Is that really true? If it is, it's quite depressing. Over the past four months I have about 600+ pages/posts and I was starting to get excited about the prospects of making $$ from blogging. Not enough to live off of, but a nice way to supplement what I make from my 'other' job. And is it really necessary to get your own domain name? What's wrong with using blogger. Is it just a 'neighborhood' reputation problem?
Miked, get your own domain but for the most part what Hon says is true. i used blogger to test what I could make and how fast, I made $240 in 4 months from the start with 99 total posts. I would not worry about rss subscribers and focus on getting search engine traffic from shoppers. Your goal is to get them to click on an add information is important but put your adds into your posts, use pics, have them link to the product at amazon with your account to get credit. Don't try and reinvent the wheel, it works as it is just make it yours. YOu are on the right track, what is your blog about? and how much traffic are you getting? I just started one on the 6th of january and am getting nice google traffic the last 2 days
Let me answer your question with a question. Is $10 too much to spend if you are looking to make $10,000 a month?
Well ultimately if you wanted to sell the blogs it would be a lot harder to sell them if they are a blogspot domain. Plus you have no control People have lost entire blogs at blogger. If you build up PR for that url and then lose it there's no way to get it back. Imagine having 5000 posts and then having them all disappear over night. It least with wordpress and your own domain you can back it up easy, reinstall it easy, and YOU control the domain name. Some blog search engines like Mark Cuban's Icerocket have banned blogger blogs at various stages due to the massive spam problem. I've programmed and kept blogger blogs and wordpress blogs. Overall wordpress blogs have far more features that produce better search results and they always performed better in search results compared to blogger blogs. RSS readers are important because RSS ad's in your feeds pay very well. Plus its also shows you have a loyal following. The social proof aspect means people are more likely to read your stuff if a whole bunch of others are reading it. And you can start to offer them your own products like Darren Rowse has done. The aim is to build a base of fans as opposed to customers. Most of your effort is put into developing the content so to maxmise the results you want to make sure you have a well search optimised template and that you're also writing the articles in the correct format so they get found by the search engines. Darren Rowse is a real good source for blog stuff. Well done on your six hundred posts Miked. If you're serious about making money from it, you probably just need to up your posts a bit, tweak your blog, start some other blogs and get your own domain name.
Hon, look at the blogs that bring Darren money from blogging, he will tell you that he is not making $5 a day from problogger. His digital camera, laptop, camera phone blogs etc. are were he is making the money. He does not have huge rss readers infact few if any, (on those blogs) his traffic is coming from google. he does not hide this look at his site meter. he is getting about 20,000+ uniques a day and 10 to 15% clicks, that is how you make money. And Darrens original content on those sites consists of a quick paragraph telling features and then copy and paste from other reviewers, giving them full credit etc. but still not original!
Hey cdl512... I'm well aware that Darren makes a lot of his money in his tech blogs. However, I still believe the most valuable asset you can have in any business is a database of fans, you can easily contact with your latest offers. You want repeat visitors. They may not continue to click adsense ad's but you can sell them your own products/services etc. You can also do advertorial posts and things like that where you charge people to put a whole post \ that promotes their product. There's a whole lot of ways that you can make additional money by having these people come back to your site and visit. Why limit yourself? Besides like I said, RSS Feeds with adsense can pay good money. It all adds up. Personally I'm always ready to take more money if its on offer. Even if its only an extra 10% of income per year its worth it. Check out the ad's in Darren's feed. http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalPhotographyBlog
Hon, very good point! I never pass a penny I don't pick up! I have not done rss ads and should! I just looked at my stats and saw that my feed is getting more looks than anything so.... thanks for motivating me to put ads in.
I wasn't aware that anyone had lost their blogs except for spamming, which I don't do. Maybe I should switch to my own domain. My brother-in-law even offered to set one up for me. hmmm... I have 7 blogs running (I know, a little bit schizo), but I was all over the place when I started. I started a sports blog, but quickly realized that I was competing against every other sports page out there (and there are thousands just on the Red Sox). Then I had a 'brilliant' idea about posting on technology gadgets (pretty stupid, I know now). And so on. Now I basically post to four of them (although I've left the others up). It's been interesting so far. My sports blog has a PR of 5... I would hate to lose it by starting over, which is why I've been reluctant to move.
don't move it, just be carefull. I think the concerns about loss of blogs is much ado about nothing. If you have a pr of 5 keep it up! Don't let tech gadgets get you down if it is something you like. I am doing the same thing and getting good traffic on one blog that was started on the 6th. The last 3 days have been growing very well! just remember volume of pages is a good thing. A drawback from blogger blogs is you only have 300mb of space for pics.
Run from blogger... as fast as you can. I have heard of a few blogs that have been caught in their big splog cleanup. Theye even have the "dob in a blog" button at the top of their page. The problems of building a business that relies on the whims of another business should be self evident.
I don't even have a blog yet, but this is what I recommend: First, get a theme. If you are using blogger, then, follow the steps necessary to get your blog read far and wide: Blogger Application Settings Blogger itself has an array of settings, many of which work to your advantage in this endeavor. This first grouping is quite simple and just requires that you sign in to your Blogger account and flip a few switches. Set your blog to ping weblogs.com. Weblogs.com is a blog update notification service that many individuals and services use to track blog changes. When this setting is activated, Blogger will notify weblogs.com that you have updated your blog. That means your blog will be included in various "recently updated" lists on the web as well as other blog-related services. Activate Your Navbar. I did this and watched my traffic go up on the very first day (and continue to climb). The Blogger Navbar replaced mandatory ads a few weeks ago. One of the features on the Navbar is a button called NextBlog—click it to visit the next Navbar-enabled blog. It turns out this couch-potato like way of flipping through blogs is very appealing. As a result, the next blog button gets a lot of attention. So turn your Navbar on and catch some of that wave. Install Email This Post. News sites like The New York Times Online have had a feature like this for years, it allows people to simply forward an article to a friend via email. If you use Email This Post on your blog, people will be able to forward your posts to friends. This may not have an immediate impact on your site stats but it enables others to publicize your blog for you. That's good stuff. Turn on Post Pages. If you're still only archiving by day, week, or month you are living in the past man. You've got to make sure you are publishing every post as its very own web page with Post Pages. That makes your entries way more link-able and more attractive to search engines. Links to your blog means traffic to your blog. This is an easy setting in Blogger. Turn on your site feed. When people subscribe to your site feed in their newsreaders, it means they are definitely going to read your post. The folks who subscribe to site feeds are the type of people Malcolm Gladwell calls "mavens" in his book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Long story short: these people will help you get more traffic so turn on your site feed. Add your blog to Blogger's listings. This is a really obvious one but at some point during the blog creation process there's a chance many of you initially thought "Oh, I'm not sure I want to be public just yet. I'll mark that as 'no.'" Go back in there and mark it "yes." When you add your blog to our listings then it shows up in Nextblog, Recently Updated, and other places. It's like opting-in to traffic. Do it. Blogging Technique Suggestions This part of the traffic-grabbing techniques is a little more persnickety and not as readily activated. The basic gist of this section of methods is "If you build it well they will come." You'll need to incorporate the other aspects of self-promotion, but it's true that writing a great blog goes a long way towards repeat visitors and word of mouth blog. Write quality content and do it well. Jen Garrett demands that you use proper punctuation, capitalize letters when appropriate, and don't overuse the ellipsis. She's being a bit of a grammar bitch, but she has a point. If your "style" is bad writing, worse grammar, no punctuation, and an ugly design, that might be okay for a niche crowd. But the idea here is to get a big crowd so fix yourself up a bit, pull it together man, have some respect for your readers, and discover a style that shines brightly through good blogging. Publish regular updates. Danah Boyd once told me that she intentionally wanted to lower the traffic to her blog and she found the easiest way to do it was to stop posting so frequently. (Danah is an odd one, that's why we love her.) The reverse of her experiment is also true: the more you blog, the more traffic you will get. You've got to think about it like watering a plant—do it every day and the plant will grow. Hopefully your blog is not like the plant in The Little Shop of Horrors. That would be bad. Think of your audience. A good way to build an audience is to cultivate one. When you keep your audience in mind, you are focusing your writing. This helps you develop a stronger voice and is instrumental in creating the brand that is you as put forth through your blog. Again, this is more of an overarching, long-term technique for building traffic and won't have immediate results. Nevertheless, focus goes a long way toward repeat visitors. Keep search engines in mind. Note that sometimes your "audience" is whoever stumbles into your site from a web search. Search is a great way to bring in new visitors and there are a few things you can do to make your blog more search engine friendly. Use post titles and blog page title tags along with your post page archiving. This will automatically give each of your post pages an intelligent name based on the title of your post. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search. For example, a Google search for "Book Cover Design" features this blog post by the illustrious Jason Kottke complete with reader comments. Keep your posts and paragraphs short. Note the brevity of the aforementioned Kottke post. People will come back daily to read your fresh new work but spare them the one thousand word diatribes. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on. Think of you blog as a cumulative effect. This doesn't mean you should never practice some long form writing now and then, it's just something to keep in mind. Marketing Action Items The third and final group of promotional techniques are simple actions you can take to publicize your blog. This category is theoretically unlimited. You could build your own blimp and spell out your blogspot subdomain in twinkly holiday lights across the side, that sort of thing. Instead, I've limited these suggestions to more obvious, grounded tactics. (If you do got the blimp route, please: use helium, not hydrogen.) Put your blog URL in your email signature. Whenever I see a blog url in an email signature, I always click on it to see who I'm dealing with. Especially if it's someone I've never met. Email gets forwarded all the time so even if you only send out a five notes a day to friends, the potential number of people clicking over to your blog is in the thousands. (That is of course completely theoretical, but you get my drift—it's worth it.) I can't give you specific instructions on how to edit your email client's signature because I don't know which one you use, but poke around. It's somewhere in the settings. Sumbit your address to blog search sites and directories. People look for blog content at Technorati every day, are you on their list? You should be. Submit your blog's url to Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, Popdex, and any other site of that ilk you come across. With the exception of Technorati, many of these sites are hobby or graduate student projects but they continue to gain visitors looking for interesting blogs to read, bookmark, and revisit. Not all of them have the power to crawl ever blog in existence so you can help them help you by dropping your url in the appropriate field. Participate in meme games. A meme is an idea transmitted from person to person like a virus. If the flu was a blog, it would get crazy traffic. With all the sickness and disease analogies, blog induced memes are actually fun and can win you some extra traffic. How do they work? Basically a blogger will propose an idea like "Hey, let's post the first sentence of our favorite book!" and it will catch on like crazy with people linking to each other's submissions obsessively until the game dies down. A favorite meme for years was the Friday Five, if you're looking for something new, try The Daily Meme. Advertise. If keyword advertising were affordable enough, I'd say go for it. For now, free is a good way to go. BlogSnob is a network of free, text-based blog advertisers that you can join right now. Host ads, place ads, it's all traffic. BlogSnob ads blend right into your site and are fully customizable. Bloggers who join the network can place free ads, while sometime in the near future real advertisers will have to dish out to get noticed. It pays to be a blogger. Link to other blogs. This is a great way to get traffic. Here's what happens when you link to another blogger: she sees you in her referral logs, checks out your blog, and then very likely links back to you or at the very least makes a mental note to do so. Links are the currency of the blogosphere and it takes money to make money so start linking. Don't be shy folks, it's not actually cash. Not yet anyway—who knows what bloggers will come up with. Install a blogroll. This is similar to linking. Well actually, it's the same but different. Blog posts eventually drop off the front page and get archived. A blogroll is more of personal statement: these are the bloggers I like. Or, this is the crowd I'd like to be associated with. It's a very simple yet effective social networking scheme and it has the same result as a simple link if not stronger: traffic! So if you don't have one yet, sign up for a blogroll and get that link-list going. Be an active commenter. Try to leave comments on the blogs you read every day. This is in the same vein as linking. Leaving a comment on someone's post can make their day. Nothing beats getting those email notifications that whisper tacitly out at you from the screen, "You're thoughts have struck me dead in my tracks. I simply must acknowledge you and your greatness." (Or something to that effect.) Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least. So if you feel inspired, leave a comment or two in your blog travels. It behooves you. Pitch your posts via email to other bloggers. This is a touchy technique and should be approached with caution. Blogger Eugene Volokh has published a short treatise on how best to pitch one's blog via email and it's filled with great tips and advice. Assuming your blog is actually worth pitching (of course it is), here are some tips from Volokh. 1. Pitch the post, not the blog. 2. Include the full text and your URL. 3. Submit only your best posts. 4. Don't only pitch to high traffic blogs. Print your blog URL on cards, stickers, etc. Basically, if you plan to have anything printed up, put your blog on it. These days, more and more business cards have blog addresses listed on them along with email and phone number. I wouldn't be surprised if I started seeing bumper stickers with blogspot addresses on them soon. There's a lot of traffic on the 101, that bumper in front of me is prime advertising real estate. Speaking of the 101, maybe you've spotted the giant orange SUV with the license plate that says BLOGGER while driving south towards San Jose? No, that's not Evan Williams as you would suspect. It is, however, a nice piece of creative publicity. If there's one thing we've learned from my Labor Day investigation of blog promotion it's this: Don't be that guy with the BLOGGER license plate but think like him. That's the kind of take-charge technique you should open your game with. That's how you can turn your pawn into royalty. (Stolen from) Biz Stone, who works at Google on Blogger and writes books about blogging. ******** Also, do make sure your blog gets "pinged." I am sure there are threads around here explaining that. If I were you, that's where I'd start. At least it would put you and your blog into the AdSense game - not a bad place to start.
Hi everyone, This post is real useful for me too. I myself am a new blogger been reading DP for some days now. Very useful informations. Thanks everyone. Keep posting the good stuffs.
To make money from blogging you will need reputation and value, which comes through hardwork and dedication. If you invest your time wisely, you will be rewarded.
WOW, you went back a long way for this one! Just goes to show there is gold in the archives around here.
you all keep saying make quality content, but if I just opened a wordpress blog it doesnt offer my any money making methods.
GD this is an old thread! But what the hay, ...don't put the cart before the horse. A blog is just the medium, or the vehicle. You have to have the idea or purpose first, or you're just blogging for the sake of having a blog. That's like owning a set of clubs, but not knowing how to golf.