I’ve been reading and doing some blogging off and on for the last year or so…finally found something I really enjoy blogging on and started a fan page last year which has a few thousand fans now without any real marketing at all.
So about a month ago, I launched the blog to go with the fan site and have been blogging. I did not do any marketing of the blog on my fan page or in twitter, etc., because I wanted to get some content up and get the kinks worked out. With SEO I’ve only been getting 30-40 hits/day, but I haven’t really been doing much SEO wise…mainly just trying to get in the groove of posting daily with new and interesting content.
Curious about your journey…how did you start out? how did you increase traffic? where are you now? how long did it take you to get there? any tips to share along the way? Income info would be nice, but not totally necessary. I know if you work at it, the income will come…
But on the subject of income, I’ve been told to not bother with google adsense…thoughts on this? The argument was that this person had 2000 hits per day with google ads on the site and only made $3 or so…and he felt google adsense wasn’t paid attention anymore by people, plus ruined the look and feel of the website…curious if you agree or not?
I’ve tried blogging, and monetising my blogs a number of times over the years and each and every time a single post was what made people return to these blogs.
Although I wouldn’t call him a “blogger”, the famed creator of “The Best Web Page In The Universe” Maddox regularly stated that regularly updating for the sake of it was a worthless ordeal. For my last blogging adventure I decided to not maintain a regular blog, but to have a blog that I posted to once a month at most. I would spend most of the month on this single post, and more often than not these would be successful.
In short, I increased traffic to my site by writing less, and using this time to write articles of great quality.
I have two blogs worth mentioning. Both were made against all good blogging practice and probably common sense, but they are based on very specific keywords and rely entirely on SEO, which I did heavily (minus the spamming kind, like forum spam, blog comment spam, etc.). The result is about 2,000 daily visits and about $8k/mo across both of them, and growing. People seem to like them, there’s even a little community around one of them and I could turn it into forums or some other type of community site, perhaps.
I write an odd post when I feel like it but it’s hard to measure the impact - it’s minimal. Half of the posts are written by guest bloggers. But the posts that bring most of the traffic and conversions are actually placeholders and encourage discussion, some of them have thousands of comments. You might guess what kind of posts are those… yes, product reviews.
As far as AdSense, I’m not a fan, but it highly depends on the niche. I too have a site that gets about 1000 visits and only about $3/day in AdSense. I tried it on my other sites too and it always pays off better to use other ways to monetize. AdSense to me is only to fall back on when nothing else works.
Same with me. I have 2 blog, all i make to promote my bussines, because i,am still new, my blog is not good in SEO, when i check, i just in no 700, he…he. My be next year, he…he will be good in Google SEOSRP
So…if adsense is only a fallback, then should you even put it on the site at all or just look at other methods? My newest site of the two I have is mostly products…would love to do reviews on the products, but not sure how that would work if I haven’t actually used the product?
I do actually have 3 blogs, but one is for my business and generates real income through potential clients…there are no ads or affiliates…it does ok in its niche and has gotten me a few clients and a few friends as well.
No, I’m saying it’s a fallback for me. If you find that it works well for you, on the other hand, then that doesn’t apply to you. For every guy like me who says it doesn’t work for them there’s a guy who says it works great for them. Try, test, decide.
Reviews are great to monetize, especially if you can get traffic from search engines for them. Yes, you need to have used the product if you’re gonna write a review, or get someone who has to write it for you.
I started blogging 6 months before. At the starting time i didn’t get much more revenue from adsense. After trying hard with my blog i got the first payment from adsense within 3 months (150$). And with that money I purchased a hosting account bluehost. And hosted my Onlie Jobs blog there. Now its working fine and my site is being listed in first page of google.
Understandably AdSense gives a poor return on your website. So what kind of advertising do you look at? Do you use Yahoo instead, or private companies?
I started blogging 6 months before. At the starting time i didn’t get much more revenue from adsense. After trying hard with my blog i got the first payment from adsense within 3 months (150$). And with that money I purchased a hosting account bluehost. And hosted my Onlie Jobs blog there. Now its working fine and my site is being listed in first page of google.
Let me clarify a little bit. When I say AdSense I mean contextual advertisements in general. AdSense, in fact, works best out of all contextual ad networks I’ve tried. But out of all methods of monetizing, I find contextual ads the least rewarding way to do it. Naturally, slapping some ads across your website cannot be most rewarding. But in some cases, usually due to extremely low commercial intent of the visitors, nothing else works.
I’ve mention an example of my site were AdSense performs poorly. Well, so it happens that anything else I’ve tried performed even worse. And that usually is the case with any site were AdSense performs poorly. People complain that AdSense pays little for them, but most likely that’s the fault of their website, not vise versa.
On the other hand, if AdSense performs well, it’s an indicator that you can make much more by exploring other ways of monetization. Affiliate marketing usually outperforms advertising hand over fist, if there’s enough commercial intent. Not to mention if you can tie in your blog with your products or services.
I tried AdSense on one of my blogs in the beginning and it paid well at $.30-$.50 per click. But that’s peanuts compared to what it makes from affiliate programs. Why not use AdSense together with other methods then? Once you see what works best, I think it’s best to focus on it as much as possible by minimizing distractions. I think there’s nothing worse than a blog overwhelmed with ads.
I think this thread is kind of going off journey a little, but anyhow.
I was looking at the SitePoint jorney here.
They’ve managed to moneytize what their doing. Their website provide relavent posting supplied daily on popular topics, and as such is one of the highest ranked websites in the field of web design. They launched 99designs, and provide guides and books which they sell over SitePoint and Amazon. Money is the key to their survival and it’s community not only contributes to it’s content, but provides it with the income it needs to survive.
Now I am not suggesting I copy what they do, there is more than one avenue to make money. I could provide affiliate links, or maybe just sell advertising space. I don’t really think I could provide/sell another service unless I have another website specifically designed to sell a product. This is way to early for me. I think the main thing is to provide relavent content which will help me rank where I need to rank in the first place.
Oh ye, forgot to wish you all Happy Easter & Xpistos Anesti!
I tried to blog so many times and left it because, let’s face it, I’m not regular at all. I have too many things to do simply to start writing. It is not that I don’t like writing… I do! It is only that I write one post and I don’t write anything else in months and months… there’s no way that you can build traffic like that.
It does attrack me to do something at home while I’m watching TV or something (yep, I don’t have much time for leisure so even if I really want to watch a TV show I will still have my computer with me to do some minor stuff)
If you know your blog does not have a community behind it then you’re sure to loose your blogging rhythm. Blogging at one point was similar to tweeting and facebook, but now I think it’s certainly died down. Companies still ask for blogs. Maybe tweeter has taken over the blogging market on a personal level, let’s face it, it’s far easier for me to tweet than to write something. Here I write lots of stuff, and I spend hours on this site, but that’s because I know what I write will be read, and in many cases I get a response, so it’s a different sense of things.
I don’t tweet and I don’t do facebook. Oh, I have accounts on both but I don’t use them much… I guess I’m lazy. It is true that SPF is, by far, where I spend more time and where I write the more
Regarding losing the plot… don’t worry, I knew you lost it ages ago runs and hides
I don’t tweet and I don’t do facebook. Oh, I have accounts on both but I don’t use them much… I guess I’m lazy. It is true that SPF is, by far, where I spend more time and where I write the more
I tweet everyday pretty much. I do have a blog, but I can’t be fluffed writing stuff for it. I don’t have any followers and I really don’t want spend too much time on it. Initially it was fun, but then I slowly lost focus on it. I guess my life is certainly too unpredictable to start blogging.
I use to spend much of my time on another Forum, but I seem to learn stuff here at SP, so I stayed here. Plus it’s fun and the community is very active, which also helps.
It really does I guess that it is the same thing with blogging. As you say, if you know that people will read it, you may be more motivated.
Not so sure with twitter though. After all, people write things that could only be interesting for themselves (like “I’m at the supermarket buying apples”). Surely, they don’t expect to have followers for that kind of comments
I guess it would be kind of hypocritical for me to encourage customers to have a twitter account when mine is inactive. I suppose that in it’s self is motivation to keep my twitter account up-to-date, after all, it’s not like it will take much time to do.
You two should be wearing ski masks, the way you’ve hijacked the thread, that’s some hardcore thread-jacking.
I’ll try to steer it towards the right direction…
This thread has inspired me to revive my pet project - a real blog. No SEO or other shenanigans, just pure blogging fun. Currently under 5 daily visits, some of which is myself, so it’s really starting from scratch. I’ll see how hard it is. My plan is to have fun without worrying about stats or monetization and see how far and how fast it will go. People complain blogging is tough, I’ll prove them wrong. :hangin:
I guess that it is the same thing with blogging. As you say, if you know that people will read it, you may be more motivated.