Money Making Blogs

You can get this blogging guide at Michael Bergman’s AI3 blog. Looks interesting but I don’t have time to read it in detail yet. For those of you who want to do more with WordPress blogs, this should be useful.

I noticed on Darren Rowse’s BreakingNewsBlog that some of the content is taken verbatim off news sites. For instance, the posts at the credit cards section and this one in the personal finance section. And it’s not just one or two sentences. It’s a wholesale lifting of entire paragraphs. I’m quite sure this is a violation of copyright terms. Now, I’m not sure if Darren himself is posting these entries or one of his hired-hands. I’m suspecting it’s the latter case. Take note - if you’re hiring bloggers, be sure to do quality control checks. You don’t want to be caught in a copyright infringement suit.

Be sure to check copyright terms before you use any content from other websites.

If you want to learn about what not to do, read this interview with a blogger who is blogging on high paying AdSense keywords.

Okay, Rule #1 - NEVER reveal all your URLs.

You’ll either:

1. Get lots of people copying the themes of your blogs

or

2. Some people may think your “keyword-targeted” blog is a spam blog and report it to Google.

It’s best to keep the URLs to yourself.

[tags]niche blogs[/tags]

If you are using Blogger to host your blog, you can now easily integrate AdSense into your blog without changing the HTML code in the template file. Interestingly, this was announced at Google Buzz under the heading “Get Rich Quick(er)”. I guess it’s get rich quicker for both the blogger as well as Google. What a great idea to increase Google’s revenue. Someone at the company probably realized how many blogs out there are not showing AdSense ads and decided to add this new feature. My only concern is that as AdSense proliferates on all the blogs, people will tune out those ads and revenues will go way down. We’ll have to see if my prediction holds true.

Here is another good example of what a niche blog looks like. This one is focused on credit cards and looks like it’s main sources of income are affiliate programs and Google AdSense. Notice that the Adsense titles are the same color as the link text on the page. Two comments - the search box can be replaced with a Google Search box to add some revenue; and secondly, adding AdSense within the body of the post may increase the CTRs.

Want to know what’s hot and what’s not? What are the products that people are searching for? A good place to start your research is Google’s own shopping search tool called Froogle. It will show you in real time the searches that are being performed. For example, I just went to the site and right now it’s showing these searches:

sleeping bag
compact flash memory
diamond earrings
belgian chocolate
sapphire ring
lawn gnome
kodak easyshare
coffee table
iomega zip drive
diablo 2
red sox sweatshirt
patio heaters
jogging stroller
dominoes
rio mp3
chaise
radio scanner
glass coffee table
jukebox
gel pens
waffle iron
thank you cards
lanyard
king size mattress
rain gauge

If you click on the ‘Refresh’ button on your browser, the list will automatically update. If you want to find out more about one of the items, just click on it and you will see the results page that has pictures of the product. I just found out what a ‘chaise’ and a ‘lanyard’ are.

Blog Explosion has just added a ping service where you can ping multiple blog directories at one time. Up till now, the service I’m using is Pingomatic. Make sure you ping the popular blog directories where you have listed your blogs to let them know that you have updated your blog. You should do this everytime after you make a new post. Monitor your web stats from time to time to see if pinging is bringing more traffic to your blog. You can see by looking at the “referring URL” where the traffic to your site is originating from.

It looks like Problogger, Darren Rowse, is diversifying from purely earning from Google AdSense and selling ads across his network of sites. He is teaming up with Andy Wibbels in offering a course on how you can duplicate his success. He even got a mention on CBS Marketwatch and a live interview on CBS. That’s gotta do wonders for selling more of his course. According to the report, there are already 800 people signed up for the preview course call. With the price tag of the course at $270, that amounts to $216,000 if all 800 people end up buying the course. That’s a nice chunk of change!

The strategy to offer a course is a good one after riding on his success breaking the $10,000 per month barrier with Google Adsense. The only thing with blogging full time is that it’s not passive, i.e. hands-off, income. You’ll have to work day in and day out updating your blog or blogs. That amounts to a full-time job. So if you’re looking for something that you can set up and then let run on autopilot, you should take this into consideration.

Unless you can afford to hire a bunch of bloggers to maintain your blogs, that means that you have to do all the hard work. Having said that, if your archived blog posts are indexed in the search engines, you’ll still be getting traffic to those pages and probably generating income from them. So in that sense, it’s sort of on autopilot.