Monetizing Isn’t Getting Any Easier
Darren Rowse of Problogger has published the results of his two month long poll asking his readers how much income they make by blogging. You can view his post to check out the results but here is something that stuck out to me:
So to this point we can say 70% of those who make money from their blogs make less than $500 a month and 30% make $500 or more.
I know Darren has a huge audience of bloggers and most of them are looking to make money online but it seems pretty bad that only 70% of those who voted are making less than $500.00 per month. Just that statistic alone makes me realize why Make Money Online blogs are so popular.
While the results of Darren’s poll are not entirely accurate, it’s interesting to note the discrepancy between the amount of people who made $20,000 or more in the month of October. I’m willing to bet some people voted $20,000 just because it felt good but I’m still curious as to who those elite bloggers are. Darren claims he knows a few people who make that amount, I personally don’t. If you do, tell me in the comments.
Back in May of 2008, James Mowery asked Performancing readers how much money they averaged per month from Blogging? 26% said less than $100 while only 8% said more than $2,500.00. An interesting point in this poll was that 18% of those who voted claimed they would make money eventually.
What I think all of this means is that, it is a real pain to make a decent amount of income by blogging. There seems to be a select few who have been able to turn blogging into a full-time job and have developed a major following by people who are looking to do the same thing. In 2009, I have finally bit the bullet and will be operating my own web property centered around WordPress. I’ll have my chance to try out different revenue generating opportunities and of course, whatever I learn through this process I’ll be sharing the information on Performancing. But again, it has to be said that Darren has turned this blogging stuff into a six-figure salary job and he has documented how he reached that point by means of Problogger and by writing a book. It would seem that even if you are given the ingredients to success, it’s not as simple as just mixing them together. Some of the ingredients to success come from you.
While times are becoming increasingly tough with regards to monetization, my hope is that with the reboot of the Performancing website along with the forum, we can help each other succeed by sharing tips, tricks and techniques. Thats what I’d like to see and with that, I wish everyone a safe and happy New Year!
Three Tips For Increasing Value Over Time
In an email exchange I had earlier today with another blogger, he said something which struck a chord with me. He told me that those who pay people to write for them are not only purchasing immediate value, but are also purchasing value that will increase with time. In essence, you publish a new article today and it holds immediate, near term value. As that post falls deeper into the archive, people are still finding that page by means of search engines or social media traffic. Therefor, if you were paid $25.00 to write a list post for whatever niche that site was within, chances are good that the site owner will make that money back and then some. Makes perfect business sense doesn’t it?
What if you’re blogging for yourself though? No worries as nothing is different. However, since you are in full control over your blog and what gets published, it’s important to review each post you publish to ensure that the proper steps have been made so that it increases in value while it sits in the archive. Here are a couple things you can do to insure that happens.
Proper Keywords – Make sure that the post title and the post content have the proper keywords. For example, if I were writing about a free icon pack that was released, I would put the name of the pack in the title as well as in the tags. I see people arriving at my site all the time because of one or two keywords that were in my post title.
Link Worthy – If possible, make your post as link worthy as possible. Give people a reason to link to it. The more links the better and the higher the article will show up on the SERPS.
Forget Digg Get Stumbled – If you make the front page of Digg, good. However, you can only make the front page of Digg once. With Stumbleupon, getting a rush of traffic is as easy as asking someone to submit the article to the service. After that, a few stumblers will come passing by and there is no telling when the next wave of stumblers will pass through.
Here are a few links to some past articles on Performancing which should help you in building value immediately and in the future.
3 Ways to Engineer Good Content
How to turn link posts into linkbait
Help Us Name our Our RSS Subscription Link
Taking the cue from a post on Copyblogger a while back, I now wonder what we should name our RSS subscription link in our site redesign. On the Blog Herald, Lorelle reinforces the view that using the term “subscribe” might turn away people.
True–”subscriptions” usually cost money. And folks are attracted to free stuff. While we do have a premium subscription site, the Hive, the main Performancing.com site content continues to be free, whether you read on-site, via email or your RSS reader.
So saying “Subscribe to Performancing” might come across incorrectly as Perf being a pay site.
Lorelle suggests you use clever ways to name your subscription links. For instance, a blog about cats can say “Track this cat,” and a blog about health or medicine can say “Get a daily dose …” But generic ones will work, too.
For Performancing.com, we need a catchy line for our RSS subscription link. If you can give us good suggestions, we will give the top choice a free year’s pro pMetrics subscription and a free six month membership to the Hive.
What do you think we should put up there on the RSS link?
10 Awesome WordPress Plugin Authors
In what I consider to be one of the coolest uses for the WordPress.org API yet, W-Shadow has published his findings regarding the WordPress plugin repository. The data includes a list of the top 10 WordPress plugin developers as ranked by the number of downloads a particular plugin has. It was no surprise to me that Lester ‘Gamerz’ Chan who has created a wide assortment of plugins for WordPress was near the top of the list at number three. Also no surprise was Michael Torbert who took over the development of the All In One SEO plugin to round off the number one spot. On top of those findings, here are a few more tidbits:
- Most plugins by a single author : Viper007Bond has 25 plugins hosted on wordpress.org.
- Highest version number : cforms II version 9.4 by Oliver Seidel. This plugin also has the highest number of user ratings – 419 votes.
- Longest plugin name : Sliding Post – Slides latest posts with Carousel effect (55 characters) by dasinfomedia
- Shortest plugin name : mu by Mark Bockenstedt. That’s not WordPress MU – “mu” is an obscure microblog updater plugin.
Please be sure to check out W-Shadows post and while you’re there, take a look at his compiled top 1000 plugin authors table to see where your favorite plugin developer shows up in the list.
Cute Headlines Don’t Work
Steven Hodson of WinExtra.com learned a valuable lesson today that is worthy of sharing and that is, cute headlines don’t work. I know I’ve had my days where I come up with what I believe to be an awesome headline only to find out that it turned into a failure. I think the headlines which don’t work the most often are the ones that are inside jokes that only the post author knows. With that in mind, I think it’s time to revisit an excellent guide that was published by Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com that focuses entirely on headlines. The guide is as follows:
- Why You Should Always Write Your Headline First
- The Cheater’s Guide to Writing Great Headlines
- Do Key Words in Post Titles Really Matter?
- How to Write a Killer “How To” Post That Gets Attention
- 7 Reasons Why List Posts Will Always Work
- Why Some People Almost Always Write Great Post Titles
- 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work
- 7 More Sure-Fire Headline Templates That Work
- Warning: Use These 5 Surefire Headline Templates at Your Own Risk
Writing excellent headlines is a science to say the least but after reading Brian’s guide, it should be much easier.
Blogging Not Just For The Young
Browsing through the feedreader today, I came across an enlightening story about an 80 year old grandmother turned blogger. This grandmother has been using the net since the 1990s but once she became bored, she started up a blog that describes her take on life, her grandchildren, or sometimes topics such as where to get the best potato salad.
I always find blogs written by seniors to be much more interesting to read than those of younger people because of the amount of life experience they have. Getting their take on things is great especially if they have lived through the experience once or twice before hand.
What is your take on senior bloggers?
10 Reasons To Blog
Are you still on the fence on whether or not to have your own blog? Howard Flomberg of the Examiner published his list of 10 reasons on why to blog. While some of the items have a comical feel to them, most are down to earth such as number 2,
2. It will improve your writing skill. Just think, if you have a hundred people reading your blog, you now have a hundred editors!
After you give his quick ten reasons a read, come on back and let me know a reason or two as to why someone should blog.
Search Engine Optimization For Videos
We all know what SEO is, I’ve heard of SMO, but this is the first time I have heard of the term ‘VSEO‘ or Video Search Engine Optimization. Over on Jack Humphrey’s blog, Jack answers a reader question that asks what can be done to promote videos and improve their SERPS. The information is pretty straight forward. Ironically, many of the same tips provided by Jack for VSEO coincide with SEO. No surprise there. If you give your content descriptive titles, summaries or descriptions, tags, etc. you should do just fine whether it be SEO, VSEO, PSEO (Podcast SEO). In any case, Jack’s blog post is still a good reminder that the basics of SEO in general still matter.
Caught In The Act Via Pmetrics
About a week or two ago, I happened to be browsing around Pmetrics for Performancing checking out the stats and of course, spending some time monitoring the Spy feature. Good thing to as I caught a spammer in the act. Refer to the screenshot to see what I mean.
The screenshot reads best when read from the bottom up. I noticed that the IP address had a registered account and was editing a page they had created on the Performancing website. Administer this site long enough and it becomes pretty easy to spot something out of the ordinary. A post title of “Professional Details” screams out spammy to me. Sure enough, you can see that my IP address (173.#.#.#) visits the users profile page. I then block the users account while they are editing the details. When that user clicked on the save button, they received an Access Denied error because I blocked their account. I admit, it felt pretty satisfying and humorous at the same time to actually nail a spammer in real-time.
Unfortunately, the feeling of making progress was short lived as a couple more spammers signed up for accounts on the site. As it stands, Performancing.com is in a bad position right now because the site contains hundreds of user accounts which have public profiles showcasing either spam or pornographic material. Just the other day, I deleted 10 pages worth of users and I didn’t even put a dent in the situation. I’ve discussed this with J Angelo Racoma and we are working on at the very least, getting the site to the point where we can turn user registration off but because the Performancing.com database is linked with Pmetrics, disabling one disables the other. A quick lesson to be learned here is this, really think things through (longterm) before you decide to link databases together.
As part of the revamp of Performancing, I believe most, if not all of the user accounts stored in the Performancing.com database will be removed. At least, that is how I understand it. The bottom line is, if you type into Google a certain set of keywords or phrases that are usually published by spammers and your site comes in with not one, but many hits and they are public user profile pages, it’s safe to say that you have a problem.
As we transition Performancing.com, there are a number of things that are worth sharing that I believe many within the audience would benefit from. In the coming days, weeks during the transition, I’ll be highlighting specific changes that will be taking place and the reasons behind them. After all, sharing the experiences of administering/running a multi authored is a great way to learn.
Pmetrics
Ok, back to the subject at hand. I wanted to let you know that pMetrics is a web statistics package that gives bloggers and web site owners a deeper look at traffic and visitor activity. It comes with a sparkly-clean and simple interface, live, real-time statistics and search keyword and keyphrase tracking. As far as blog stats and web site statistics packages go, pMetrics is unrivaled. Packages for the service start at just $2.99 per month however, Pmetrics does contain a free plan. All new accounts get a free 21 day trial of the pro service so head on over to pmetrics.performancing.com to sign up for your account.
Replace Donate Button With A Wishlist
I don’t link to him often but Jeremy Schoemaker a.k.a. Shoemoney had an interesting topic today in that, perhaps you should replace the “Donate!” button on your site with an Amazon Wishlist! instead. His opinion is that, the donate button with a set amount or one of those buy me a coffee buttons which is practically the same thing doesn’t really allow for someone to give back. While it might feel great donating a couple bucks to someone, personally, I’d feel great if someone were to purchase a product for me that I either want, or need.
I’ve donated some cash here and there to WordPress plugin authors but I don’t do it very much. Have you? Would you rather see a list of items that the person needs or wants and simply buy one of those? How has the donate button performed on your own site?
