Money Making Blogs

You can also create a profitable blog by writing product reviews. A good example of this is the PVR blog. Notice how graphics are integrated into the blog to attract the viewers gaze.

This entry was also written by the creator of the PVR blog. Read it. It’s interesting.

Need more ideas for your blog? Like watching TV or movies?

You can also blog on reality TV shows - take a look at American Idol blog.

Not to be outdone, there is also The Apprentice Blog.

Or you can also write your own movie review blog. For example, see this blog. Notice that it’s got a PR of 7!

These are just some ideas to get you started. I’m sure you can brainstorm for much more.

The key is to think of a topic that has a lot of general interest and with reasonably high paying keywords.

Adding Adsense to your blog hosted on Blogger.com is easy. Even if you host the blog on a domain that you own, this will still apply.

First, log in to your Adsense account and copy the code provided.

The following ad formats are the best ones that will fit nicely into the sidebar:

Button (125×125)
Skyscraper (120×600)
Wide Skyscraper (160 x 600)
Vertical Banner (120 x 240)
Small Rectangle (180×150)

Next log in to your Blogger account. Go to ‘Change Settings’ and select the ‘Templates’ tab.

Look for this…

<!-- Begin #sidebar -->
<div id="sidebar"><div id="sidebar2">

… and paste your Adsense code below those lines. Make sure you click on preview to see what the resulting page looks like and then save it.

That’s it. You’re done.

You can also add Adsense to the post section. Look for

 <!-- Blog Posts >

and paste the Adsense code in that section.

Don’t worry if you have more than 3 posts per page. Only a maximum of 3 Adsense blocks will be shown as per Google’s terms of service.

With some taste of success with Adsense, many people are thinking about quitting their day job to become full time online publishers or professional bloggers. There is an interesting article on Search Engine Journal regarding this issue.

No doubt many have considered it but before you take the plunge, it’ll be wise to consider what your other income streams are should your Adsense earnings dry up. If you’re relying heavily on natural search engine traffic, you could take a big hit if the search engine algorithms change and your site drops off the index.

First make sure that you have a steady and growing traffic to your website. You can do this by getting relevant links from other websites to your site. You should also provide good content that people would want to read. You have to give a reason for your visitors to come back to your site. It’s harder to get repeat visitors than it is to get the occassional surfer to your site.

Here’s another idea - write a newsletter. Maintain a relationship with your site’s readers. This is hard work but pays off in the long term.

In short, think about traffic, content, and traffic. Oh did I mention traffic?

If you haven’t already joined, be sure to enroll in Commission Junction today. It’s one of the best and most extensive affiliate networks. You can find many affiliate programs that will pay either based on commissions on sales or leads.

There are many well known companies that use Commission Junction to manage their affiliate programs. Ebay, New York Times, The Home Shopping Network, ING Direct … just to name a few.

Some of the pay per lead programs can be extremely lucrative and convert well. It’s generally easier to get a visitor to your site to sign up for information than to purchase a product.

Another advantage of Commission Junction is that you get paid with a single check every month even if you earn commissions from different vendors. This will greatly simplify your book-keeping.

There are other affiliate networks out there but you should definitely start with Commission Junction right away.

Visit Jim Buie’s blog and read this post about profitable blogs. It will give you some ideas about the different types of blogs and how much money people are making.

Political blogs:

Instapundit is a blog by Glenn Reynolds with 220,000 readers. Wow!

Andrew Sullivan’s blog is another one to take a look at.

Chris Allbritton runs Back-to-Iraq 3.0.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga runs this blog and was hired by the Howard Dean campaign to raise money online.

So you see, you can blog about anything that interests you. But the key to a profitable blog is to have a large readership. So, more importantly, it has to be interesting to your readers too.

If you plan on applying for Google Adsense so that you can make money through showing Google Ads on your blog, I would suggest that you first get your own domain name.

You can start a blog and host it for free on a service such as Blogger but you won’t be able to apply to Google’s Adsense program unless you have your own domain name.

If you’re just starting out, go to Blogger.com and open up an account for yourself. Familiarize yoruself with all the features that Blogger has to offer.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to do some research before you register your domain name. Personally I use GoDaddy.com which is very cost effective. Dot coms are only $8.95 per year.

Think about the topic that you would like to blog on. It’s easier if it’s something that you’re familiar with or have an interest in. If you’re not interested in the subject, it’ll get tedious since you should be posting to your blog everyday. That will make sure that the search engine robots will come by and index your site whenever you have fresh content. More on that later.

For now, do some research using the Overture keyword tool. There is also this site that shows you both the Overture bid amounts and search volume side by side.

You’ll want to find keywords that get a good amount of searches and reasonable bids. Here we’ll use Overture as a guideline for how much advertisers are bidding on Google. Try to scan the 3rd or 4th place bids. This will give you a rough idea of the value of the keyword. I like to with keywords that have at least a few thousand searches. It may not be a single keyword that gets that search volume but sometimes you have a family of related keywords, each with smaller search volumes but the total is quite large.

Okay, back to registering the domain name. If the domain name is available as a .com, go for it. Personally, I like .info as well.

With GoDaddy, you can either pay by any major credit card or using PayPal. Once you register your domain, you’ll want to get a webhost to host the domain on.

Okay… so the two things that you need to get your own website are:
1. Domain name
2. Webhost

If you’re looking for a good webhost, I recommend NewWebSite which is a great deal at $9.99 with unlimited bandwidth. They use Cpanel for site administration which is very easy to use.

If you want to look at blogs that are designed to make money, take a look at Weblogs’ latest movie blog titled Cinematical. Notice the clean layout. Graphics are used sparingly yet they draw the readers in.

It looks like they are making money from sponsored ads, Google Adsense, and Amazon.com’s affiliate program. I wonder about the sponsored text links though - I’m not sure if Google’s Terms of Service for Adsense allows what would be look-alike competing ads.

Here is a list of other blogs owned by Weblogs, Inc.

AdJab
Autoblog
Blogging Baby
Divester (scuba)
Engadget
Gadling
hack a day
Joystiq
Luxist
pPlayer (poker)
TV Squad
TUAW (Apple)
Technology
Apple (Unofficial)
CSS
Digital Photography
Flash Insider
Google (Unofficial)
Grid Computing
JavaScript
Microsoft (Unofficial)
Office
Open Source
Peer-to-Peer
Photoshop (Unofficial)
RSS
SAS (Unofficial)
Search Engine Marketing
Social Software
Spam
Tablet PCs
VoIP
Yahoo (Unofficial)
Wireless
BBHub (BlackBerry)
Bluetooth
Engadget: Cellphones
Engadget: GPS
RFID
Ultra Wideband
WiFi
The WiMAX Weblog
Engadget: Wireless
Wireless Dev
Wireless
Video Games
Blogging E3
Engadget: Gaming
Joystiq
Playstation 3
Video Games
Xbox 2
Media & Entertainment
Design
Digital Music
Documentary Film
Droxy (Digital Radio)
Independent Film
Magazine Design
Nanopublishing
Business
The Mortgages Weblog
Outsourcing
SCM Wire (supply chain)
Life Sciences
The Cancer Blog
The Diabetes Blog
Medical Informatics
Telemedicine
Personal
Brian Alvey
Jason Calacanis
Blog Maverick
Gordon Gould
Judith Meskill
Events
Blogging DEMO
Blogging E3
Blogging ETech
Future of Music
Blogging Milken
Blogging Sundance
Blogging Web 2.0

As you can see, they are operating in many different niches. Weblogs, Inc. founder Jason Calacanis also has a blog and I found in this post that they are now making over $1,000 per day from Adsense (posted on April 7th, 2005) . The CTR and CPM are really dismal though.

Note: Google doesn’t allow revealing the CTR (click through ratio) and CPM (cost per thousand) of your Adsense account, so Jason has since removed those numbers from the post. But I found them quoted at another blog.

If we take that $1,000 per day number and divide that by the number of blogs maintained (75), we get a little over $13 per day per blog. If they can keep this up, they will be doing over $360,000 per year.

This just goes to show that you can make some serious money by blogging.

This is an interesting article says the average Paid Search bids rose 9% in March to $1.75 per click. That’s good news for contextual ad publishers, i.e. those publishing Adsense on their websites. This means that if you’re in the right markets, you should see your revenues going up (all other factors being equal such as traffic to your site).

The article includes a table of average click prices from Sept. 04 to March 05 listing a few major markets. The finance/mortgage arena is by far the most lucrative with average bids now at $5.39. The second and third places are for the finance/investing and telecommunications/broadband markets at $1.86 and $1.85, respectively.

Read the full article here

The first step to a money making blog is, of course, creating your blog.

This blog is installed using WordPress. This is my first time installing WordPress and it took me less than 10 minutes to get everything set up. If I can do it, you can too!

Another popular Blogging software is Google’s Blogger. My other marketing blog is created with Blogger.

The advantage of WordPress over Blogger is that WordPress allows you to specify ‘categories’ for your posts which makes it easier to organize relevant topics. It also makes it easier for your readers to find your posts.

Another difference is that Blogger lets you decide whether to host your blog on their server or on your own server. With Wordpress, you have to install everything on your server. With one of my sites that I have a blog on Blogger, both the blog and my homepage are on the first page of Yahoo search results.

I find that Blogger templates are easier to modify compared to WordPress. You don’t have to go with the default template provided with the blogging software. You can always customize your blog to match the look of your site. Besides, having a generic looking blog is boring.

[tags]how to make a blog[/tags]

I’ve started this blog to share with you ways that you can generate a passive income with your blog. It doesn’t matter what topic your blog is on - you can monetize it. It could be a blog about a hobby you have, a personal blog to share with your friends and family or even a passionate cause that you have.

If you enjoy reading this blog, please post a comment and introduce yourself. No ads, please.