BLOG$ FROM BLOGS

Jane Chin’s Reality Check on Blogging for Money or “Problogging”

How to Get Rich Quick Blogging

Let’s immediately get off on the wrong foot:

You Probably Will Not “Get Rich Quick” with Problogging.

Of course, this all depends on how you define “rich” and “quick.”

If you haven’t defined what these terms mean for you, now is a good time to answer these questions.

“For me, a ‘rich’ amount of money is at least $ _______ in _______ (what form?).”

“‘Quick’ means I spend at most ________ (amount of time) earning the above amount.”

Here are a couple of examples:

“For me, a ‘rich’ amount of money is at least $2.5 million in total net worth.”

“‘Quick’ means I spend at most 5 years earning at least $2.5 million.”

or,

“For me, a ‘rich’ amount of money is at least $10,000 cash income in the bank per month.”

“‘Quick’ means I spend at most 2 years earning at least $10,000 cash income per month.”

Once you define your answers, you may want to ask if blogging is a viable approach to achieve your goals.

How would blogging for money compare to other “traditional” forms of generating income?

For example:

Getting a second job
Going back to school to learn a marketable skill
Aiming for a promotion in your current job
Getting a new, higher paying job
Changing you career
Starting your own business

The truth is, blogging for money is not unlike getting a second job, investing resources to learn how to blog for money, and starting your own business.

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How Much Money Can My Blog Make?

A first question you may ask about starting any business - including a full time or part time blog based business - is, “How much money will I make?” You’re going to see the answer coming: “It depends.” It depends, and not always only on website traffic.

My opinion is that sustained viability of a revenue-generating blog depends entirely on content. This is a strong statement, and I will expand on this rationale in a separate post.

How to Make 19 Cents

“For every cash building blogger there’s a Jane Chin (www.janechin.com), who reports earning 19 cents in the initial months of her blogging “experiment” (her word).” David Garrett wrote in his “Can Problogging Build your Bottom Line?” in November 2006 issue of Certification Magazine.

David was referring to a post I had written in March of 2006 when I participated in a “network blog” as a contributing blogger. David’s article is important because it helps people know that problogging isn’t as easy as people seem to think it is.

I do want to clarify that 19 cents actually came from my participation on the online “blogging network”. Given that was the first month’s performance on a new “channel” at a new network blog portal, I was disappointed but not surprised.

Perhaps I’d have done better if I stuck it out, writing short cancer commentaries for the blogging network. But I only go for quotas that I set for myself. I blog every day, but not in the same blog, and certainly not only in one subject. I joined knowing full well that it would be a test run. I also made this clear to the channel editor who recruited me. When I quit after a month, neither of us was surprised.

I did much better on my own blogs - free of any network blogging affiliation, and actually now earn over $500 a month on my own blogs, and blogging part time. Blogging is something I already enjoy, but I’m still looking at the viability of the “earning” of problogging.

How My Blogs Began to Earn $500/Month

I started putting contextual ads on 10 of my websites in May of 2006. Two of these sites are true “blogs” that are periodically updated, even though the other sites use a blogging backend (Wordpress). I don’t consider any of these “high traffic.” In fact, I’d be happy if I get 50 unique hits a day. I purposely created my sites in narrow (”niche”) topical content areas.

When I first put up ad codes on these websites in May 2006, the sites earned about $80 that first month. As of December 1, 2006, my blogs and sites (now over 40 sites) was earning over $700 a month. The graph used to make this website’s title graphic comes from actual numbers I ran on my websites that display text ads, as well as affiliate sales and paid reviews.

This graph represents the first 7 months of monetizing websites and blogs, and doing this on a part-time or semi-professional basis.

Probloggers Warn Blogging Won’t Get You Rich Quick

Popular problogging website Problogger.net has a post about how much money a blog may earn. Darren Rouse is quick to point out that problogging is not a get rich quick scheme, and even as he claims to have purchased a house from Google Adsense earnings, he emphasizes that his blogging income comes from at least 20 blogs. Now that Darren and colleagues have founded a network blog company called b5media, I am sure that Darren makes a very comfortable 6-figure income as a true professional blogger or problogger.

I’m more impressed with Steve Pavlina, who claims to make over $1000 a day from his personal development website, because this is earnings based on one blog. Steve has written an extremely long, 7000+ word article on monetizing his blog. The earnings result he reported on his blog is after 2 years of his site coming online.

Citations
How much money can a blog earn?

Problogging is not a get rich quick scheme

How to make money from your blog

What I use on almost all of my blogs: Wordpress

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Do Ads Cheapen Your Blogs?

You can monetize all kinds of blogs. Whether you do monetize a blog, and how you monetize your blog, depends on your comfort level with displaying ad codes on your websites. This get us into the “psychology of blogging.”

There are bloggers who are very uncomfortable displaying advertisements on their blogs.

These bloggers come from one or more of these positions:

They are already making a lot of money elsewhere
They view monetizing blogs as “selling out” or degrading the quality of their work
They don’t see a need or interest in monetizing their blogs
They are concerned about annoying blog visitors with ads

These are all very legitimate reasons.

I don’t have a problem with blogs that remain staunchly ad-free, or with blogs that are clearly formatted to generate revenue for the blogger. I do have a problem with people who openly criticize all who monetize blogs because they chose not do to so. A popular marketing consultant thumbs his nose at ad-displaying blogs, yet uses his blog to promote all of his books. He gets away with it because he is linked throughout the blogosphere, and makes a lot of money from books and speaking engagements. Monetizing his blog would end up diluting his book-marketing efforts - not to mention display of competitive ads on his website.

Just because monetizing blogs isn’t his strategy doesn’t mean you need to buy into the idea that monetizing your blog somehow “cheapens” your content. When I’m adding value to the blogosphere, I expect to add value to my life as well. I don’t need to apologize for or feel bad about getting a return for my laborious time and resource investment to share information.

Blogs can be a nice source of supplemental income for many of us.

I started monetizing my blogs for a practical purpose: I wanted enough to cover our monthly utilities. If my blogs generated at least enough to cover our gas, electricity, water, and telephone expenses, I can free up that part of my mind for other creative pursuits.

Whether you choose to make money from your blogs - or through any other means - should be entirely up to your own motivation. If you already love to write and blog, then putting ad codes on your website will not bother most people. We are already used to seeing ads on most websites.

What about the notion that putting ads on your blog degrades the quality of your blog?

Here’s the cold truth: the quality of your blog deteriorates when you publish crap content, not only because you’ve put up an ad on your blog.

If you deduce that monetizing your blog with ads had eroded your site traffic, then you want to examine all the potential causes of this happening.

Is your content lukewarm to begin with, and your ads have increased the readability barrier of your posts?

Are your ads so intrusive that readers click off because it takes too long to get to your content? (I’ve done this for major news content websites that force me to wait through video ads)

Are your ads so confusing that readers leave because they are confused by how to get to your content?

The concern about “annoying visitors” with ads is valid; some text ads are less intrusive than others. I find pop-up ads or ads that take up entire pages and ads that prompt you to “click here to skip this ad” the most annoying. This is why you won’t see me choosing AdBrite’s “interstitial ad” option: interstitial ads are splashed across the entire site before readers can access content.

The bottom line:Don’t apologize about how you choose to generate value for yourself from sharing value with the rest of the world. While we’re at it, stop hanging out with people who make you feel bad about asking for value when you give value.

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Stay Away from Splogging and Fake Blogs

When monetization of blogs began proliferating all over the web, many people decided that they could cash in on fake blogs.

Splogs are blogs that have fake content and even stolen content.

I know, because I’ve seen some of my blog posts copied and pasted on splogs. Of course, there’s usually no contact information to be found for me to ask that my content be removed.

Why do splogs exist? To make money from Adsense. I’m specifying Adsense since most other text-link ad providers have some type of selection criteria to accept a blog within their publishers’ network. Only some of my blogs get accepted to these text-link ad providers, but all of my blogs can run Adsense within minutes.

When you decide to make money from blogging, you have to make a few decisions that can shape the direction of your blogging:

The first decision, of course, is that you want to make money from blogging. You may want to blog full time, or in my case, part time.

The second decision is what you’ll be writing about, which you probably already have an idea before you even read this article. A corollary to this second decision is how often you need to write. Posting frequency is more about your blogging strategy than just “getting a lot of traffic” and I’ll cover this in another article.

The third decision is how many blogs you want to write. This will affect your posting frequency for each blog.

Many people prefer to dedicate themselves to writing one blog, and really invest themselves in cultivating this one blog. This is a good decision. A few people may choose to write multiple blogs. Multiblog bloggers may want to increase their chances of making money across more than one website or because they have many interests they want to write about.

I am a “multiblog blogger.” I chose to be a multiblog blogger because I have some interest in many things. If I only kept one or two blogs, I may be blogging “off topic” too often. If I started writing about healthcare issues on a website where my readers came to read about careers, success, and life purpose - well - they’ll get annoyed very soon.

There are at least two dangers of being a multiblog blogger.

Danger #1: You can dilute your efforts across too many blogs.

You may not get enough critical mass built for any one of your list of blogs unless you offer something unique enough on each to keep visitors coming back. I definitely run into this danger, because my interests may change, and because I tend to write long articles that are time-consuming. If you do a quick count of my blog list, you’re only seeing a fraction of the domains I’ve actually developed. I’m still deciding what I’d do with the other hundred domain names.

Danger #2: You may end up creating splogs.

Let’s say one of your blogs do well in generating ad revenues, and you say, “this is a good thing, why not make more of it?” Here is where splogs can happen, although most of the time bona fide bloggers don’t deliberately create splogs. Most splogs come from people who don’t care about sharing valuable information at all - only about replicating websites and falsely bloat up their rankings on search engines.

The truth is splogs have become big business in further enabling splogs. There are individuals who want to sell you “Adsense Templates” that come supplied with generic articles so you can get a splog - or ten - running in minutes. A newsletter that I subscribe to recently had an “affiliate advertisement” on some free templates available. I downloaded four over the weekend, uploaded them, and assigned an Adsense code to them to see how well they’d do. So far (and almost one year later), nothing. Zero. $0.00 Earnings! This means if I had paid this company money to gain access to more of their templates, I’d be making multiples of zero dollars. Maybe the real money to be made here is selling YOU pre-made Adsense templates.

If you’re even reading this article, chances are you have a genuine interest in value exchange. You have valuable information you want to share, and you would like to generate some revenue in exchange for your value creation. Splogs may stick around, but visitors are smart enough to click off a fake blog site, and it may be a matter of time before value run out for fake bloggers.

Related: UK Guardian talks about cashing in on fake blogs.

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All Good Domain Names Are Gone

If you are looking to earn money with your blog, I would say domain names are important, but not as important as domains have been made out to be.

If you’ve been blogging under a “vanity domain name” - that is - your own name as the domain name, you may wonder if you should register a more descriptive domain name.

The problem is, all the “good” domain names may have been taken, so you’ve read or been told.

Now, when I register for a new domain name, I almost always expect it to be taken. That a domain name was not yet taken is a bigger surprise to me than if it was.

Getting good domain names used to be about timing. You’re gambling on someone else not thinking up the name you planned to use. I’m not surprised that domainologist Dennis Forbes used the word “bubble” to describe the emerging domaining business.

Many domainers see domains as virtual real estate, and are getting into the domaining business hoping to make a quick buck flipping the domain real estate. Some veterans have made millions in the domaining game. My brother had recently entered the domaining business, and spoke of buying tens of thousands of domains the same way a commercial real estate investor talked about purchasing investment properties.

Way back in the mid-1990s I really wanted to get my name as a vanity domain (www.jane.com - I’d link to this but the link doesn’t go to a live website). Unfortunately I was a few months too late; that domain is booked through year 2012, and I suspect, beyond. That was when registering domains cost over $100. Happily, I did get my full name domain (www.janechin.com), which I currently use for one of my blogs.

With domain names becoming a commodity, registering domains now costs less than $10 per year. The intellectual property behind this commodity is what is giving domain names their value. Sure, snappy domains may have all been taken, and some are parked as nothing more than a page of ads.

I believe, as Dennis Forbes believes, that snappy domain names have been helpful, but the value would not ride high forever. Shorter domain names will yield to descriptive domain names. This means combinations of phrases will be just as valuable, and even still available.

Technology will also help equalize the power that domain names can hold over your blogs. If a reader comes upon your blog and becomes intrigued by what you write, he or she can simply subscribe to your blog and access it from a feed reader, instead of having to remember your domain name or bookmarking it to revisit. Right now I use Google Reader and subscribe to the blogs that I visit regularly. I access all the feeds on one page.

We still have room for registering some catchy phrases. Some of the descriptive domain names I’ve registered:

A Patient’s Perspective
Live Your Inspiration
Backstabbing Coworkers
Back to the Nest
Drink Fiber
Targeting Tumors
Parents in Debt

You can already get an idea of the theme or focus of the content based on the descriptive domain name.

Here’s to your creative mind to nabbing your desired domain names!

Citations
Have all the good domain names been taken?

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Beyond Adsense - Part 1 of 2

Up Front Disclosure: I’m using referral links to discuss the products in this entry, since I have personal experience using each of them and can therefore speak intelligently to the pros and cons. If you want to sign up for any of these products, I appreciate you using the referral link, and I may get credit for it

I love Adsense because it’s contextual, which means Google tailors the served as based on your blog content. It’s as simple as “copying and pasting”.

But let’s face it - Adsense does not perform for everybody, and over time you may get “Adsense Poop Out”, as I’ve seen on my blogs. What I mean by “Adsense Poop Out” is that your Adsense earnings begin to wane over time. Maybe my readers have gotten used to the ads and have become blind to them. Maybe Google’s ever-changing algorithms have made it more difficult for blogs to earn at the same level as before. Maybe my websites aren’t as optimally configured to earn as they should be.

Whatever the reason, I’ve been looking at other ways to monetize my websites beyond Google Adsense. In this two-part article series, I’ll share with you ways I’ve found useful to additionally monetize blogs and you may find that these can work well for you.

Text Link Ads (TLA)
TLA has worked well for me, and can be a good source of text-link based income for you - provided that your blog / website gets accepted. It automatically calculates the rate of advertising based on your blog’s popularity, and splits the ad fee 50/50 with you. If someone buys a $20 link on your website, you get $10 and TLA gets $10.

Pros Minimal administration, passive, multiple blogs per account.

Cons Maybe tough to get site approved if your site is too new or does not have enough content.

ReviewMe (RM) (No Referral Link; Donate to Jane’s Tip Jar)
I admit, when RM first came out, I thought it was a great way to earn extra revenue by doing something I was already doing anyway (blogging). I learned of RM through TLA - the two companies are probably related - signed up immediately, and added my maximum allowable limit of 6 blogs/account. I was quite active for the first couple of months, and earned almost $500… then I realized how much work writing reviews was. Of course, you can just do the 200 word “minimum”, but I spend time visiting the websites, composing my review, and aim to write constructively and objectively. Translation: lots of time spent for a small return than the value of my time was worth. RM, like TLA splits revenue with you 50/50.

Pros Minimal administration, paid review, multiple blogs per account, set your own pricing.

Cons Maybe tough to get site approved, 6 site maximum/account, more work than I intended to earn a couple of hundred bucks a month, have to wait for review opportunity otherwise sign up for cheapo $5 review opportunities (not worth the time in my opinion).

AdBrite
AdBrite is a bit like Google Adsense in that you sign up for an account, create “ad zones” for your websites, and insert the code into your web pages. You can even set your own pricing and use their smart revenue tool to insert Google Adsense instead of Adbrite if the Adsense ad paid more. However, I haven’t really seen good performance from Adbrite as I’ve seen from Adsense, and creating and updating those ad zones are a pain in the butt.

Pros Multiple blogs per account, set your pricing, set payment threshold (unlike Google you don’t need to earn over a certain $ to get paid).

Cons Ad zones a pain to set up and update, earning performance less stellar than Adsense (at least in my case).

If you’ve used these services, please let me know your experiences.

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Beyond Adsense - Part 2 of 2

This is a continuation of my previous article to look beyond Adsense ads to supplement your blog revenue. In the first article, I looked at Text-Link Ads, ReviewMe, and Adbrite. In this article, I’ll be covering Widgetbucks and AuctionAds. I have a private invite to ShoppingAds but at this time it’s too soon to tell the results with ShoppingAds.

WidgetBucks
You get a $25 sign-on bonus with WidgetBucks, so at least for the first month you’re guaranteed $25. That said, your site needs to generate a total of $50 or more to get paid. Payment terms are 45 days from meeting accrual requirement of $50, like Adbrite, which I find too long: would any of the folks running these site agree to wait 45 days to get their paycheck, or wait 45 days for their advertisers to fork over the money? I think not. At least AdBrite doesn’t have a minimum payment amount.

Pros Minimal administration, passive, multiple blogs per account.

Cons Not as many ad layout options as Adsense, Adbrite, or AuctionAds. Long payment terms (45 days) with high minimum payment ($50 minimum). Product selection seems limited.

AuctionAds
AuctionAds did well for me on one of my high traffic sites, but only for the first few months. Afterwards, site readers seemed to experience “Auction Fatigue” and I saw revenue drop significantly past the first few months even when the ad placements and keywords remained the same. I also suspect that keyword selection has something to do with it, since your readers won’t click through to bid if they aren’t interested in the items displayed. There is a $50 minimum for payout, but at least you get paid directly through your payment account and there’s no 45 day wait.

Pros Minimal administration, passive, multiple blogs per account. Immediate payment via Paypal account if meets minimum accrual of $50.

Cons . High minimum payment ($50 minimum). Auction keyword targeting may affect display result and therefore click-through rates by readership. Readers may experience auction ad fatigue similar to google adsense text ad fatigue and become blind to the ads.

Conclusion
At the time of this writing I’m almost exclusively using Text-Link Ads and Google Adsense for my content-heavy blogs that are focused on niche topics. I reserve Widgetbucks for a small handful (3) of my blogs, and AuctionAds for one highly-trafficked website (not a blog). I keep a small AuctionAd on this blog, but it’s more for experimentation than revenue generation.

Recently I was asked by a business-oriented social networking site to serve as an expert commentator, and by posting every other day (on average, and the posts need not be long at all), I was paid $500. That’s been a reasonable deal for my time, so I’ll continue to do this as long as they continue or increase the compensation rate.

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Monetizing Blogs One Year Later

Here’s our blog-based revenues from January 2007 through September 2007: $13,871.69.

This earning includes revenues from:

Google Adsense
Text-Link Ads
AdBrite Text Ads
ReviewMe Review Payouts
AuctionAds
Affiliate Sales
Direct Website Sponsorship

I’m not discounting this earning. When we first started allowing text ads on our websites and blogs, our ambition was to earn at least $500 per month to cover the utility bill and basic domain registration/hosting fees. We’ve met this goal. Our new aim is to cover the mortgage. Considering that we live in Southern California and bought our house during a seller’s market, you can guess that the mortgage is not insignificant.

From Utility Bills to the Mortgage

In light of our new aim, my blogging strategy needs to change. I’m still figuring out what my strategy needs to be to meet the trends I observed from our own websites. Based on the general trends of blogging for money over this past year, I think many of you bloggers out there may want to remain vigilant on your blogging revenue and blogging strategy.

Unless you are one of the group of known bloggers who have already gained an audience or you are already famous and blogging is just a way to sell your books or speaking engagements - you have way more competition than ever before.

You are competing with people who are willing to earn the minimum wage, where they spend up to an hour writing a review for less than $10. (i.e. Pay Per View or ReviewMe or LoudLaunch)

You are competing with people whose tactic is earn-by-volume, and they can buy 100 domain names pre-populated with ad templates and stock articles. (i.e. splogs or fake blogs)

Why Blogging Revenues Are Hard to Make

When a website format or category appears successful, it becomes saturated very quickly. People start copying the website idea with similar content articles and even similar blog appearance. Separating wheat from chaff is not difficult, but it drains time. I find myself tuning into how I “feel” about a website content within seconds of looking at the material, and assess whether there is an original thought behind the writing. Blog readers have learned this, as well. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like a blogger cares very much about the writing itself, only that it needed to be written so that the blog smells fresh. Other times a blogger has taken an idea seen elsewhere and duplicated it, with a paraphrase here or a new example there.

It is in this vein that I’m examining why I blog, and if blogging is part of your long term revenue strategy, you will want to periodically reassess why you blog.

I have given enough time in this blogging experiment to know where my preferences are, including how I want to earn money. Truthfully, blogging can only be a minuscule supplement to my household income, for what feels like a heck of a lot of work.

I think blogging as self expression is a great idea, and one I’ve come to love and will continue to use for years to come. I also would rather have too many blogs to choose from than not enough blogs to wade through. For the time being, I’ve got many other interests (comedy improv, public speaking, integral philosophy, art) in addition to my businesses competing for my time, and I prefer to spend my time experiencing and enjoying life - not blogging for blogging’s sake.

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