A Reality Check about Blogging for Money

Short and sweet – it is mho that those who attempt to sell you on the ease of making money blogging, full time money or more, are the ones who are selling something that will benefit them much more than you in the short term! Yes, short term…

“While the occasional blogger has a fast rise to fame they are the exception. Building a successful blog takes a long time (it takes time to build readership, to work out how to monetize it etc) so take a long term approach and pace yourself.”

Darren mentions how fortunate in luck he was in his beginning then tells us about “blogging less can mean more”;

“that doesn’t mean you can just come up with a few posts on a whim every few days and expect the traffic (and money) to come rolling in.”

I’d add that the boneheads out there who came up with these scraper blogs that are “Made for Adsense” approach the lowest of low in the blogging world!

The reality???

“the vast majority of bloggers are making very little per month. While it is possible to make amazing money from blogging the sad reality is that most don’t make more than pocket money. Even some blogs who ‘deserve’ to make money blogging don’t.”

Post from: EveryJoe

Darren Debunks A Myth

I received an email this morning about Darren and Andy’s new updated blogging course, titled “Six Figure Blogging”. The fresh new course covers new material such as text-link-ads and new innovations from Chikitka, Amazon and Google.

We also tackle questions such as:

- With all the blog networks – is there still hope for six figure blogging?

- How long should you test a blog before you expect
income and search hits?

Plus:

The 10 Reasons Why Blogs
Don’t Make Much Money
(these may surprise you)

If you’re looking to earn a buck on the side then checkout the affiliate program available.

Post from: EveryJoe

Fresh new Blogging course – Earn Six Figures!

Does this sound like you?

I can think of three primary ways of driving traffic.

• Regular readers (Includes RSS subscribers)
• Search engine traffic
• Advertising campaigns such as YPN or Adwords

If you haven’t mastered any of these, then you’re not going to have much luck earning any revenue from your blog.

Regular Readers

Successful blogs that gain a strong readership, tend to get steady flow of traffic and have the benefit of viral marketing. If users are subscribed to your RSS feed, it’s a given that they enjoy reading your content and are likely to tell others – creating a viral method of gaining traffic.

Regular readers have a down side though and that is contextual advertising. If a reader is familiar with your blog, they most likely go straight to where the content lies, missing any advertisements that you may have placed.

Scrivs has talked previously about tactics such as link baiting, commenting and link exchanges.

Search Engine Traffic

Now here’s a goodie but an oldie. We all know that blogs rank great in search engine results, but just how good can just one article rank?

Problogger at the time of writing, ranks 6th for the keyword “make money online” and according to the SEO keyword research tool, this keyword attracts around 137,683 hits a month. This is traffic that Darren is getting without spending a dime and ultimately when you compare who clicks the ads, search engine traffic is the winner.

Advertising Campaigns

Sometimes you have to spend money in order to receive money. I’ve had great success in the past where I started an Adwords campaign for one of my sites. I was spending around $3 a day for 10c clicks and in return was earning $5 a day in Adsense revenue, sometimes higher.

I highly recommend Adwords to start with and while confusing at first, it really helps you to understand the niche your in. From traffic, to clickthroughs and bids – you can see in real time what people are searching for and WHAT triggers them to come to your site.

Post from: EveryJoe

Developing Traffic Revised

But they found and managed to destory our haven, however we will not give up!

Spam Karma 2 has done wonder’s for the blogs I run. It’s efficient, easy to install and has a nice interface to manage comment spam.

And the best part? It’s free.

Askismet, the non-free spam protection also seems to be popular. However it seems Darren from Problogger is having some issues .. maybe B5media should switch to Spam Karma 2?

Post from: EveryJoe

Keeping out Blog Spam

What I mean by home base is this; some organisations are tightly associated with a particular location such a country or city. A classic example is movie making where most films are made in HollyWood or Hong Kong. When the majority of people want to make a movie, they make sure their home base is in either of these two places.

Another example is the music industry. We’ve seen bands from specific genres that have formed in Manchester, England. Bands such as Oasis, Joy Division and the Bee Gees. This shows that an organisations home base can help lift “branding”.

Everyone knows that Google and eBay have their headquarters in Silicon Valley and it’s becoming quite a trend. Silicon Valley is now filled with web startups.

Now apply this to blogging.

Your home base may be “Blogger.com” or “wordpress.org”, but how many “successful bloggers” have free hosting accounts?

I’m seeing an increase in ProBlogging where people are obtaining domain names and purchasing hosting which is fantastic to see. It shows enthusiasm and professionalism.

So if you’re new in town, sit back and have a think.

Where would you like your home base to be?

Post from: EveryJoe

Starting a Blog – Where’s your home base?

“Why do businesses exist?”

One brave student put up his hand and answered with;

“To provide goods, services and employment”

“Wrong” said the lecturer. “For that is a charity. Businesses exist to increase the wealth of the owner“.

Now apply this to blogging. Do blogs exist to increase the wealth of an owner? I guess it all depends on what you want to achieve with your blog. People have different opinions, if you had asked Liz from Successful-Blog I think her answer would be something along the lines of – “Blogging is about your passion to write and produce interesting content to share with others”. Darren from Problogger may have a similar view but we all know he earns a bucket load from blogs and whilst there may be passion, I’m sure he wants to “increase his wealth” as well.

So you have two different goals. To increase your wealth or to blog for passion.

It’s all up to you.

Post from: EveryJoe

Why do blogs exist ?

BLOGGERS DON’T CLICK ADVERTS

If you’ve had any experience with running websites, tweaking ads and performing search engine optimization – you’ll notice that we become blind to adsense. When we read a blog and see adsense adverts plastered left right and centre, we understand that the author is attempting to create a revenue stream.

We will often criticize the website in question, and think in the back of our minds how a Google ad would look better here or there.

We will wonder what the click ratio is and what the paying rate is for the keywords we see plastered all over the site in the most obvious locations.

We will laugh and mock sites that have the infamous Google public service adverts.

We will cringe when we see adverts that aren’t blended.

However, we will never click ads; for that would be giving money and hope to the competition. It’s a harsh world isn’t it?

Post from: EveryJoe

Bloggers Don’t Click Adverts

It’s quite simply really and only requires a new email address and a WordPress plugin called Postie.

How it works

My new phone supports IMODE emailing, which is a service specific to my provider. IMODE allows me to subscribe to content such as movie session times, news, weather etc. Your provider may not have IMODE; however other providers (Vodafone live for example) may offer similar connectivity.

To sum it up;

1) You take your photo.
2) Attach it to an email on your phone and send it to a secret address that YOU set up.
3) The WordPress plugin Postie can check this secret email account and decode the information inside.
4) It then creates a WordPress post, containing the emails subject, body and any attachments.

So how can I set this up?

If you’re using WordPress 2.x, you can grab postie here.
If you’re using WordPress 1.5x, you can grab postie here.

1) Simply unzip postie into your wp-content/plugins folder.
2) Activate postie from the WordPress admin plugins page

Now we need to create a secret email address. When I say secret, I mean an address that you tell nobody. Postie will check all incoming email addresses and only accept emails that have YOUR from address. However, it is possible for people to forge this address – and then you’d have randoms posting straight to your blog which could be nasty.

Configuring Postie

Once you have created this new email account;

1) Visit the WordPress admin panel, select the options menu and then select Configure Postie.
2) Here you can change various Postie settings. One thing you’ll want to change is the default posting category.
3) At the bottom, fill out the email details such as incoming mail server (POP3 or IMAP) and your new email address username and password.
4) Create two new folders called “wp-images” and “wp-filez” and give them writable access. (Chmod 766)

Note: You must remember that by default, Postie will only accept email that has a from address that matches your WordPress admin email address! In my case, my mobile phone provider gave me an email address to use for my IMODE service; I edited my author profile and changed my email to this address.

At the top of the Postie options page, there is a test config button. This will check that Postie can connect to the mail server and also write to the attachment folders that we set up earlier.

Testing Postie

You can now test Postie, simply send an email (PLAIN TEXT!!) to your secret address (doesn’t have to be from your phone, you may send from Outlook if you wish) and make sure you attach a valid jpg file. Now head back to the Postie options screen and hit the Run Postie button. It should show a status page informing you of any messages that were received and any errors that may have occurred.

Automating the checking process

If your webhost gives you access to secure shell (SSH) or telnet, you may be able to add crontabs. Use the below crontab code.

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/lynx –source http://www.your-website.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php >/dev/null 2>&1

This automates the Postie checking process every 5 minutes. The above crontab code should be all on one line.

If you don’t have SSH or telnet access and you have access to cPanel (a web hosting control panel) then you may be able to set up crontabs via the web interface, although it all depends on whether your web host has this enabled.

The next step is to test it with your phone, take a picture and attach it to an email to your secret address. Within 5 minutes it should appear on your blog!

Post from: EveryJoe

Blogging from your phone