StevePavlina.com was launched 19 months ago. 12 months ago it was averaging $4.12/day in
income. Now it brings in over $200/day. I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion.
In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was
bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?
This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth
(hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free
to bookmark it or print it out for later.
Do you actually want to monetize your blog?
Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If
you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy,
obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.
If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first.
If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But
make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to
succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough —
you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely
good to earn income from your blog– you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed.
If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however,
you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find
this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? (It talks about how to find the right balance
between your needs and those of others.)
If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re
going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a
remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request
donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re
going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products
you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then
fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.
You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will
complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began
putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I
expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me
negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the
complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost
immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to
see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this
year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s
certainly not my only source. More on that later…
Can you make a decent income online?
Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an
attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income
from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a
day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-
time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-
time.
Can most people do it?
No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the
dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to
generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal
Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your
outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a
living this way, I would say that most smart people can. What if you don’t know whether or
not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question,
you aren’t.
If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK,
actually I do.
This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with
relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes
ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much
effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something,
and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the
door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the
best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.
If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an
excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and
then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I
would offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.
Web savvy
What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent
functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. Which technologies are “key”
will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally
speaking I’d list these elements as significant:
*
blog publishing software
*
HTML/CSS
*
blog comments (and comment spam)
*
RSS/syndication
*
feed aggregators
*
pings
*
trackbacks
*
full vs. partial feeds
*
blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
*
search engines
*
search engine optimization (SEO)
*
page rank
*
social bookmarking
*
tagging
*
contextual advertising
*
affiliate programs
*
traffic statistics
*
email
Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.
I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your
head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet.
Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone
who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your
knowledge base.
If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL,
digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need
to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you
hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know exactly
what you’re getting into.
A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income
generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you
will probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO
well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the
connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may
need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you,
social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor
decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of
this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a
title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields
relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social
bookmarking. Plus I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. So I do my
best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means
abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little
skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out
on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these
types of skills that require decent web savvy to understand.
This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as
hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take
me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of mental processing goes into those
60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them
fairly routinely.
Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on
Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it.
To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe
you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true,
but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to
use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto
mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even
though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work.
But I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would
take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional
knowledge to utilize several of them.
Thriving on change
I would say that your greatest risk isn’t so much that you’ll make mistakes that will cost
you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial
mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more
concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do
that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should
be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that could have made you
money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities.
I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at
uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.
The blogosphere changes very rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains
to decipher these opportunities and figure out how to take advantage of them before they
disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss
out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re
losing money you could have earned.
I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid
than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is
accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea
that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-
time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone
else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will likely be very
confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a
little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can
capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even
though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is
what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months
with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success
make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.
What’s your overall income-generation strategy?
I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to
generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or
reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-
aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire
will just create a mess.
Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t
good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to
generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to
get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I
first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew
that if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough
income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level
15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to
increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more
secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can
always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…
Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales,
donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you
decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to
create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year
and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m
headed. It also allows me to quickly say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my
plan.
Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions
for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of
income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel
people towards some kind of order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different
monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific
action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and
design your site accordingly.
When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy
someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s
content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making
money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after
researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as
well. This is an effective combo.
Traffic, traffic, traffic
Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and
I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your
blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.
Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million
visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months
ago.
Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your
income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your
income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost
everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With
sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize
your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).
When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest
challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build
traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my
site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19
months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my
current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s
more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I
go along.
Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad
clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and
more of whatever else that generates income for you.
With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer.
High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible
for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day,
my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and
I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured
in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists
are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities
were not available to me when I was first starting. Popular sites have a serious advantage.
The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.
If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-
traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.
How to build traffic
Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re
starting from rock bottom?
I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build
a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to
bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of
traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your
visitors. No games or gimmicks.
There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.
Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click
the previous link to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically
submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy
ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes
minutes. Use the easy sign-up form at Conservative Cat. Do NOT spam the carnivals with
irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are match for your content.
In my early traffic-building days, I would do carnivals submissions once a week, and it
helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still
have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown
blog up to a certain level. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they
give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every
once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make
much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new
visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up
dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s
a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.
If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong?
Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making the mistakes is not the
issue. Missing opportunities is.
Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?
Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:
Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll
never come back.
Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally…
FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site.
Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links.
Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued
increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have
even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out
that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about
this. I think it’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even
though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content,
they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.
I think most mature people understand that it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from
their work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people
generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes
serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This
article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly
reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay
anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more
I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and
added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-
free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead.
More income = better service.
At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as
if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of
ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I
have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they
weren’t effective, I would remove them right away and try something else.
I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites,
including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though
they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.
I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read
my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s
ad-free. I do, however, include a simple donation request in the bottom of my feeds.
If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at my 2005 traffic growth chart. I
first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-
February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent
source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range
options to go further back in time.
Multiple streams of income
You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On
this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s
a list:
1.
Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
2.
Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
3.
Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
4.
Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
5.
Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly
books)
6.
Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)
Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this
list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.
Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too.
Every stream generates more than $100/month.
My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10,
and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this
up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to
voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor
support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a
surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.
These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995.
With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising
income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my
wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: VegFamily.com advertising, direct book
sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense
income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of
paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one
source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage
you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.
Automated income
With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to
do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to
do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.
I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no
products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m
still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.
Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that
work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and
check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be
in.
Blogging software and hardware
I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features
and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.
The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I
coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a
simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the
rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog,
like the Million Dollar Experiment.
I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your
blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself
to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page
rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over
the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-
level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and
that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more
work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.
Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend
Pair.com for a hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and
have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers
most of her clients there.
As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private
server (VPS). My web server is hosted by ServInt.net. What I like about ServInt is that
they have a nice upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several
upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your
own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several
sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add
another site.
Comments or no comments
When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the
level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending
more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the
effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change
my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can
easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions
an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane.
Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.
But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors
ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below
1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned
blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. In fact, I wish I had
done it sooner.
If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it
previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.
Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw
no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me.
Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more
trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do
so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion —
it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily
keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I
don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.
I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many
people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think
that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers
neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about
comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence
of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing
new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a
comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity,
my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After
doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.
Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or
making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even
helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.
Build a complete web site, not just a blog
Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my
traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the
home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the
blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is,
so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.
Testing and optimization
In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you.
So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income
stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut
streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams
that show real promise.
A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes.
They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my
earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them,
possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I
never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.
For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors,
sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating
the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal
specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the
gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor
layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my
traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and
optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my test failed and even made my income go
down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be
a fraction of what it is now.
It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has
been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in under and hour and then just
wait a month and see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it
does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be
experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months,
you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you
need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here —
you either succeed, or you learn something.
Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small
Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a
big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs VegFamily.com, a
popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big
niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal.
Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to
write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health,
and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.
Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still
feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a
personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about
this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.
Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try
to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love
most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience.
Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can
give.
A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the
same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income
ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field
of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.
Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a
clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I
generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’
ve found that clarity usually yields better results than cleverness.
Posting frequency and length
Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some
bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more.
I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I
usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000
words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now).
That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more
exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links
and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read
them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value.
Expenses
Blogging is dirt cheap.
I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil.
Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many
more gems in the archives.
My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web
server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this
site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s
subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.
The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much
lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can
be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic
continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction
of total income.
Perks
Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your
traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for
potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the
publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal
development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen
books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them
as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a
review to share it with my visitors. I do have very high standards though, so I review less
than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens
of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can
imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.
My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling,
and profound. If it doesn’t meet this criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a
generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors
just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site.
My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.
Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a
potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press,
which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar
via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be
posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in
2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote
speaker.
I’m also using the popularity of this blog to setup interviews with people I’ve always
wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my
audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with
multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other
interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so
much free exposure.
Motivation
I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to
be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that
matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and
easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings.
That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire
is still there with or without the money.
What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?
Blogging lifestyle
Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work
from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is
quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal
growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.
Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet.
But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.
