Have you ever had one of your ideas 'stolen' and used by someone else soon after you shared them in a public setting? If yes, you'll know the frustration and anger that accompanies such a case. It could have been when you were in school and someone else stood up and took the credit for your work, or in a professional setting where a colleague took your idea and ran with it (and thus took the credit).

It's always about 'the credit', isn't it?

Experience tells us to keep our best ideas to ourselves - why give away the store when you can profit from it in the future, right?

The only problem with this approach - the hoarding approach - is that we don't always have the time to work on all of our ideas. And that means that for every project that we work on, 20+ others go undone, because of a lack of time. So at this point, we're at a cross-roads - you don't want to share freely because those are your ideas but you also don't have the time to work on them.

I don't believe in giving it all away for free - sure, to some it may sound noble but in terms of value you know that your ideas are worth something, and in most cases, worth more than the goodwill that will be generated from giving them away for free.

An acceptable alternative may be to develop your ideas and then distribute them, for a price. For example, think of Private Label Rights (PLR) products. In theory, PLR products are components of a ready-made business that you can take, personalise and get started with almost immediately (a good example of this would be the PLR articles provided by PLRPro).

Depending on the time available to you, you could develop your ideas to the point of a short 10-page report ($7 value or even free), into a 50-100 page ebook ($19-$49 or again free), into full-fledged running blog (which you can then sell to make a nice profit) or anywhere in between.

Let's say that I want to get into the self-help niche but don't have time for it. So what do I do?

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For a lot of people, blogging is more than just about the money. It's about community and sharing and making a difference in peoples' lives.

At the end of the day though, unless your bed is made of 100-dollar bills, money plays a key role in your blog's existence.

In a previous post we've already talked about how you should know 'your purpose / motivation' for your blog before you start - however since financial considerations are always there or thereabouts whether you have a commercial venture or not, it's crucial to understand the role money plays in your blog's fortunes.

1. Don't make your blog about the money

Focus your blog on people - your readers, on conversations, on building relationships, on sharing ideas and most of all, on positioning your blog at the center of the conversations in your niche (it's a topic for a whole different discussion, but in short, talk about what matters to people in your niche now, not yesterday or tomorrow.

The money will come, as a direct outcome of your site being successful, as long as you monetize it properly.

If you are fretting about 'making money' from your blog then you might have things the other way around. After a certain point 'optimizing your revenue streams' stops improving the bottom line. You just have to make your site the most popular site in your niche (or close enough) - that's when the big advertising dollars come in and that's where you want to me.

Provide value to your readers and work hard at making your site popular - the money comes as a by-product.

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Over at College Startup I wrote an article this morning entitled Five Effective Ways To Re-Invest Your Profits. The basic point of that post is that the best way to become rich off the Internet is to slowly exchange roles with your money: put your money to do the work that you used to do.

Writing that article got me wondering what the average blogger does with his or her earnings. Do you keep 100% and use it for spending money? Do you reinvest 30% and keep 70% as salary? Or vice versa?

So let's use the comment section to share our personal strategies for handling the money we get as (pro)bloggers. I think it will be helpful to all of us to get a picture of how other bloggers use their earnings and maybe "borrow" a few tips;-)

Deborah wrote a thought-provoking piece a couple of weeks ago about whether traffic (visitors/readers) or money should come first when blogging. She also talked a little bit about a radio interview she'd participated in where they drilled for information about making money online.

Deborah's post struck a chord with me on two levels:

1. about the focus on money by the media, and
2. the resultant copycat bloggers who think it's a fast way to get rich

In this post, I'm going to talk about my personal experiences of both these points.

Passion Versus Profit?

Our story follows the blogging dream: we started a blog about something we loved, and after a while, visitors flocked to the site to comment and read our latest posts. The industry became familiar with our blog and started to cooperate with us, improving the information we were able to provide to our readers. We got interviews, exclusives, etc.

To promote the blog, we circulated some press releases to the media and secured a number of radio and newspaper slots on local and national programmes.

The single biggest question from all these journalists wasn't "how'd you manage your stellar success and build such an amazing website?" It was "You couldn't be running this website for free - how do you make money?"

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When it comes to making money on the Internet, or more specifically with a blog, there are simply so many options out there, it can be a little overwhelming for someone starting out, trying to earn a living through blogging or through creating a website community. One of the highest paying and easiest to use ways to make money is with affiliate programs. Affiliate Marketing is a lot simpler than the blogging and marketing 'gurus' would like you to think, and I whipped up a questions and answers blog post, highlighting a conversation I had with a client a few weeks back.

Question - What’s the single easiest way to start Affiliate Marketing right now?

This is an incredibly difficult question to answer, let alone to start with… In Affiliate Marketing, relying on a ‘single’ technique or tactic, even just to get you going, is suicidal. You need to be using a wide range of different methods to drive traffic through your affiliate links – anything from PPC to blogging, SEO to viral marketing… It’s really up to you. In the Affiliate Defined videos I’m creating, there are some truly unique tactics, tricks, tips and ideas to get you started.

Question - Do you need a big website to successfully use Affiliate Marketing?

Absolutely not! You don’t even NEED a website! There are so many ways you can reach an audience on the Internet (whether you choose video marketing on sites like YouTube or PayPerClick advertising on networks like AdWords, maybe even a bit of t-shirt marketing from time to time) it’s reached a point where a website isn’t actually needed to earn an income online, and that’s what Affiliate Marketing is all about. Promoting other people’s products on other people’s websites!

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This article will show you how to place AdSense code (or any other ads) between posts on your WordPress blog's main page - the same approach can be used to place ad blocks in your archive pages (including category and author archives).

I'm going to explain the conceptual part first (yes, I just like to hear myself talk) and give code examples later - if you want to skip to the code, just scroll down.

How-To - Basic Concepts

The basic concept (so you can port it to a blogging platform other than WordPress) is that you want to place ads after X number of posts on the main page.

Let's say that you want to put ad blocks after the 1st post and the 3rd post - so you would then find a way to dynamically count the number of posts that are being shown and set it so that after the 1st post and the 3rd post.

In WordPress the main process used to show posts to visitors is called 'The Loop' (read this and this for more info). In programming terms it's a while () loop that continues to show posts one by one until it meets a condition that tells it to stop (such as a WP setting that limits the blog to show the latest 15 posts on the main page) or if there are no more posts.

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Part 4 of the Performancing Reboot

How can my blog make money?

It's a question every blogger asks himself one time or the other. If you're lucky (and smart), you get the answer soon enough.

But even if you *know* how your blog will make money (through AdSense if I can increase my traffic, through TLA if I can increase my PR, through affiliate marketing...maybe I could sell a book?), chances are you'll be stumbling through the implementation.

But the guys Performancing are all about implementation right? Showing you how to monetize your blog hands-on and what not?

So how do WE make money?

There are 3 basic things we can do (or your site can do):

1. Services: This is the first and perhaps the most obvious for me, possibly because of my freelance writing and SEO consulting background. If you're an expert on something, why not make money off it?

   There are a couple of issues with services - how do you take out that much time, how do you price them and most importantly, why are you selling your expertise when you could be using it to make more money on your own projects?

2. Ads: Easiest of them all. We could monetize the archives through AdSense, sell text link ads, paid graphics ads like on SEJ, affiliate promos, etc etc. Personally as a blog owner and reader I don't mind ads but I hate the fact that a) ad placements are so uncreative and b) ad creatives are so ... uncreative. Some more effort, guys.
3. Products: In the long run, this is probably the best solution. Think SEO Book, or heck, SEO Elite. A product - whether it's a book or software - is an excellent branding tool and nice earner if you can establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

We've already started on the ads, we have a product (pMetrics) and we are going to working on all three areas (products, ads, services) in the coming months.

If you've got any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

There are many reasons why people hate AdSense and most of them are quite silly. I've taken the top 10 reasons below, and discussed each of them individually.

There are some valid concerns, definitely, but a few of them are just ridiculous.

10 - Poor email support / Poor support overall

This is a fair point - AdSense can and should do more in terms of tech support.

However, when you consider the sheer number of people who use AdSense and even if you place the percentage of people who need tech support generously low, that's still a lot of users.

I'd like to see the Google AdSense team do more (they've improved since last year, IMO), especially in replying to all email support queries within 12 hours. Impossible? Hardly.

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Donations - I'm sure you have either tried asking for them, know someone who has, or have come across a blog or site with a prominent "donate now" button on it somewhere. It could be a donation of any form such as the Chipin widget, the Buy Me a Beer plugin, or a simple Paypal button. Believe it or not, donations can actually work.

I guarantee it can be frustrating. After all, you've created the most outstanding blog or website in your chosen niche. You've jam pack loaded it with incredible one of a kind content that can't be found anywhere else, and it is starting to generate a decent amount of traffic. Comments are routinely left that are positive, praising you for your efforts and more importantly praising you for sharing your insights for free.

It's about this point that you suddenly realize you could have been selling this content all along and making a nice profit, but instead you've locked yourself into a situation where you stand to lose your readers if you cut off their access and start charging for it.

Your site is where it is at because you've been generous, open, and giving, and charging for your content or special articles, even in your mind, is not really a viable option.

I have a solution for you and it is what I did on my site to make donations work. Give begging a chance. My main site, How to Box, is proof of it. But, you have to be willing to give as much as you take. Let me explain.

I'm not saying, flat out ask for money. I've tried that elsewhere and I've seen it elsewhere and not only does it make your site or blog seem cheap (in my opinion), but it has a bit of a deflating effect on your own psyche (thoughts like "I can't believe I'm begging...") Just plopping a Paypal donate now button on your site isn't enough. There has to be some incentive for your user to use it. By changing your perception of what a donation actually is, then you have a monetization strategy that works.

If you have enough of the following characteristics in place, your blog or site might be a candidate for donations:

• A loyal userbase
• A decent amount of traffic
• Flagship content (thanks to Chris Garrett)
• Some kind of interactivity between yourself and your readers (comments, privatemessages or whatever)
• Your readers have to trust you - at least a little bit.

Once you have a couple or all of these characteristics, then you can implement my donation strategy which consists of:

1. Creating at least two levels of users - regular and premium

2. Taking your flagship content and giving unrestricted access to your premium user.

3. Making it incredibly easy and completely unrestrictive for your regular users to become premium users.

The key to this lies in point 3. Otherwise, the donation is simply a payment under the guise of a donation. There is a fine distinction here that I'm sure we could argue over many beers and still not sway one another's minds. Hopefully I can make this clear.

A donation is a donation if a person willingly gives you money. You can argue that it is money given with no expectation of return, however, I'd argue that that person either already has received something (an excellent site or blog), or will receive it (premium status) after giving you the money. The most important thing is that you can not restrict any user, money or not, from easily obtaining premium if they don't want to donate. This is what still makes it a donation and not a payment. Regardless of whether they make the donation or not, you have to be willing to upgrade their account and continue to give away your excellent flagship content if they ask, although I'll show you how to minimize this in a minute. Thus, like I said above, you have to be willing to give as much as you take.

I found that there was a wide demographic of my users that either:

1. Could not afford to pay for my product
2. Were skeptical of paying for my product
3. Had no physical means of paying for my product (no Paypal, no credit card, etc...)

As well, I created the site with full intention of never making any money off of it. I actually did it to make a difference (as noble and full of crap as that sounds.) To this day, my primary purpose is not to line my pockets, but to make it grow, prosper, and help the people using it learn how to box and get in incredible shape. Thus, any money that comes in is just "gravy".

So, when costs finally started pissing off my wife, I tried this "donation" method of selling. My training programs are only accessible to premium users and I allow my users to pay me whatever they can afford to get them. Not only does it relieve them of any risk, but it actually surprised me at just how generous total strangers can be.

Do I get taken advantage of? Absolutely. I routinely have people donate $.50 or $.25 just to get access, but I also know that some of those lowball donations are people just testing me out. Seeing if what they are getting is any good and then some of them come back and donate again with something more substantial. All in all, the number of really lowball donations is extremely low (<2%).

In the end, it doesn't matter, because if someone emails me their sob story about how they can't afford to pay, yadda yadda yadda, I quickly respond with "I've upgraded your site, enjoy" and they lay on the praise and adoration which not only helps my ego, but I know is being spread to their friends. Friends who have money and are willing to part with it.

For the most part, though, I believe people are honest and when they like the site, they pay well for the training programs.

(I'm currently experimenting with a couple of things to increase the initial donation amount and will report back if they work.)

My site now makes more in donations than it does from all other advertising on it (affiliate and adsense) combined and has increased every month since I implemented it. It required tweaking though as I started like so many others and just put a "donate now" button up and hoped for the best. Turns out visitors need an incentive to donate because:

They are too damn lazy to actually make a donation no matter how much they like your blog or site.

Before I sum up, I have two more things to say. First, donations doubled when I made the process a one click, automated upgrade path. That is, users simply put a number in a box and hit donate and it is done. Paypal does the rest. Their account is automatically upgraded and they have full access. The more clicks in the process, the more chance laziness has of taking over before the money hits your account.

Second, I turn those that can't afford to donate into dollars as well through the use of an advertising program allowing incentive clicks (Maxbounty - that's my affiliate link, hope you don't mind:). Before I grant them access, I ask them to choose an option that pays me for their lead. I'll expand on this in another blog post if anyone is interested. If that still is not an option for them, then I upgrade their account anyways. Again, this goes back to laziness. It takes effort to write an email. Give them a different option and they almost always take it.

I know I said that I'd sum up and this is already way too long, but I figured you might be interested in the technical side. I'm running Drupal and use the following modules to make this magic happen:

1. role signup
2. lm_paypal with a slight modification
3. tac_access lite

That's it. It really is a simple process.

I really hope this helps someone out there. Now feel free to debate whether or not it truly is a donation or just some convoluted method of convincing myself I'm not begging. Cheers.

Yesterday we talked about the difference between pushing your blog as a shop and as a billboard.

There's plenty of advice on how to optimize the advertising on your blog (I've done several blog reboots on this) but not much in terms of turning your blog into a shop (note: see the Harry Potter experiment for another view on this).

So I'd like to put this question to the Perf community - how would you sell a book (or any other product) directly through a blog? How would your design change (if it would change), how would you change the focus of your blog (would you), etc.

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Is your blog whoring out for 5 cent clicks? When it come to making money from blogs, the easiest option seems to be to put advertising on it. AdSense, TLA, Chitika, paid reviews and other advertising gimmicks go a long way towards feeding the bloggers' need to make money.

It isn't the only way to make money though - and as a fellow blogger recently commented, there are serious advantages in considering your blog to be a shop rather than a billboard.

This is NOT a rant against blog advertising. Unlike some purists who feel that blogs should not have any advertising (the reasons behind that are food for a whole different discussion), I believe that advertising revenue is convenient for a blogger who is short on resources and wants to make money from his hobby (or passion).

However, if advertising is all you're focusing on for revenues as a blogger, you're missing out on a significant amount of income.

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Last month, I talked about buying websites for profit and SEO ranking. Of course, you could overdo it and end up with too many blogs. Well, what about investing in domains. I'm talking about domains with no websites attached.

Aviva Directory is a general purpose site with some interesting content. One article, how to get started as a domainer, gives some suggestions on how you can get into domaining, what tools to use, how to pay for it all, and how to make money at it.

The primary difference between blogging and domaining is that the latter does not require as much investment in time, and can be automated to a degree. Domaining can earn you a lot of money, if you do the necessary domain name research, and there are a number of strategies for doing so. Some strategies are getting a bit dated, replaced with newer methods. A few methods:

1. Free parking, which brings in contextual ad revenue, split with the parking host. Under this strategy you might only make a few cents per day, but if you have hundreds of domains, you could earn a few hundred dollars or more per month.

2. Automated bulk buying, which amounts to buying hundreds of "interesting" domain names and then selling the lot for a small profit per domain.
3. Flipping, which is usually done with domains that have been around for a while. You buy it on speculation, thinking that in the near future, it'll command more than you paid for it.
4. Traffic gathering. If you have a weblog or site that covers a general topic, you would have a number of domains whose names would have keywords relating to your site's topic. Each domain would redirect to the main site. This way, you probably have to rely on type-in traffic.

I've only very recently started into domaining and it's yet to make me a cent - but only because I really haven't put in the time. If you're interested, the potential profit can be more than the average blogger might make. Check out the Aviva Directory article for a list of tools, tips and resources. If you've been domaining, do you have any tips you can add?

Let's say you have a site its doing roughly 750,000 monthly pageviews and continuing to grow onward and upward. And yet you are losing money. How do you monetize it. It's in a relatively unprofitable geeky niche. Therefore it can't make any money right?

When looking at any revenue stream you have to find out how to profit on a website regardless of its traffic. Every site has influece to some degree. Not only do I want to increase profitablity, but I also want to increase traffic 2 fold in the next 30 days.

For all those folks who submitted your site into the blog makeover reviews this is really going to help you build a blog whether from scratch or from your existing content base.

The thing that most bloggers do when creating a site is they undervalue it. By saying "Oh this is personal site therefore it doesn't have the same amount of value as a 'professional' publisher."

One of the host of mistakes professional bloggers make is not understanding the principles of being able to capitalize on marketing and monetization.

Anyone who's been blogging at least a few months knows that in most cases, contextual ad revenue from networks such as Google AdSense comes in trickles. A better option, provided you have a Google PR (PageRank) of at least 4 and a blog in an appropriate niche, is link ads such as  Text Link Ads or Text Link Brokers. (Know of another one? Drop a comment.) You also need backlinks (outside links to your blog), some feed subscriptions, and at least a steady bit of traffic - though not necessary a lot.

Steady Revenue

It's not passive revenue. At least not at first while you're building PR and backlinks, etc. But it can tend towards that. A word of caution: not all blogs are suitable. Of the eight blogs I have registered at Text Link Ads, only four have sponsors. Some have never had link sponsors since they were registered maybe eight months ago. One sold out its inventory in less than 2 months. Another sold out today, and another was just accepted but already has four sponsors. I have another 7 that need a bit of TLC before they're ready, but when they are, they should do okay.

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The amount of advertisement you see in my blog here tells you I ‘gian lui’. You know. ‘money crazy’? Not that I make thousands out of it, but the kick of seeing your yearly hosting fees being taken care of by itself, is a good feeling. So I try anything that comes along the way. So far, adsense has done it’s job of paying my hosting fees, and that should gives you a rough idea of how much I am making. If you don’t, just ask around how much it takes to host your own domain. Hehehee…. it’s almost next to peanuts.

Anyway, the latest craze which started just the beginning of this week is Performancing. It is so new that they actually haven’t announce it officially and it has already caught on like the wild fire burning next door. Every professional blogger, every amatuer blogger and every ‘lui kui’ blogger worth their salt has signed up for the programme. Check here to see all the big names and their price that they have set for advertising in their blogs. If you scroll down further you will see Ahpek.com somewhere at the bottom, priced at $31.00. It is their automated pricing system that decided that my blog is worth that much. I didn’t set my own price because I don’t know how much it is worth as this blog is still so new.

It works almost like Text Link Ads but the beauty of this new programme is that they allow all bloggers to participate. Even those using hosted domains like Blogger. Text Link Ads only allow bloggers blogging on thier own domain. I think all bloggers should try this. It doesn’t takes up much of your space, you don’t have to pay anything and in the process you might actually make some US dollars. A blog with a few of these kind of links looks elegant as well. Interested? well you know where to find the link. Neh.. just next door only..the square one with the words ‘Performancing’ leh… And while you are at it, if you have your own domain, why not sign up with TLAs also..