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This is by far the longest article about blogging I had written. This blog is nearly 3,000 words in length and its possibly the most in-depth article I posted on this site so far. I would like to ask you to send feedback (email available on the front page of this website) as to what you have learned from this article, what you thought could be improved about it, and any other comments or questions. Blog requests are also welcome, I will be sure to write about subjects that are frequently requested by the readers of my blog. The importance of multiple-stream incomes Making money with your blog comes in different flavors. Monetizing your blog is not an easy task. When I started making money with my blog, I was only making 0.05 to 0.25 cents a day. Now that I have achieved a greater success, I'd like to share my experience with others, and the way I thought about blogging that eventually got me to this point. If you want to be successful at making money with your blog, you must be very thorough about doing research. This research is not always the same for all bloggers and will depend on your blog's niche subject. I will explain choosing niches later in this article. Is it possible to make money with only one source of income? Yes. But it is to your greatest advantage to implement a number of different strategies to monetize your blog's content. Remember that the odds are against you and part of your job to successfully monetize your blog is to decrease these odds. Blogging for money is a lot about making choices. When you choose to only have one source of income (whether it is Google AdSense or Amazon affiliate program or something else) you reduce the chances of greater success. Some people will look at how little money one stream of income can potentially make in one day and use it as the reason not to continue. Blogging for money is also about psychology. If you don't believe it is possible to make money online on the Internet, then you are once again stacking the odds against yourself. Consider this situation. Joe has started his first blog a few months ago. His greatest source of income makes $1 dollar a day. Let's say it is the Google AdSense program. Without additional blog optimizations, in one year Joe will make 365 dollars. Joe tried experimenting with placing an Amazon affiliate program on his blog, but after months of tracking statistics, he noticed that the Amazon affiliate program has only earned him approximately 0.10 cents a day on the average. Please note that a beginner does not make these decisions on the annual scale, but rather on a more immediate scale. Does my blog make money for me right now? Why does a beginner have to ask these questions? Probably, because a beginner has no annual experience with blogging for money. People give up easily all the time, without realizing how close they may be to actual success. It is without a doubt painful to learn that your hard efforts only result in only 0.10 cents a day and so Joe takes the Amazon affiliate program out of his blog because he is tired of doing additional maintenance for nothing. This choice reduced the total annual income by roughly 10% of what Joe makes with Google AdSense. Eventually, Joe saw no reason to continue, developed negative ideas about blogging, thought making money with a blog wasn't possible (if he couldn't do it after putting so much effort into it!) and gave up the blogging business altogether. Joe's friend, Jennifer, who is a much more experienced blogger, makes $100,000 a year with AdSense placed on a similar blog. To Jennifer, the same choice would result in a $10,000 annual loss. The true power of multiple-stream incomes becomes obvious only with a significant amount of traffic. But what is the difference between Joe and Jennifer? Their blogs are nearly exactly the same, but one makes a significantly larger amount of money with her blog than the other. Without Jennifer's knowledge, Joe decided to give up writing blogs for a living, even though he was already making the step in the right direction. He was just thinking about it in a different way. With the articles that I post on this website, I want to talk about those different ways that Jennifer knew about, and Joe didn't, which essentially defined their success at being a profitable blogger. Building consistent income is a difficult task, but it is not impossible. Large-scale success will usually accumulate over a period of time (a year, or more) in small fractions at a time and doesn't happen overnight. However the rewards can be incredible. One of the main goals with making a large amount of money in any business is becoming financially free. Building Traffic for Your Blog When we start writing blogs for the first time with the intent to make money with it we think about many elements of this business with a one-side track mind. For example it doesn't take a Nobel Prize winner to understand that the more traffic you drive to your blog, the more money you will make. But it is more difficult to become aware of the fact that there are different types of traffic. Some types influence the others. Other types are just a side-effect. Overall Traffic This is the total amount of traffic that your blog generates. It is not uncommon to develop the belief that this is the most important factor when it comes to making money with your blog. Yes, to some great degree traffic is very important. But understanding traffic in depth will give you additional perspectives on optimizing your blog for a specific type of traffic which can fundamentally increase your revenue. The overall traffic is simply the approximate level of your success at Internet marketing. The overall traffic can be split into two categories: visitors and pageviews. Blog Visitors This usually implies unique visitors, or in other words any individual who comes to your blog. Unique visitors may navigate your site and visit multiple pages. Designing your website navigation with care increases the amount of average pageviews. Your blog may contain 100 useful articles about Debt Consolidation on your blog, but how easy is it for a new visitor to learn that within 8 seconds of viewing your blog? Remember that usually unique visitors have never seen your blog before, they don't know anything about it and they will leave the page very soon (within 8 seconds) if they do not find anything interesting or are unaware that the page contains more information. One of your goals as to improving sales made from your blog is to make sure less of the visitors leave your page immediately after arriving on it. This may seem like a trivial task at first, but the underlying reasons for why people leave your page right away are plentiful. This is reflected in another important element of statistics tracking. We refer to the unique visitors who leave, and how often they leave the page as the Bounce Rate. This means that a visitor "bounces" off your page, because he or she did not find anything that captured their interest on your page, the page didn't load completely or the page was loading too slow. Page Views In website statistics page views indicate the average number of pages a visitor goes to on your website. In the instance of writing blogs, that means how many blog articles a visitor had viewed while visiting your blog. The Bounce Rate The bounce rate indicates the average amount of visitors that have "bounced" off your page without spending time reading it. Sometimes, if your statistics program is telling you that a visitor has 100% bounce rate, that doesn't always mean that the visitor immediately left the page. After all, it is difficult to track statistics for a situation such as that. This is because to calculate the average time a user has spent on your blog or on a blog article in particular, the tracking mechanism needs the visitor to refresh the page. Obviously, in cases when a visitor has been reading the first page he or she landed on, on your blog, and then closed the browser after 10 or 20 minutes of reading, the tracking mechanism has no way of capturing that data because the browser has been closed or the visitor left to see a page on another site. The 100% bounce rate is extremely common, and many beginner bloggers may be discouraged by seeing that in their statistics. But before making any conclusions, make sure that the tracking website you use for your blog statistics doesn't give you false information. Returning Visitors One of the most valuable sources of traffic come from the returning visitors. These people are usually the ones who are loyal to the information posted on your blog. They already know what to expect from your blog, they return to continue reading your articles, or to see if you had posted any new ones. They trust your writing abilities and your resourcefulness. They gain something from your blog. While this type of traffic is more likely to skip clicking on the Google AdSense ads on your blog, they are more likely to sign up for additional services or products in your affiliate program arsenal. Optimizing your blog content, page layout and link location for this type of traffic usually comes later on when your blog is already generating a significant amount of traffic. Time Spent on Page How much time does a visitor spend on your blog? This is one of my favorite statistics indicators of all time. This shows me that people actually read my articles. Some of the most loyal readers have spent from 30 minutes up to an hour reading some of the articles on this website. Not only this is gratifying, it is also an indicator that I am writing about the right things, something people find useful. It is this type of content you should be determined to write about. By the way, all of the statistics meters I talk about here are available with Google Analytics, whose services I have been using for over two years. How Often Should I Post Blogs? One of the questions that people ask me is how often should they update their blog with new content. Posting frequently certainly has an effect on building traffic. But how quickly can you really do research on the subjects you are writing about? Doing thorough research takes time. The reason that this is important is because people enjoy reading deeply researched content. A blog, in that instance, becomes like a book. And books are the fastest way to learn. We had all seen blogs that are poorly written. Usually the author of such blogs writes a bulk of blogs in one day and posts them to his or her site. This means publishing a lot of content that is not very valuable and relying on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to pick up your pages by keywords and displayed in search results. In some instances poorly written content works. But it has one major drawback. All content that is written in a rush is not timeless, it can't be. Writing one article per day is a reasonable goal, but make sure your research is thorough, or that you point out at least some of the things that you haven't found on other blogs. It is the timeless, original content that makes a difference in becoming successful at blogging. Plenty of times, bloggers who strive to monetize their content take ideas from already existing blogs, or already existing information. Plagiarized content is not uncommon on the Internet either, but it is just the wrong thing to do. Writing 100 pointless articles in one day is about as effective as writing 10 great articles in 1 week. Obsession with Statistics The difference between a professional blogger (someone who makes money consistently, and is able to make a living with a blog) and a beginner is that the latter tends to obsess with statistics, and the former tends to think more about increasing the revenue amount. Statistics will only tell you whether you are successful or not over a long period of time. Statistics is a good way to determine whether the additional content you post on your blog or your optimizations have a positive effect on the amount of traffic your blog accumulates. There are several things you should be able to determine with a statistics tool, but don't go too crazy about it. An increase in traffic is always good, but checking statistics every day may not be the situation you want to be in. Blogging is statistically fascinating. By using free statistics tools (such as Google Analytics, or a horde of others), we can track how many people visit our blogs, where they come from (geographically, as well as which sites they come from) and even how long they spend on a specific page of your blog. Knowing this information by itself is very rewarding. Choosing your Niche Don't blog just about anything. One of the greatest things about blogging is that you can blog about anything there is. It is in your interest, however, to only blog about the type of information there is a demand for. Choosing a niche may take a while, but it is an extremely important part of monetizing your blog successfully. Nonetheless, this process is sometimes difficult for some people. Are there things you enjoy doing? Why not write about that? Do you like computer programming? art? sports? Do you have a favorite movie you'd like to review? Writing about things you already know makes your job easier. Blogging is a two-way street. Writing about your personal interests is also a great way to receive comments from people who have similar interests and maybe gain additional knowledge and insights from them, too! With the recent developments in the Social Networking industry, people are becoming more serious about posting valuable comments on blogs, and contributing to the discussion. Choose a subject that you feel comfortable about. If it is difficult for you to come up with a subject, you have all the information available to you on the Internet to do research on. Google suggest can be used as an effective tool to choose subjects people are already searching for. If you go to google and start typing in a keyword, the drop-down menu will appear with possible matches. use this information to develop ideas about what people are looking for on the Internet. The possibilities here have no limit. Have you ever bought books? If you have, books can be another great resource for choosing a subject to blog about, as well as a great supporting resource. These subjects are already about things you know something about or were curious about at one point in your life. Identify all information available to you and choose several subjects. Write about the subject you like the most out of them all. Many people sometimes choose subjects because they know that the Google AdSense ads about that niche generate more revenue per-click (lawyers, real estate, debt consolidation, and many others). This may be a good strategy, but remember that these markets are extremely saturated. When you start building your blog for the first time, assume that your success will happen a long time from today and the road will be tougher than you think. But in time, you will learn about things that do matter, and by focusing on those things you will be able to consistently and cumulatively generate a steady income. |
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