Money Making Blogs

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Here’s another blog network to watch - Shiny Media. Among the blogs maintained by this network are Mobile Digest, a mobile phone blog, and The Bag Lady, a shopping blog. These blogs make money mainly from Google AdSense and affiliate marketing. As you look at some of the blogs, take note of how they integrate pictures and ads to make the presentation aesthetically pleasing.

I read this article in Fortune about Jon Gales whose blog MobileTracker.net earns more than $5,000 per month from Google AdSense. This from a kid who is 19 and still in college. The site has been in existence for about a year and a half and gets over 200,000 visitors per month. That’s pretty good stats.

I checked the blog just now and noticed that Adsense ads has been replaced with Chitika mini malls. However, if you look at the archives, you’ll still see the AdSense ads. Take note of the color scheme for the ads. The title and text match the color of the post title and body and the URL is just a lighter shade of blue. The layout integrates the ads to make them look like part of the posts. This is a common strategy for AdSense publishers, i.e. making ads blend into the rest of the page content.

Check out his other blogs: Carbwire, GoogleRumors.

Carbwire is PR6 and has 1,210 backlinks in Google. Mobiletracker is also PR6 and has 1,790 backlinks in Google.

Also, the list of media mentions for MobileTracker and Carbwire is impressive.

Jason Calacanis has sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL according to this news report published by Reuters. Jason reported not long ago that the blog network was earning over $1 million in AdSense revenue per year. That’s not counting other advertising deals he has with companies wanting to advertise on their highly trafficked blogs.

The reported sale was for a cool $25 million. Now, that’s a money making blog! Or I should rather say money making blog network.

There is another way that you can add an income stream to your blog and this is called Chitika. It works better is you have a site that’s related to consumer products such as electronics and gadgets.

This is an example of what you can put up on your blog:

You can sign up for a free account at here. A word of caution if you are using WordPress. You cannot just paste the code provided by Chitika. I tried that and nothing showed up when I viewed my blog. But fortunately, I found a WP plugin specifically for Chitika.

Blog networks are becoming a popular business model. The idea is to have a network of several blogs on niche topics and generate income through advertising. The key to having a successful blog network is traffic and branding. Other than that, the barriers to entry are quite low. Some people start off by managing the blogs themselves but that quickly gets out of hand as the network grows and the need to write for the blogs increases. Many blog owners then resort to hiring contract bloggers and pay them either a percentage of the revenues or some fixed amount per post. Of course, there are other creative arrangements as well.

There’s even a blog now on blog networks. Check out BlogNetworkWatch. It’s owned by Martin Neumann. By the way, he also owns HomeOfficeVoice.

So back to the topic of blog networks. The early players in this arena are Weblogs, Inc. owned by Jason Calacanis, b5media owned by Jeremy Wright, and 9rules owned by Paul Scrivens. Scrivens also owns FineFools.

Here are some of the blogs in the b5media network:

* CellPhone9
* Cooking Gadgets
* Microsoft Weblog
* New Linux User
* Play Girlz
* The Search Engine Herald
* The Windows Vista Weblog
* Lifestyle Literally Blogging
* She Knows Best
* The Movie Weblog
* The Sports Weblog
* Unplugged Living

Here are some of the blogs in the FineFools network:

* Gardgy - gadget blog
* I Like Cameras - photography
* Movable Phone - mobile phones
* Damn I’m Cute - celebrities?
* It’s Useless

Then there are the casualties. WebbyMedia just started its short life (less than 2 weeks ago) and and was canned today. The owner Omar Al-Hajjar reasoned correctly that there are no barriers to entry for blog networks and the only differentiating factor lies in the brand power.

Overall, as you can see, the blog network owners target high-paying niches like gadgets (cell phones, digital cameras and other electronic toys are popular ones), tech and also potentially high traffic topics like celebrity gossip.

One of the signatures of blog networks is the that they often interlink all their blogs in order to cross-promote. This reveals all their blogs and open themselves to the scrutiny of competitors and possible competitors. As I said earlier, the barriers to entry in this business is virtually none. Therefore, in my opinion, it’s better to keep your blog inventory under wraps.

If you’re looking for ways to further monetize your blog, take a look at Kontera. It’s a unique contextual advertising system that scans your website for keywords that match their ad inventory. The keywords on your page will appear as active links but these links look slightly different from regular links (they have a dotted line below the regular underline). When the mouse cursor is hovering over the Kontera links, the ad will show up on the page. It’s sorta like the Yahoo! Search box that pops up on the page when you view Yahoo News.