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

Capital Gains, Dividends, and Taxes

I've come across these questions several times in the last few days, so I thought I'd answer them to dispel some intuitions novice investors have.

1. If I reinvest my dividends, do I have to pay taxes on them?

Whether you reinvest your dividends or not, this decision will never (unless tax laws are changed) affect your taxes. Whether your dividends are taxed depends on what dividends you're talking about and in what kind of account you're receiving them.

Let's start with regular stocks--like the ones traded on NYSE, NASDAQ, and Pink Sheets. In a regular, taxable brokerage account, or if you buy directly from the company in a taxable account (e.g., not as part of a 401(k), etc) you have to pay taxes on all your dividends. It does not matter if you reinvest your dividends or not. There are two ways in which regular stock dividends are taxed: ordinary income and qualified dividends.

The ordinary income tax rate on dividends, or the ordinary dividend tax rate, is based on whatever tax bracket you're in. Let's say you're in the 25% tax bracket. That is how much tax you'd pay on your dividends if they're taxed as ordinary income.

The qualified dividend rate, at least for now, is much lower. It also depends on your tax bracket, but the maximum rate is 15%. For people in the lowest tax bracket, the rate on qualified dividends is 0%. This will probably change in the future, especially if the Democrats control all the branches of the government.

The way your regular stock dividends in a taxable account are taxed depends on how long you hold the dividend paying stock. If you hold the stock for more than 60 days during the 121-day period that begins 60 days before the ex-dividend date (the ex date, etc is explained here), your dividends are taxed at the qualified dividend rate.

Many companies also have preferred stocks, which trade on the exchanges like regular stocks. These usually pay out a big dividend, have a narrow trading range, and the company reserves the right to buy the stock back for a certain price. If the company goes out of business, holders of the preferred stock have priority over holders of the regular stock in terms of who gets what of the company's remaining assets (the order of priority is bondholders, preferred stockholders, and regular stockholders).

There are two types of preferred stocks. The most common is a hybrid between a bond and a stock. The "dividends" the company pays out on these preferred shares are treated as debt. The company gets a tax break. As an investor, however, you incur the ordinary dividend rate, no matter how long you hold the stock. Only around 100 companies (mostly utilities) have preferred shares that pay out dividends that can, if you hold them for the requisite period, be qualified dividends. They typically have lower yields.

There are also tax exempt "dividends." These come from municipal bond mutual funds and closed end funds that invest in municipal bonds. Here is a great article on such closed end funds. I put dividends in scare quotes because they're not really dividends. The payments you receive from municipal bond funds are actually tax free interest payments. Depending on the fund, some, usually a very tiny percentage, of the payments you receive may count as something called "private activity bond interest." This "is interest paid by private activity bonds, issued to encourage private-sector investment in the development of certain facilities which serve various specified public purposes, and exempt interest dividends paid by mutual funds that are attributable to such interest." Private activity bond interest has tax implications. While municipal bond interest is exempt from federal taxes, you may still have to pay state taxes on your "dividends."

2. If I reinvest my profits or capital gains, can my taxes be deferred or exempt?

No. Every time you sell an asset for a profit in a taxable account, you incur tax liability. It does not matter if you use your profits to invest in something else.

There are two types of capital gains: short term and long term. Short term capital gains are taxed as ordinary income. Whatever tax bracket you're in is the rate at which your profit is taxed. For simplicity's sake, let's take a regular stock as an example. Suppose you buy GE in a taxable account, hold it for less than a year, and then sell it for a gain of $200. Let's say you're in the 25% tax bracket. You'll have to pay $50 in taxes (25% of 200).

Long term capital gains rates also depend on your tax bracket, but they are lower than the ordinary income rate. The maximum tax rate on long term gains is 15%. Taking the same example, suppose you buy GE in a taxable account, hold it for over a year, and then sell it for a $200 gain. Suppose again that you're in the 25% tax bracket. You'd have to pay $30 in taxes.

Here is a great little calculator for short term and long term capital gains taxes. The thing to remember is that to qualify for long term capital gains rates you have to hold your stock for at least a year and a day.

Mutual funds and ETFs (some, not all) pay out dividends, some of which can be counted as ordinary dividends, qualified dividends, short term capital gains, and long term capital gains. It depends on what the fund invests in and what the fund manager does. The more active the manager is in trading stocks, the more likely you are to receive ordinary dividends and short term capital gains. Once again, it does not matter whether you reinvest your mutual fund and ETF dividends. As long as you hold them in a taxable account you're going to pay taxes on them.

The way to avoid taxes on your capital gains and dividends is to receive them in a tax deferred (such as an IRA or 401(k)) or tax exempt account (such as a Roth IRA). With an IRA, you only pay taxes when you start taking money out after retirement. With a Roth, you pay no taxes, since you're investing with after tax money. For more on this, click here or here.

The bottom line is that reinvestment has nothing at all to do with taxes. Whether you pay taxes (and what rates) depends on what kind of account you're holding your assets in, how long you hold them, and what kinds of assets they are.

Source: Slacker Wealth

Is a $5 Stock Cheaper than a $30 Stock?

We all have certain pet peeves in life. I have several: when someone starts spouting off baseball stats without knowing what they mean, people who don’t know how to walk, and traffic. I’m sure you have your own too.

When it comes to investing and stocks, this is probably the thing that bothers me the most: when someone says that a stock is “cheaper” than another simply because the price is lower.

It’s just not true. Sure, it’s “easier” for a $5 to double to $10. After all, it just has to go up $5, right? While a $30 stock needs to go up a full $30 for your money to double.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that you’re looking solely at the stock, not the company behind the stock. It’s like relying solely on stock charts to make decisions—not wise. There are a wealth of numbers out there that can tell you so much more about a company. Paying this much attention to stock price is like picking the best baseball player of all time based on his jersey number—it makes no sense at all.

Unfortunately, it’s novice investors that often fall for this trap. I hear it all the time, “Wow, it’s only $6.34! That’s cheap!” They are scared off by stocks like Google ($346) and Berkshire Hathaway ($4,125)because they are so “expensive.” They might be, but the stock price is not the number that will tell us that. If you really want to simplify things, at least take a look at the P/E number. The P/E doesn’t tell the whole story, but it’s a good place to start when trying to get the value of a stock.

It tells you what the price is relative to the earnings that the company is actually making. Google, for example, has a P/E of 22. Yahoo, whose stock price is $14, has a P/E of 20. Pretty comparable no matter how different the stock price may seem.

For example, IBM trades at $95 and has a P/E of 11. Microsoft, on the other hand has a higher P/E of 12 (the higher the P/E, the more expensive the stock) and a price of $23. So it looks like Microsoft might be more expensive than IBM—despite the price difference.

When companies can arbitrarily change the stock price, you know you can’t read too much into it. If the Washington Post (trading at $486) wanted to make its price more “appealing,” it could do a stock split, which means every stockholder would get ten shares for every one they own, and the price would go down to a more “reasonable” $48.60 cents. How fishy is that?

It’s the reason why Warren Buffett refuses to do it to his stock, no matter how high the share price goes (an A share of Berkshire Hathaway costs $124,000). As he puts it:

“Berkshire’s shareholders think of themselves as partners in the company who are interested in its long-term prospects, not the movement of its share price.”

For all you investors out there—there is enough to worry about, especially now. Don’t fall for this trap. Instead, try to learn something concrete about the actual company behind the stock: what they do, how they do it, who manages it, what people think of their products, etc. Then take a look at the numbers that actually contribute to the story and go from there.

The lesson here is that you shouldn’t be after a low price, but a good value, and that has little to do with just paying attention to stock prices. Don’t let them fool you out there.

Source: Nat @ thewriterscoin.com

Dow bounces back with biggest point jump ever

Dow jumps 936 points in biggest point gain ever. The Dow, S&P and Nasdaq all gain over 11%.

Stocks rallied Monday afternoon, with the Dow up 976 points during the session, as investors bet that the worst of the credit crisis is over, following a series of global initiatives announced over the last few days.

The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) ended 936 points higher, after having risen as much as 976 points during the session. The advance was the largest ever during a session on a point basis. The point gain was equal to 11.1%, the fourth-best day ever on a percentage basis.

The Standard & Poor's 500 (SPX) index added 11.7% and the Nasdaq composite (COMP) added 11.8%.

Stocks were buoyant Monday as investors welcomed a global effort to unfreeze the credit market and get money flowing through the system again. Although stocks reacted positively, credit markets barely budged.

"We had some good news this morning from the Fed and the other central banks, but we were also oversold on an historic level and due for a big bounce," said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer's Investment Research.

Last week was the Dow's worst ever, ending a stunning eight-session selloff that seared 2,400 points off the blue-chip indicator. That represented a 22% decline in the Dow, something not seen since at least the '30s, wiping out $2.4 trillion in market value, according to losses in the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000, the broadest measure of the market.

Detrick said that not only had the Dow fallen for eight-straight sessions, but it had also fallen for eight-straight weeks.

"We basically saw a crash, and so you're going to see a big bounce off that," he said.

Whether the rally can continue beyond the short-term is unclear, as analysts debate whether the market really put in a bottom on Friday.

Christopher Colarik, portfolio manager at Glenmede Investment Management, said he thinks the market likely put in a bottom Friday when it touched session lows.

"We saw a lot of desperate selling over the last few weeks and at some point, these stocks start to look attractive," he said.

Previous efforts to get the credit markets moving again had failed to reassure investors, but the latest developments seemed to provide reassurance.

"Seeing that there's going to be more of a global commitment to resolving the financial crisis has given confidence to investors and gotten them to put some money to work," Colarik said.

Gains were broad based, with 29 out of 30 Dow stocks rising. Highlights included: GM (GM, Fortune 500), up 33%; Alcoa (AA, Fortune 500), up 22%; Chevron (CVX, Fortune 500), up 21%; American Express (AXP, Fortune 500), up 20%; and MIcrosoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), up 18%

96 of the Nasdaq 100 (NDX) gained, as did 472 of the S&P 500 components.

Market breadth was positive. On the New York Stock Exchange, winners topped losers 10 to 1 on volume of 1.14 billion shares. On the Nasdaq, advancers beat decliners 5 to 1 on volume of 1.84 billion shares.

The latest: On Monday, Neel Kashkari, assistant Treasury Secretary and interim head of the $700 billion bailout program - outlined some of the steps the government will take in the weeks and months ahead. The program includes buying soured mortgage assets from banks and buying stock in a number of financial institutions. (Full story)

Meanwhile, House Democrats are meeting Monday to put together a second economic stimulus package that could be worth $150 billion, although House Republicans are reportedly skeptical, CNN reports.

World leaders met over the weekend to come up with solutions. After an emergency meeting Sunday, 15 European nations agreed to help their troubled banks by adding capital and guaranteeing inter-bank lending. (Full story)

Additionally, the British government said it would pump $63 billion into three of the country's banks.

And the U.S. central bank said it will offer an unlimited amount of dollars to three other central banks in an effort to keep money flowing. (Full story)

The Fed announced an emergency rate cut last week, has pledged to help U.S. companies by buying short-term debt directly from businesses and has made billions available to banks in return for damaged assets.

Morgan Stanley: The company said it has completed plans to sell part of itself to Japanese bank Mitsubishi UFJ. The $9 billion deal gives the company a 21% stake in Morgan Stanley. Morgan (MS, Fortune 500) shares jumped 55% and topped the NYSE's most-actives list.

It was one of many bank stocks gaining. Other advancers included Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Merrill Lynch (MER, Fortune 500).

Automakers: General Motors (GM, Fortune 500) surged 32% and Ford Motor (F, Fortune 500) gained 27%, after the automakers had been among the hardest hit stocks in the recent selloff. Reports surfaced over the weekend that GM has held talks with Chrysler about a possible merger, although analysts say GM would need to raise cash ahead of any potential deal.

Credit markets still frozen: The recently announced initiatives made a small dent in the lending freeze Monday, although conditions remained tight.

The three-month Libor, or what banks charge each other to borrow for three months, eased to 4.75% from a 2008 high of 4.82% Friday.

The Libor-OIS spread, a measure of cash scarcity, eased to 3.61% from a record 3.67% Friday, suggesting cash is more available than at the end of last week.

The TED spread, which is the difference between what banks pay to borrow from each other for three months and what the Treasury pays, fell to 4.57% after spiking to an all-time high of 4.65% Friday.

The wider the spread, the more reluctant banks are to lend to each other, rather than from the federal government. When markets are fairly calm, banks charge each other premiums that are not much higher than the U.S. government.

Treasury bond markets are closed Monday for Columbus Day. (Full story)

Other markets: U.S. light crude oil for November delivery gained $3.50 to $81.20 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Friday, oil prices plunged more than $8 to a 13-month low.

Oil prices have tumbled on bets of slowing demand since the price of crude hit an all-time high of $147.27 a barrel on July 11.

The price of gas decreased for the 26th consecutive day, according to a survey of credit card activity by motorist group AAA.

COMEX gold for December delivery tumbled $24 to $835.80 an ounce.

In currency trading, the dollar slumped against the euro and the yen.

source: cnn.com

Chrysler, General Motors discuss merger or acquisition of Chrysler by GM

DETROIT (AP) -- Published reports say General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC have held preliminary talks about a merger or an acquisition of Chrysler by GM.
The Wall Street Journal, citing people it described as familiar with the discussions, says Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm that owns 80.1 percent of Chrysler and 51 percent of GMAC Financial Services, proposed trading Chrysler's automotive operations to GM. The Journal says Cerberus would receive GM's remaining 49 percent stake in GMAC.

The New York Times, also citing people familiar with the talks, says the automakers were discussing a merger. The Times did not mention GMAC, a traditional auto lender hit hard by the housing market downturn.

Messages seeking comment left with GM and Chrylser by the The Associated Press were not immediately returned late Friday.

Source: here