finds a good way of earning money, they seem to want to use it more than what really doesn’t make them much money at all. Affiliate marketing can be a profitable venture for you. Do your research so that you know without a doubt you have what it takes to become a great player in the area of affiliate marketing.

Google AdSense
AdSense has been known to have a very successful outcome for those that have monetized their website or blog with it. You are paid for each qualified click that you receive from the advertisements that are being shown on your website or blog. There is always an effective way to implement this as well as an ineffective way to implement this. Make sure that you know the effective way and put it to work for you.

Put your skills to work for you.
You can provide additional services on your website or blog to help you make money online. These services can be anything that your visitors might be looking for. This could include writing, web design, etc. The possibilities are endless. If you do something directly related to your niche, why not offer others the ability to have you get it done for them as well? You will both benefit from this, just think about what you can offer and give it a try.


Provide paid website reviews on your blog.
A lot of bloggers will offer other blogs and websites paid reviews. These are usually posted in a blog post that is dedicated to the review of the website or blog. This is a great way to earn some extra money from your blog. A lot of bloggers have actually made more than some of their advertising programs that they use to make money online. You will need to have a good reader base and traffic to be able to charge the most for a paid website review.

Sponsorships can help you out quite a bit. Maybe more than you think.
Some blogs or websites offer sponsorships, which is also known as private advertisements. Simply put, the advertiser will pay you a fee to place their advertisement on your website. You choose what ads you want to offer privately and put in the leg work. Depending on how you provide sponsorships, you can help cover costs while putting a little bit of extra money into your pocket.

These were just a few of the more simple and proven techniques to make money online using your website or blog. There are many other ways to make money online, you will just have to put in a little research for that. Try it out and if it don’t work, try something else out.

Source: BlueVerse.com

How to Make Money From Your Blog

A very informative article by Steve Pavlina. 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 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.

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.

Source: Steve Pavlina

Ways To Make Extra Cash

IF YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE PERSONS WHO HAVE TO BE SEARCHING FOR COINS BETWEEN THE CUSHIONS OF THE COUCH AFTER YOU PAY YOUR BILLS, THEN THIS IS JUST FOR YOU!

Creating a stream of Residual Income might be something you want to take a look into and get some more information on. When you create residual income, you are taking a step towards making extra money in a manner that does not require constant effort. While with Linear income, what you earn is directly proportionate to the number of hours invested (your typical 9-5 work)

HERE ARE 5 PRACTICAL WAYS TO EARN RESIDUAL INCOME:

1. Join associate or affiliate network marketing programs.

2. Produce printed copies of art work such as paintings, computer backgrounds and wall papers, etc and advertise on free advertising sites.

3. Collaborate with someone and publish literary work such as historical articles/manuals or poetry. It could be a one time work but it has the potential to earn you money constantly or at least for a season. This is how authors and artistes make money while they sleep.

4. Have YOUR GSAT, CXC lessons, presentations and/or lectures put on a CD and labeled for students or individuals to purchase. I know a few teachers and lecturers who have done this and have made extra money every semester or every time they make a presentation without even marketing the product. Just Print, Bind and Sell! Or Burn, Label and Sell, that’s it!!

5. Start a savings and/or investment program that pays you residual income in the form of interest or dividends. This could be stocks or bonds. You put money once and you can get up to 22% interest. The money works for you!!

That’s it! I know what just happened, a thought I am too familiar with just popped up in your head -“AH THAT’S TOO MUCH TO DO”. It’s the thought that will keep you from REALIZING what you are made of. Well you can submit to it, or LITERALLY box yourself hard, get up and determine to do something about your financial welfare. My aim is to show you that you can do it – you have to believe you can. I am doing it!

Written and © to: Andre P. Llewellyn