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.

Technorati Tags: one man’s goal, marc galeazzi, blog valuation, buying a blog, money making blogs

Popularity: 73% [?]

This could be the Google AdSense killer - it’s called AdBlock Plus. Install the Firefox plugin and you can block 99% of the ads you see around the internet from Google AdSense to banner ads. PC World chose Adblock Plus as one of the 100 best products of 2007. It has got an estimated 2.5 million users and growing.

But it still doesn’t block the AdSense ads appearing on the SERPs. In place of the ads, you see white space where the ads used to be. So can it kill the revenue streams of people who make a living from selling ads off their blogs and sites?

When you first install it, you can load up the default settings for ads that you want to block. After that you can block other ads by training the plugin to do so.

When you right click on a mouse, you will see the “Adblock Image…” option that you can select to block any new banners that you don’t want to see.

For example…

I took that example from Shoemoney’s blog (I don’t have anything against the man, just using his blog as an example since he’s well-known among the make money blogging circles)

Here’s Shoemoney with AdBlock Plus disabled….

Enable AdBlock Plus and POOF!… no more ads.

Want to see more examples?

Okay, let’s take a look at JohnChow minus the ads.

Looks nice and clean doesn’t it? Suddenly there’s all this free space.

So how does your blog stack up with AdBlock Plus?

How are you going to modify your monetization strategy when more users start to block out ads?

Technorati Tags: ad blockers, blocking ads

Popularity: 39% [?]

Does your blog have useful content that humans want to read?

Or is it chock full of ads?

I think this is a good followup on my previous post about beautiful blogs. Here’s the counter example of what not to do. Like the show “What Not To Wear”, this post could be titled “How Not To Blog”.

Take a look at this one.

Scroll down the page and you’ll see even MORE ads.

Seriously, where is the content?

Mistake #1 for most newbies - trying too hard to make money.

I can’t say this enough.

Want to see more ugly blogs? Check these out…

This one should be called “How NOT to earn money on the internet”

And what in the world is a BlackMaster??

Dreams come true? Try a brighter, more positive WP Theme.

By the way, these were picked randomly from Entrecard. What’s the deal with the dark backgrounds?

Technorati Tags: ugly blogs, blogs nobody will read

Popularity: 33% [?]

Everybody and their mother knows that Google frowns on paid text links as a way for webmasters to buy link juice for their sites. So it turned out that 2007 was the year that most of what’s known as text link advertising died. Most bloggers are so scared now that they put no follow links on all their link ads.

(By the way, if text link ads are being discouraged, why does TLA still have PR7?)

image credit: w@ndering_st@r (Flickr)

There is another way to do sell text links which is virtually undetectable to Google. Some people call it content hosting or presell pages.

By the way, Bob Massa’s blog (where I found the term ‘content hosting’) is one that you should read and keep in your feed reader. Lots of good insight there.

The way it works is that you contact the webmaster or blogger directly and ask them if you could pay them to have some of your content and links put on their site as part of a post.

It’s like product placement on TV shows. Or like how you see the judges on American Idol always drinking Coke. That’s content hosting for you.

This way your links will look a whole lot more natural than if they are a part of a list of text links on somebody’s sidebar. That’s just screaming out for Google to get you.

I’m sure there is already an underground market for such a thing. If you target a well established blog to host your content, you get both the benefit of the traffic as well as the link juice.

That’s all the more reason to expand your inventory of sites so that you have a stable of sites with various PR values that you can use content hosting to introduce your newer sites. For the more advanced, you can spread out your hosting and also your IP addresses.

The key is keeping things looking natural. Some people think you’re trying to game the search engines. I think you’re just trying to figure out their rules and play by those rules.

Here is an image that I came across on Flickr. I’d like to call it Determination.

image credit: J Quantz Jr. (Flickr)

Technorati Tags: text links, backlinks, passing PR, content hosting, presell pages, link juice

Popularity: 37% [?]

Here’s an article from InsideCRM on 101 ways to monetize your blog. Actually it’s broken down into the following subtopics:

1. Merchandising
2. Paid Content
3. Begging (a.k.a. donations)
4. Opportunities (speaking, consulting, etc.)
5. Offline
6. Ads
7. RSS Ads
8. Text Ads
9. Sell Your Own Ads
10. Affiliate Programs
11. Sponsored Posts
12. Misc.

How many of these ways have you tried? Please leave a comment. I’d like to hear about your experiences.

One thing you can do is to pick one or two items out of each subtopic and work on those. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Of course, some things like getting speaking gigs and consulting work is much harder to come by unless you establish your expertise.

For new bloggers, ads, sponsored posts, affiliate programs and donations are probably the best to start with.

Technorati Tags: blog monetization, revenue streams

Popularity: 29% [?]