I have been doing an extensive amount of article writing lately, in order to obtain a laptop. Now that I have a good $1,500 saved up for a laptop, I can make time for a lot more than the amount of workload I wish to have. So, then I began to think about blogs. How profitable are they on average, and what are the odds I will have a good return on investment? I am a great writer, and could devote many great articles to a blog. I would much rather sell the articles to others, if I found that blogs are a big gamble. Advice?
The blog market is so saturated.. so I'm not sure if you'll make that much money off adsense. Why not just start a niche site and write articles for it? Be sure to do good SEO work and you'll earn more on adsense. Try 20 pages of articles per niche site.
Well, it wouldn't necessarily be a conventional blog. Take my musical interests for example. I may put a good 30 articles up on the subject of electric guitars. Could this be profitable? More so than selling them for over $100?
What would be the total cost for these articles? Over time yes you can make over $100 with that many articles. Can you optimize a blog? (its slightly different than normal sites). If you can optimize, this may work better for your (easier to manage)
Ten 500 word articles will usually go around $75, so the total price for twenty articles would be about $150. I haven't optimized a blog, simply because I have no experience with them.
Yes, as long as you have the interest and passion to blog about the topic. However, it takes time for a blog to gain popularity and generate revenue. If you persist, you can easily earn over $100 per month. Read John Chow's march income status blog for more info: http://www.johnchow.com/make-money-on-the-internet-march-2007/
Thanks for the link, I have read his stuff before. How should I monetize the blog? I don't like the idea of adsense taking traffic away from my site. Would text links be a better solution?
Yeah, I would try making a blog yourself and try earning money with adsense. There are so many ways to get traffic (via digg and social bookmarking) so it shouldn't be a problem. If your first site works well, build an empire!
Well, any type of monetization will be taking traffic away from your site. you can try finding related aff products on clickbank, cj, copeac and promote those if you do not like adsense.
Ha, well I will most likely go with adsense after all then. I just don't like the idea of losing traffic. I guess it is worth it in the long run!
Yes, go with adsense soley, don't lose traffic by overloading your site w/ affiliate links... with good traffic and PR you can sell links privately and make more $$ (and it won't look "messy" on your site)
Monetize on both. I do not see why this is not possible. To use Adsense and to blog. But at $100 a blog....Maybe not that at the moment. I believe John Chow is something like $250 and Shoemoney and Cuts are at $2k+. But I do know that some can range from $15.00+ depending on traffic and page rank. So I am sure after 100 blogs or so will pay off the laptop, in addition to the adsense. On the selling of links..Be wary of doing so. Matt Cutt just anounced the Google snitch patrol of sites who sell links. I dont think blogging will fall under this category though.
Ha, well no need to pay the laptop off, it's paid! With a lot of hard work, I managed to get the money in a little over a month. I read that blog too. I bet it falls through for Google. How can you defeat one of the large factors that make up your own search engine?
Sorry I know it was maybe a bit off topic. But I do know that Microsoft and AT&T is pushing a AntiTrust lawsuit against Google and buying Doubleclick. I would just say be sure to monetize on both. Dont lean heavily on just one.
Who said anything about losing traffic? Use the blog to discuss topics that pertain to your market and promote your own products... make them a part of the blog. If anything thats going to increase traffic.
i dont believe in blogging, you have to be work really hard if you want to seriously make money from it, remember that the top earning bloggers today only started blogging because they wanted to voice their opinion and not earn money from it.
I see your point here, but tend to disagree. If you optimize a wordpress theme and write blog posts aka articles that get good placement in search engines, it can be just the same as a niche site. Updating blogs regularly can be a hassle, but easy seo offered in some wordpress themes saves a lot of manual seo work
It is actually much better than a niche sites because of pinging Ping gets you FREE visitors and, if you do it right, lots of them