Money Making Blogs

Wow, time sure flies. If you’re wondering why there haven’t been posts for a few months, it is because I have been taking some time to focus on other projects. As a result, this blog has been neglected. But I intend to get back to blogging on a regular schedule.

There’s no doubt that the number of blogs and blog traffic is continuing to grow. Take a look at these trends:

These are just blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress. We’re not even talking about blogs that are self-hosted. So as you can see, the potential of blogging is huge and there are tons of ways you can generate an income stream through blogging.

Also, check out Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere. It gives a deeper insight into the growth of blogs in 2008. Some of the stats are staggering. For example, consider this:

There are an estimated 77.7 million unique visitors in the US to blogs
The number of users in Facebook: 41.0 million and MySpace: 75.1 million
Compare this to the estimated total internet audience 188.9 million

Wowzers.

Check out Day 4 which covers blogging for profit. Here again, some interesting stats are uncovered.

“Bloggers with advertising invest an average of $1,800 annually in their blogs. U.S. bloggers earn an average of $5,000, though bloggers in Asia earn 50% more on average and European bloggers earn an average of 75% more than U.S. bloggers. High revenue bloggers skew the mean revenue. The median revenue for U.S. bloggers is $200 annually (and the median annual investment is only $50).”

and this…

“The top 10 percent of blogger respondents earned an average of $19,000 annually. Three-quarters of these successful bloggers are male, and four in ten are self employed (twice as high as the average blogger). They are also more likely to be professional or corporate bloggers. Overall, the high revenue bloggers are more sophisticated in terms of the tools that they use, their usage of readership events, and advertising platforms. They also invest far more resources (both time and money) in their blogs.”

So you see, blogging is still on the rise and it’s not too late to start your own blog.

If you have a successful blog with a large readership, you can create an additional stream of income (and repeat visitors) by having a newsletter. Depending on the topic of your blog, you may have readers who wish to receive a newsletter that contains more in-depth information. You start by creating an email opt-in list of newsletter subscribers. This list can then be used for other marketing promotions or you can monetize your newsletter through sponsor ads.

If your blogs offer something of value to your readers, chances are they will expect your newsletter or email campaign to do the same. This is a good thing because you will attract subscribers, but if you don’t deliver you will find that many of your readers end up unsubscribing. Add value to your email correspondences in the same way you make your blogs interesting to retain and attract subscribers.

Make sure you give readers something of value in these emails and give them a reason to read them so that your advertising methods have the greatest chances of being successful. If you promise little known tips or hard to find information, you better deliver or readers will unsubscribe.

A good way to increase the number of people subscribing is to reveal extra information that can be found only in the newsletter.

One example is to conclude a blog entry in an email for subscribers only.

Readers who are eager to get the whole story and will be more likely to subscribe to your newsletter. Free incentives are also a good way to get subscribers, it doesn’t have to be something fancy. Some ideas include offering a free report or list of tips. Even the free info you give out should be useful. Don’t just offer up junk. If your free information is that good, people will come back for more.

Monetizing a newsletter or email campaign is similar to monetizing your blog. While you cannot use Adsense and other similar advertising methods, you can directly sell ad space and depending on the size of your subscriber list you can charge a hefty sum.

You can also use affiliate marketing in your newsletter, just be sure to have the bulk of your newsletter contains relevant content and not just ads or else your readers will start dropping like flies. Make sure your affiliate marketing is related to the content of your newsletter or email and that your audience will be interested in what you are promoting. Don’t overdo it. Treat your subscribers well!

You can also sell your own merchandise through your newsletter. If you have created merchandise with your blog logo or related slogans, adding a link in your news letter asking readers to check out your store or merchandise won’t hurt, just make sure it is paired with good content.

If you build up a large subscriber base, you can also use it to send other email campaigns and promotions for your merchandise, book, or affiliate products. A word of caution, however, no one likes unsolicited emails so you should be sure that you have permission to send additional emails and that they offer something of value and are not just viewed as annoyances.

Finally, over time as your readership and brand grows, you can also offer a paid version of your newsletter that contains more information than the free one.

If you decide to start a newsletter, make sure you pick an autoresponder system that is reliable and has high deliverability rates.

[tags]create multiple streams of income, start your own newsletter, setting up a newsletter [/tags]

The most important thing about having a blog is to establish your brand and let your readers get to know you. This applies mostly to blogs that are related to your business. As the author of the blog, you can tell your readers about yourself in the About page. Your readers will also come to know you through your style of writing and what you write about. If you have something meaningful to say, people will listen.

Get Started

If you don’t already have a blog, it’s time to take the plunge and get started. Remember Nike’s popular slogan? Just do it. You can learn along the way as you build up your first blog. There is a lot of freely available information about all aspects of maintaining and marketing a blog.

In the beginning, you can take a look at some of the popular blogs in your niche and take note of what you like about them. Basically you are trying to capture the best elements of those blogs and try to incorporate them in yours.

Blog Regularly

Even if you are not a Pulitzer prize winning author, you can still get better at writing as you practice. Try to blog as regularly as possible. If you stop for long periods between your posts, you may start to lose your readership. You can even write your posts beforehand if you know that you are going to be away on vacation. Then you can set up automatic scheduling to post to the blog.

Build a Community

As your blog readership grows, you will hopefully get more people interacting with you through the comments. Definitely install Akismet to catch most of the comment spam. Try to answer all of the valid comments quickly and you will make your readers feel that you care. Another option to think about is building a forum as part of your blog. Again, due to the problem of spam, forums require moderation and if you don’t have time to do this, you’ll have to find some volunteers or pay for help.

Another way to build a community quickly is by holding a blog contest. You can offer attractive prizes (like lots of cash!) or ask other bloggers to donate prizes in exchange for something you have to offer. You could offer to review their blog in your blog and give them a backlink. You could offer them your own product in exchange. Those are just two quick ideas.

Folks like Darren Rowse (Problogger) and Shoemoney have built their brands largely due to the popularity of their blogs. You have to find your own unique angle to it. For Problogger, it was teaching people about blogging and making money from it. For Shoemoney, a lot of initial interest was generated by showing a huge affiliate check and talking about tremendous success with ringtones.

Don’t delay, start thinking about how you can establish yourself in a crowded marketplace. The sooner you start, the better.

[tags]building your brand, blogging tips[/tags]

Want to start a blog and not coming up with enough ideas? Take a look at the blogs listed on Blogger Stories. You may just get some fresh ideas.

But beware, you may also get caught up reading the blogs and before you realize it, half the day is over.

There are tons of ways to get ideas for blog posts. When you see something that catches your attention, do yourself a favor and write it down in a notebook. Call it your “Blog Ideas” notebook. The next time you’re out of ideas, you can go back to your handy dandy notebook and use one of thoese ideas.

[tags]ideas for blogs, blogger stories, blog ideas[/tags]

Recently, Marc Galeazzi bought a money making blog called One Man’s Goal for $10,000. His move has been met with some skepticism by other bloggers on the wisdom of spending such a large sum of money for a “money making blog”.

Frank over at OpTempo tries to give Marc some advice.

Here are the blog stats for One Man’s Goal - so you can decide for yourself if it’s money well spent.

Traffic
4/5/08-4/10/08 - 1,135

Alexa - 83,114
Technorati - 16,847
Earnings (As quoted by Bryan for past month) $1,150
Posts - 230
Comments - 3,535
Rss feed - 616 (This is low because Bryan only recently coverted to feedburner) Real Est. - 1000, but will will use the 616.
Inbound links - Google - 165 Yahoo - 7,226
Page Rank -4
45n5 ranking - 50
Aweber Newsletter Subscribers- 396

Based on one month’s earning, the blog sold for about 10x monthly earnings. But we don’t know if those earnings are consistent. You usually value a blog based on the stability of past earnings and projections of future earnings. Other factors like the number of readers and the size of the email list can come into play as well. Personally, I don’t care about 45n5 ranking, Alexa ranking or the number of posts and comments.

Will Marc succeed? I don’t know but I think that he will put everything he has into it because of the amount of money he has invested into it.

I wish him luck. The “make money online” blogging niche is really crowded and you have to really stand out and be able to carve out your own piece of the pie.

[tags]one man’s goal, marc galeazzi, blog valuation, buying a blog, money making blogs[/tags]

What do fancy sports cars and make money bloggers have in common?

Well, ever since John Chow put up his blog with a photo of a fancy car in the header, there have been numerous copycats. Surprising? No. After all, people like to copy those that have found success.

Here’s John Chow’s blog header…

and a few admirers copycats…

Now let’s have a bit of fun and go down memory lane.

Here’s the evolution of the cars on John Chow’s blog.

circa November 2006

we like blue better than red!

maybe TWO blue cars are better than one.

Seen a make money online blog with a car in the header lately? Let me know….

[tags]john chow, make money blogs, headers with cars[/tags]

There is an article in the NYT that highlights the fact that blogging may be hazardous to your health. The article mentioned Russell Shaw who is a blogger who suffered a fatal heart attack recently. Another blogger mentioned was Marc Orchant who also had a heart attack.

This story should be a wake up call for those who are trying to make money online through blogging. While you’re at it, be sure to ask yourself what you’re doing it for and whether it is worth all your sweat and tears. Truth be told, it’s not as easy making money through blogging as some may have you believe. It does take a LOT of hard work.

Be sure to take care of the important things first - family, health, etc. Keep things in perspective!

image credit: Vicky’s Pics (Flickr)

[tags]blogging and your health, priorities[/tags]

If you don’t have a way for readers to subscribe to your email list, you are losing a lot of repeat traffic. Think about it, how many blogs do you visit on a daily basis? There are too many blogs to keep up with - yes, even the good ones. Sometimes I visit a blog that I find interesting and I will check it frequently for a while until they start going off topic and I lose interest. However if I sign up for their email notification list and I get a “friendly email reminder” that a particularly interesting post has been written chances are I will go and visit that blog again.

Previously, I have written about capturing all your blog readers. Having an email subscription system is one of the ways to keep in touch with your readers. Of course, if you’re into social networking, there’s also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Pick your poison.

Sidenote: By the way, if you use Twitter, Tweetscan is a great search engine specifically for Twitter.

My favorite autoresponder is Aweber. With Aweber, they claim you’ll get great deliverability (how does one check?). But the features I like are the ability to set up different sub-lists and transfer subscribers from one list to another based on certain actions. Suppose you’re selling your own product and you collect a list of prospects.

Now if someone on the prospects list buys your product, you can have them automatically switched to your customer list. This saves a lot of manual work.

Another feature that I like is the ability to do a split test on your email list. If you have a list of 6000 people, you can create a 3 way split-test message and you can partition it evenly (2000/2000/2000) or in any proportion that you like. This is a good way to test message titles (think direct marketing) and also message styles.

For those of you who are crazy about tracking, the reporting options are fantastic. You can keep a tabs on the daily trends of new leads, unverified vs. verified leads, countries, states, area codes, follow up status, etc. This is particularly useful if you want to keep a tab on how many people subscribe to your blog after a post that really appeals to your audience.

At $19.95 a month (if you have less than 10,000 people on your list) Aweber is unbeatable value!

[tags]autoresponders, Aweber, email list, followup[/tags]

If you are interested in promoting eBay as an affiliate, you should know that they are no longer using CJ as the affiliate platform. They have their own in-house affiliate program now called eBay Partner Network.

This is something you should really consider if you’re interested in promoting a brand that’s recognizable worldwide.

Be sure to read the terms and conditions before you join. Specifically, you’re not allowed to do direct linking from a PPC search engine ad to an eBay landing page. Going through your own site first is okay. Maybe you can check out BANS if you aren’t already using it. That’s a great way to construct highly targeted landing pages for this purpose.

The compensation is based on a tiered structure and you’re paid based on a percentage of the winning bid (promote high ticket items!) or the number of active new members recruited.

[tags]eBay partner network, affiliate program[/tags]

Do you know how long your website or blog takes to load for users with different internet connection speeds? The reason this is important is because not everyone is using broadband although it is becoming increasingly widespread. If your site takes forever to load, the chances of the visitor clicking on the back button is higher and you’re going to lose a lot of traffic that way.

Fortunately, there are tools available online that lets you check how fast or slow your site loads. Most of these tools are free. One example of such a tool is from websiteoptimization.com.

It tells you how fast your site loads depending on what type of connection your visitor has. It also gives you suggestions on how you can improve your load time.

Try to keep the load time less than 3 seconds. The main culprit of slow load times is usually images. Try as to use images in JPG or PNG formats. These formats usually take up the smallest amount of memory. If you have Photoshop, you can save the images in different formats and compare the file sizes. You can also set the amount of compression to use.

If you’re using third party widgets on your blog, these could also slow down your load times. You might have noticed that I have removed the Blog Catalog widget from my sidebar because I found that it was taking a long time to load up.

Remember, the faster your site loads, the more visitors you’ll retain and more visitors mean more money!

[tags]website load time, compress images, image files[/tags]