Making money on a blog

Many ways to make money on a blog

But does it actually work? Well. After two months of experimenting, I can say with all honesty, that yes, yes it does indeed work. Will it make you rich? No, it sure won’t. Not unless you’re really good, or have a good amount of time to dedicate to it.

Granted I haven’t been staying on top of rule #1 of blogging, which is to update frequently, I still get a decent amount of traffic even if I’m not getting any kind of payout. I’ll be honest here, I really didn’t think this website was going to make me any money, and it was really more of something to kill my time at work while I had some down time.

Waste my spare time blogging at home? You can’t be serious. That’s my off time.

I’ve made a few bucks since I started this site, but it’s barely enough to pay for the domain. I definitely won’t be making enough to pay for the host unless by some miracle this blog goes viral and everyone on the internet runs across it.

I’ve made back links.

I’ve tweeted.

I’ve registered with blog sites and forums.

I’ve run Google Adwords.

I’ve done just about everything that anybody on the internet can try for themselves by Googling millions of websites to try to figure out how to make money on the internet, by blogging, youtubing, selling shit, ebay, craigslist, goddamn you name it and there are litterally into millions of pages of websites on the internet.

So don’t do what I did. Don’t try to blog about making money on the internet. Don’t blog about making money on a blog. Don’t blog unless you’re planning on blogging about something useful.

Do your research.

Keywords are important.

A niche that doesn’t include millions of websites is important.

Find something unique and stick with it.

The more unique, the more likely you’ll be viewed from the search engines.

The more often you update, the more you’ll be indexed, and the better your page rank will be. (I’m still a # 0 on Google, but I’ve increased my overall rank from nearly 15 million to just under 7 million!)

Just remember in the back of your mind, that you aren’t in it to make money, you’re in it to give people useful information. My biggest fault, is that the information is already there, I just condensed it, and tried it all myself.

Follow these things and yes, you’ll make money, but how much you make is up to you and the amount of time you’re willing to dedicate to your website, blog, store, ebay, craigslist, whatever.

Good Luck, I’m sure I’ll check back here from time to time and may even write some more articles although I doubt they’ll be on making money on a blog.

Google Adwords

It’s been awhile since I’ve touched on anything, and my stats are definitely showing it. It’s getting to the point where I’ve tried a good amount of things so my post count per week is slowly going to get lower and lower as I run out of money making tricks. With this topic, there are only so many things that you can do. I’ve done just about all of them. From Keyword research, to search engine optimization, to ad types, to social media marketing, there isn’t much left.

So I think my last topic before I write my final few posts is going to be to touch on Google Adwords. We’ve all seen the ads. Free 75 dollars in advertising for trying out Google Adwords. It’s a great way to get you try it out. It’s also a great way to bleed your wallet dry if you aren’t paying attention to it.

I decided to give the free advertising a run so I signed up with Adwords at the beginning of the month and let it run for about fifteen days. In those fifteen days, and using over one hundred keywords, I racked up close to 25,000 impressions, and a whole 66 clicks. $44.00 dollars worth of advertising later, I’ve suspended my campaign and saving the rest of my free money for later.

First thing first. I like the setup. They make it really easy to set-up your campaign. In fact, you can even call customer service toll free, and for no charge, to get your first campaign setup. You have the options of a text ad, or a visual ad. You can determine how much per day you are willing to spend for advertising, and you can even set a bid price to compete for ad space. Of course the higher your bid amount, the better chances of exposure you have.

What I don’t like is the fact that regardless of whether you’re getting hits or not. Google Adwords will charge you $50.00 every thirty days regardless of if you’ve racked up that much in clicks or not.

Here’s the way it works.

Your ad has a chance of getting shown when people search your keywords, or someone is using Google Adsense and your ad matches that genre. Every time someone clicks on your ad, Google charges you a certain amount based on your bid pricing and your max amount per day. Once you’ve racked up $50.00 dollars in clicks from your ad, Google will charge your credit or debit card. If you don’t hit $50.00 in clicks within thirty days, they will still charge you $50.00.

Writer’s Note: I was totally wrong on that 50 or 30 days. Adwords will only charge you 50.00 or whatever you spend within that 30 days. So if you only spend 3 dollars, you only pay 3 dollars.

I’m still within my first thirty days as well I still have some money in my beginning credit saved up. At this point I’ve suspended my campaign before it hit $50.00 to see if they still charge me. They shouldn’t since I don’t have a running campaign and I also still have credit available, but we’ll see. I’ve been hit with enough charges on shit I didn’t use before, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google was just one more person doing the same thing.

Unfortunately for me, my blog is still new. It probably doesn’t quite have the appeal that people want, or the information that people are looking for. My bounce rate during this time from the search engines was close to 80%. While I had some people sticking around, a big chunk of those 66 people didn’t stick around long, but with 25,000 impressions, you’d have expected many more people clicking.

The real down fall to this, is that Google Adwords isn’t that great for a beginning site unless you’re actually selling something. If you’re relying completely on ad revenue (such as on a blog) you better be somewhat established, otherwise it’s all money out, and not much money in. I can see it really easy to rack up two hundred or three hundred dollars in a month on advertising, so be prepared to spend the money if you want to drive that traffic to your site.

If all you’re looking for is pure advertising, then Google Adwords works well. If you have a monthly budget, I’d say use it. If you’re just looking for traffic to come your way, it seems to work, but I’d also imagine that depends on your niche. There are tools within Adwords that can give you ideas, but you have to take the time to learn them to make use of them.

All in All, it can’t hurt to try it for free, just make sure you keep an eye on it in the first couple of days to adjust your spending and make sure you don’t burn up the entire 75 in the first day.

Making money blogging, which ad system to use

One of the biggest decisions people are going to have to make while trying to make money on a blog is which ad type and unit to use.  There are so many options, it can get confusing. Obviously the biggest ad program out there, is Google Adsense. Google Adsense is by far the biggest player out there. The ads are well targeted based on your content, and they provide many different methods of creation for types of ads, colors, backgrounds, and tracking. Unfortunately, with Google Adsense, you are not only at the mercy of your readers, you are also at the mercy of Google.

Google Adsense works by reading your content and then showing ads based on the relevance of your content. Looking around my site, you might see a lot of Google Adword and adsense ads. Well, obviously that’s because my site is based on making money on a blog. Google wants to show you resources that will help you make money. If you are building a blog based on pretty little ponies, I have to imagine you’d get a lot of horse, pony, and feed type ads.

From what I’ve seen, and have used with Adsense, they are pretty much on the mark based on your content. I helped build a blog for a friend of ours that was fighting epilepsy, so that she could chronicle her battle and whatnot. We placed Adsense on there to help raise money for her medical bills and her family. The ads themselves were very well targeted towards epilepsy patients and people who fight that battle on a daily basis.

Another type of ad system that I’ve run across is CPM (Click per Mille or Thousand) This system allows you to make money based on ad impressions, instead of ad clicks. Unfortunately for most new bloggers, these systems are a little harder to get into. Most, if not all, have some sort of traffic requirement. If you aren’t bringing in any traffic yet, then you can just about forget these, especially since you’re only making money for every thousand impressions. If you’re only getting 5-10 views per day, it’s going to take you a long time to make any money.

One CPM agency that I found that does not require a traffic minimum, is Context Web. While there really isn’t much for customizing, it’s easier to get approved then Google Adsense is. One other great aspect is that you can set your CPM price. This allows you to play a bit with what works for which pages and settings. If your requested CPM can’t be met, then Context Web also allows you set a backup ad from another company. I’m not sure how many options there are because it’s limited right now, but Google Adsense is one. So if your CPM can’t be met, it will display an Adsense ad instead.

The only other problem I’ve found with CPM, besides needing lots of traffic to make any money, is that you need a low bounce rate. The bounce rate is important here, because even if you are getting traffic to your site, the ad impressions won’t have time to load which will automatically default to your backup ads. Since the backup ads are generally going to be CPC, you aren’t going to make any money. Low bounce rate = higher paid impressions. (although I’m also pretty sure, but haven’t tested, that ad blockers also force backup ads to show since the CPM impressions technically can’t be viewed)

If you aren’t paying attention to your bounce rate, I suggest you start now. Google Analytics works well to keep tabs on this, and if you aren’t set up, please go get setup on it. I try to review my traffic daily so I know where and when I need to make changes. Also, if you’re using any site that is a type of traffic exchange or point per click, stop now. You might think that you’re getting more traffic, but in all reality, your bounce rate is going to be as high as 99%. Ask me how I know? Adsense also doesn’t appear to like those kinds of tactics and you could in essence, get banned for using those kinds of sites to bring traffic to your website.

All in all, it really depends on what type of niche site you have. What kind of traffic you bring. And how you manage your ads. There are a lot of ways to make money blogging and I’m still trying to figure them out. I know there are other ad programs, and as I find them, and try them, I’ll update on which ones have worked the best. This is still a learning process for me, but the amount of research I’ve put in so far has made a huge difference over two months ago. Hopefully this blog will eventually save someone the same two months of research.

Keyword Research

So one of the things I’ve touched bases on earlier was keyword research. You have absolutely no idea how important this, and neither did I, until I started seeing the search engines hits I was getting from one of the posts I made on this blog. See, I’ve been so enthralled with getting as much traffic as possible, I’ve completely overlooked the most important thing with blogging. Good content, and useful keywords.

By using the right keywords in your titles and your posts, you can easily be number one on a Google search. I haven’t quit hit number one, but I have hit number four, and number sixteen with certain search keywords. I’ve only been doing this for a little over a month and my native Google hits are been slim, but the more I do this, the better it starts to look to me.

Before working with certain keywords, you should search around for them. See what kind of websites come up. How do they fit in your niche? Can you beat the content that already comes up on those sites? Or are you haphazardly repeating the exact same thing that has already been said before?

Know what you’re planning on writing and make sure you incorporate those keywords into your blog posting. The search engine robots index these words, and figure out how to incorporate them into the search engines in the most efficient way, so be efficient, but don’t over do it.

Making money on a blog isn’t always about your content, but the research and the effort you’re willing to put into your blog. Keywords are a big part of that research so make sure you’ve done your homework. If you are running advertising through Google Adwords, they have some great tools that give you access to keywords and their monthly search statistics and what kind of competition you’re up against.

For Instance – “Making money on a blog” gets searched roughly 74,000 times, but “Make Money” and “how to make money” get searched over 5,000,000 times per month. Yes, that’s Five Million times per month, but keep in mind the amount of competition you’re going to have in those websites that have anything to do with “how to make money”. “Making money on a blog” might not get searched as often, but it’s more niche, so there aren’t quite as many websites which should help reduce your competition.

So keep in mind, that the keywords that get searched more often, aren’t necessarily the best keywords to be using. Sometimes less traffic is better because you’ll have more targeted and better quality traffic. Smaller and more quality traffic means that the ads you are running on your website (which should go with your niche) are probably paying more because they aren’t getting as many hits.

Here’s a few sites that should get you started:

Google – Obviously Google is your top priority. Search those keywords and see what kind of results you get.

Keyword Research Tips

I was going to include more sites, but it appears that most of them are software trials and tribulations. I’ll leave those up to you because a) I’m not paying for software and b) I’m not going to promote anything I haven’t tried yet. Maybe soon, we’ll see how my own keyword research goes.

Get rich quick? Probably not

Throughout my research on this, I’ve seen one thing over and over again that kind of pisses me off. With the exception of one website, everyone seems to focus on getting rich quick using ads. Google‘s Adsense is by far the biggest ad program out there, but what most people don’t understand, is that just because you have ads on your site, does not mean you’re going to get rich quick.

I have ads. I’ve barely made any money, and I thank the few that have actually clicked on the ads. By far, I’ve actually made more money using CPM ads, which rely on page impressions instead of click through. Unfortunately, this not only requires web traffic, it also requires good web traffic and low bounce rates to be of any use.

Anybody can slap a few ads on a website and make money off it. The degree to how quickly you make that money, depends on how popular you can get your website. Is my site popular? Nope. I barely show up on the search engines within the first 20 pages of results. My site is new, and until I’ve become established, I’m still nobody.

I started writing this blog as means to make money on the internet. I have a regular job that I work at, and I doubt I’ll ever make enough money off this particular blog to quit that job. The people who make a ton of money blogging, are the ones that spend eight hours a day blogging. Me? I’ll spend about two to three hours between submission sites, blog carnivals, and writing posts.

Making money on a blog is my pet project. Eventually, this will be complete and I’ll never write another post on it. Once it’s complete, I’ll start a new project, and concentrate all my energy on that one to make money. Eventually, I’m hoping this blog makes me money randomly, but the real key is updated content.

Without updated content, you’ll never keep your readers coming back. They’ll get bored, and you’ll fall into the abyss of archived websites on Google. Granted you’ll still get dug up once in awhile, and your footprint will always exist, but you’ll slowly but surely be buried by the new sites that are doing exactly what you’re doing.

You want to make money on a blog? Stick with it, keep your posts updated and your readers coming back. Keep the content fresh and use your keywords wisely. Making money on a blog isn’t easy, and this post is just as much a pep talk to myself as it is to anybody out there trying the same thing as I am. It will happen eventually, it just takes awhile.

Twitter as a marketing tool

As I continue to embark on my quest for riches, I’ve been working on my twitter followers. I’m up around 300 or so, but I couldn’t tell you how many are actually following me, and how many were automatic followers.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about using Twitter as a social media marketing tool, is the fact that it’s more of a popularity contest then a viable marketing tool.

I see so many sites floating around that promise to increase your Twitter followers, but to what degree? You can follow up to something like a thousand people per day (I think that’s what Twitter’s terms are) and even if you get every single one of those to follow back, how are you going to convey your message out to those thousand following you if they’re also following a thousand other people? Are you going to get lumped into a list that just has random people? Or are you going to make it into that list that’s actually looked at daily.

What’s going to make you stand out above and beyond those other thousand people to make those Twitter followers click your link and read your posts?

In comparison, and a lot of this could just be the fact I haven’t really changed my Twitter account over to the new one yet, I opened up a new Facebook page with the right keywords. I started my own page for people to like on. And I’ve gotten more traffic from that Facebook page, then I have directly from Twitter and my Twitter account has more followers, and has been around much longer.

The new Twitter account has the right keywords and descriptions, so maybe that will be the difference. I’m still going to add everyone for follow backs. I’m still going to have a bunch of random people I don’t really care about. And I’m still going to use those sites that promise you Twitter followers fast.

Remember, this is an experiment, and if I didn’t try it at least twice, what good would that information do you? Check my contacts page for my Facebook and Twitter accounts if you’d like to follow me for real.

Driving Website Traffic – Things that don’t work well

In my never ending search to drive more traffic to this website, I’ve found a method I thought I should warn the newbies about. I’m trying everything, and unfortunately, this is probably one of the negatives.

Since traffic should = revenue, we want people to stay when they come to our site. Bounce rate is extremely important, especially when using CPM ads instead of CPC ads (more on the types of ads later) What I’ve found, is that the higher your bounce rate is, the less likely you are to get actual page impressions. It doesn’t matter how many links you have to your site, if someone is clicking on it, then immediately bouncing away without reading the content, it’s really not worth the effort you put in to get your link on that site.

So beware of the sites that offer points per click. Essentially you are given points for clicking on another website in a list. The more websites you click, the more points you get. The more points you have, the more you can offer for people to click on your website. However, the double edged sword here is that 99% of the time, people are only clicking on your site to get more points for themselves. This means, they click your site, get their points, close your site without even once looking at the content.

This isn’t the kind of traffic you want, or need. If you honestly have to resort to these tactics to drive traffic to your site, you’re either too impatient, lazy, or expecting immediate gratification. You want quality traffic. You want search engine traffic. You want traffic to be given to you from links because of your content, not just because you have the most points in the que right now. You want people to stick around and enjoy your read, check out the rest of your site, and hopefully, click on an ad or two because it pertains to what you’re talking about.

In the last week, I’ve gotten 500 hits from one website. My bounce rate is 95%. The average time on my blog, less than 30 seconds. The only thing good coming from this is that I might get lucky and find someone in my niche that decides to stick around and see what else I have to say. Otherwise, I see this as a complete failure of a test.

Unfortunately the old saying is true. “You get what you pay for”, and truly trying to drive traffic to your site using this type of method is honestly not worth it. If you must get desperate, lazy, or expect instant gratification, then do it right. Go through the proper advertising channels. Use your free 75 dollars for adwords (I haven’t tried this yet, but I figure I will at some point for the fun of it) Then make the determination for yourself whether or not it’s truly worth it. For me, it’s just not.

I also just wanted to add on. I got a virus from hitting some page because all I cared about was getting more points, to get more hits. Get your virus definitions updated, it’s not a pretty thing.

Search Engine Optimizing Tips

Search Engine Optimizing. What is it and how does it help?

Simply put, you want your website to be the highest rank in a search engine. If you aren’t showing up in search results, you aren’t getting hits, which means you aren’t getting revenue. You want your site to be a higher rank then the millions of other sites that have the exact same content as yours.

Just as a fact, I’m a Google Rank 0. I’m a nobody in the scheme of things. You look up “making money on a blog” and I don’t even exist in the first 50 pages or results (I gave up after 50) There’s literally thousands of websites that have some sort of information on making money on a blog and I’m just one more person competing.

I think the biggest difference I have over the other sites, is I’m not telling you how to make money, I’m trying to find out if it’s even possible. This gives me an edge up on the competition, but it’s also such a drawn out subject that I need to make mine stand out that much more. I have original content, but how do I get it out there?

SEO is the process of getting your website seen, and in the process bring traffic back to your website.

Here’s some tips and tricks on gaining page rank, and hopefully gain some pages on the search engines:

Keyword research – Most search engines index your website by the amount of keywords written in your pages. The words that you write are the words that will drive your website. Repeating certain keywords while developing your articles will help drive the relevance of your site in the search engines. You can also edit your Meta tags if you know any html. This helps the search engines get your key words without having to index your pages.

Here’s a handy plugin for anybody that isn’t somewhat efficient in coding html:

Add Meta Tags to WordPress

Linking – Search Engines love websites that have links leading to them. The more links you have, the more often you’ll get seen. It shows that you are a known website and that you are worth linking to, which can mean a higher rank because why would someone link to you if your information wasn’t good enough to look at.

You can do this a number of ways. You can leave comments other blogs, but make sure you actually leave a real comment, otherwise you’ll look like a spammer and your link won’t get approved. Use your website as your signature on forums. Every time you join in on a conversation and leave a reply, your signature gets stored and becomes a back link. Make your blog worth coming back to and not only will other people link to you, they’ll also make sure that their audience knows about you, which will provide more back links.

Although these require some effort, don’t skimp out. Don’t use the websites that promise hundreds or thousands of back links. Most of the time this will end up with you link on a website or blog with a bad rank or reputation. Search engines don’t like this and it could eventually hurt your ranking in the long run. When this website was a forum and I was new at this whole marketing thing, I did exactly this, and I’m still trying to recover from it. I have no idea how much actual damage I did, but I do know I have a higher rate of spammers coming here then I do on my other project.

Site Maps – Probably one of the most over looked things in building search engine traffic is your site map. Your site map details out your individual pages and let’s the crawlers know that there is more than just your front page. It also gives your users another way to look through your site by creating a type of contents page. Here’s a great plugin for WordPress I use to create my sitemap.

Sitemap Plugin

While there are many ways to increase your search engine likability, these are probably the three most common practices when optimizing your site. If I could actually find my site somewhere on Google, I could tell you how well these things work for me, but unfortunately I’m buried so far because of my previous mishaps, it’s going to take awhile to rise up to the top.

One last word of advice I can leave you with. Crawlers love fresh content. Blog often. Update your website as much as possible without becoming annoying. Try to write an article at least three times a week because the fresher your content is, the more value it will have over the giants that have been sitting at number one on the search, but their content might be over three years old.

Hope this helps. Until next time.

Twitter don’ts

There’s plenty of sites advertising ways to get your Twitter followers up fast. Here’s a few to avoid:

http://www.twitterfastfollowers.com

Twitter Faster Followers forces you to go through ads and fill out surveys. I tried both, but it still wouldn’t unlock the access that promises me tons of followers. They also force you to follow their VIPs and a randomly chosen set of Twitterers (is that a word?) in order to get in on the random set that will force other people to follow you. Not exactly how I want to get followers, I’m not about to force anyone to follow me for this site. I barely follow it.

Don’t add too many people! Apparently Twitter is frowning upon more than 1000 follows a day as a means to cut down on Spam. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time to sit down and try to follow 1000 people a day.

There is another tool called Tweet Adder. I won’t be buying it to try it out, but it’s against Twitter’s TOC to use applications to get followers. So keep that in mind.

More of a do, but Don’t forget to follow new people that are following you. If you can keep some sort of ratio up, you’ll see a higher influx of followers. Right now I’m following far too many people and not getting enough follow backs. I’ll be fixing that shortly =P

Guess that’s it for now. I really can’t find too many Twitter Don’ts besides don’t spam, don’t write junk, and don’t add too many people daily. Good luck.

Social Networking, How important is it?

So how important is Social Networking? I’m beginning to wonder that myself even as I try to grow my Twitter followers and figure out the best way to pimp out my Facebook page as well. Unlike my previous posts about submitting to blog directories and search engines and whatnot, I have a feeling the social networking aspect is going to take a very long time to become useful. Yes I can follow thousands of people a day and hope for a few follow backs on Twitter, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is how many people following you are actually going to look at your links or come to your website/blog.

When you start talking about Facebook, Myspace, and the like, I have a feeling it’s going to be even more difficult. First, people aren’t going to really know you, and while that’s not a big issue on Twitter, users of Facebook and such are generally there more for friends and family then with any kind of self promotion. It’s much easier to be rejected on Facebook and it’s going to take much more effort to get that kind of following.

Reddit and Stumble Upon I’m still trying to figure out. It’s a different aspect outside of just adding and following users and I just haven’t spent as much time with them as apparently I need to. These will probably be coming after I’ve established some sort of Facebook and Twitter following.

Here’s a few articles I found interesting enough in regards to social media marketing. I’m still pretty skeptical at this point whether or not it’s going to help or hurt my incoming hits, but I’m still pretty early in the game at this point.

SMM Worth your time
SMM Consistent Traffic

And of course the one negative one I could find…
SMM Sucks at driving traffic

Sure enough once I’ve worked on this social media thing long enough, I’ll make sure I post some stats of how well Social Media Marketing actually did help. I’ve seen reports that say anywhere from 200 to 20000 hits come from social media, but I haven’t seen any real world stats to get any type of proof.

Follow me @sddebateforum or twitter.com/sddebateforum

I’m thinking I need to change my name or twitter profile to be something more in tune with this website, so I’ll probably be changing it soon, along with my Facebook page since both were tailored more towards the failure of a forum that I had before I decided to do this site. Feel free to leave me thoughts on that in the comments.