Chris Garrett is running a global blogger survey, and if you participate, you're eligible to win one of 10 copies of the ProBlogger Book that he co-wrote with Darren Rowse of Problogger.

Darren wrote an inspiring article, 12 Traits of Successful Bloggers. It's inspiring, at least to me, because I think I have many of the traits (either at present, or have had in the past and thus can recover). The short list:

1. Creative and playful.
2. Innovative.
3. Connectors.
4. Community Enablers.
5. Information Mavens.
6. Communicators.
7. Interest.
8. Entrepreneurs.
9. Originality.
10. Perserverance.
11. Focus.
12. Curiousity.

Now to work on my weak areas, the biggest of which is "Focus" What about you? Which traits do you have? Which do you think is the most important? (I vote for "Perserverance", because if that's all you have right now, it'll carry you through while you build the other traits.)

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For the last couple of years I was spending my hobby time on building a blog in a rather narrow niche - a particular aspect of software development. As many other hobby writers I found it difficult to write regularly and would happily receive some assistance. I keep my site open for the readers and sometimes site visitors posted own articles, but it was never enough.

Therefore since about a year ago I am permanently looking for the freelancers on the topic. I posted ads on Performacning job market, another blogger job board, even contacted authors of the other blogs in the niche. This way I was able to find several writers including the good ones, but never I managed to get as much regular writing as I wanted.

Your skills are wanted

The reason is simple - there are not many writers in any specialized niche. When a person is a professional in his area, he is likely to earn his living from the day job activities and is rarely really interested in freelance writing (unless he is professional in freelance writing). He might like the idea of earning few extra bucks and becoming a known authority in the niche, but chances are that his interests will erode over time.

Certainly, there are excellent writers in any niche, but to get those you got to pay a lot. As a result I believe there are many mid-to-low budget bloggers all the time willing to get more writers on the board. These authors can be novices in blogging, might not commit to the strict schedules and still be very valuable - it is their specialized experience that makes their work attractive. For instance, when I manage to get an experience software developer writing on my blog, I am more than eager to provide him with blogging related advices and even to do the whole editorial part of work.

Got profession - got blogging money

The bottom line is simple. If you have skills in pretty much any area, you can easily earn extra $5-20 an hour by freelance writing in a relevant niche blog - the writer's skills are not important. If you want to explore the opportunity:

• advertise your willingness to write on the Performancing job market or some other blogging related job boards
• contact the authors of the blogs in your niche. Looks for the blogs that do some advertising, but are not exactly big sites with real journalists
• if you are a software developer, contact me at artem.marchenko@agilesoftwaredevelopment.com

Picture cortesy of e-magic @ Flickr

Do you have dreams of making a living working online, possibly through blogging? Do you have a plan for how to achieve that? This year marks three years of serious blogging for me, though I have been a freelance writer and published author for much longer. Since becoming a committed blogger, the tough decision has always been whether to blog for myself or to freelance. Both have their positives and negatives.

Here I am nearly three years later and still mostly freelancing, not putting enough time into my own web properties. But in general, I'm questioning if there's any future in pro blogging for the average person wanting to be a web publisher. Don't get me wrong. I'm almost never short of opportunities for paid work online. But some months are real downers, or the stakes per project are high. So if I miss a deadline or cannot complete a project, there's that much more to lose. There's no half-billing if I only finish half of a project. But my own properties are so neglected that they earn very little. Quite the dilemma.

If you're just starting out in the blogosphere, what should you do? Short answer: learn the good and the bad aspects of both blogging options. Here are just a few of both that come readily to mind.

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Pros and Cons of Blogging For Yourself

Have you picked a niche for your pro blogging? Do you know what niche conversation you'd like to be part of? Have you been able to stick to just one niche? This afternoon, I pulled out a notebook with the intent of listing three niches to focus on for my own projects: photography, film and cars. Not because there's necessarily a lot of revenue potential in these niches but because I have enjoyed them for a very long time. My cat who thinks he's a dog, Aeric Sir Stinkybutt decided to join me. A 20-minute catnap later, my list of three niches became ten.

This is a constant problem for a generalist like myself: inability to focus. I enjoy a lot of topics, whether or not there's revenue potential. I just can't write for long on a topic I don't enjoy. Fortunately for my freelancing biz, I like a lot of topics. But unfortunately for my freelancing, that means monitoring the events in multiple niches and then building multiple niche blogs of my own.

The latter is a necessity if you want to successfully promote your writing clients' sites, or even just to convince clients that you can handle a niche. It does not mean you have to do all the writing yourself, but you probably want to maintain at least one site for each niche you'd like to be hired in.

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Anna Goldsmith has some fine tips at Copyblogger for a successful freelance writing career, but they apply to any stay-at-home web worker, especially bloggers.

1. Create a division between work and home.
2. Take off your pajamas.
3. Get to work on time.
4. Don't watch TV in the middle of the day.
5. Go out to lunch.

In reading this, I realized that I violate all these rules often. My desk is in my bedroom, I sometimes wake up and blog in my "pajamas" (looks like a sarong), I get up anywhere between 8 am and 11 am (but usually before 9), I never go out to lunch, and I often watch TV all day and all night.

I know that when I "dress for work", I'm always more productive. But I have to watch TV because I get a huge source of my "pop culture" knowledge from doing so. And watch a lot of classic movies on TCM and AMC as part of my film studies. It's a necessity, but I do try to spend at least 3-5 hours straight without the TV on.

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A few days ago, I posed the question Are Bloggers and Blogs Ruining the English Language? In hindsight, only an hour after posting, I realized that I missed an opportunity and made a mistake with that article. It should have been formatted/ massaged into being part of my current series, Joining a Niche Conversation. The question is, should I have edited it and changed the title after I had already posted it live?

The article generated a fair bit of response, but it might have provided more value to the series than on its own. For example, had it been titled "Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 3: Avoiding Communication Breakdown," it might have contributed to the series' synergy. In the latter form, it would have to be tighter and maybe contain a summary and a bullet list.

It was an oversight on my part. I'd already produced a loose outline for the series, but had not included rules of grammar as a topic. Of course, that doesn't mean I can't go back and edit the article. This question has come up amongst members of The Hive, Performancing's new authority forum: should you edit archived blog articles?

Here are a few considerations:

1. Website content gets edited. Why not blog content?
2. What impact will changing blog content have?
3. Is it worth the effort of editing archived posts? What value
4. Is it okay to change the title?
5. Should you change the URL?

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Once you've picked out the top blogs in your niche, you can join the conversation. (The next post in this series will cover monitoring a niche.) To stand out, you want to offer either fresh ideas to further a blogosphere conversation or start a new one. Idea-generating can be a lot easier than some of you might think.

What to Do

For those of you that only have time for the condensed version, here is the gist of the article below.

1. Read fiction, read non-fiction. Read newspapers, books, magazines, posters, ads and product labels.
2. Listen to music of as many types and origins as you can manage.
3. Watch movies, short films, documentaries, videos, and informative TV programs.
4. Listen to the conversation of people out in public.
5. Listen to the sound of other languages - just the sound - and then
   approximate those sounds with English sounds. (Don't ask why; just try
   it.)
6. Learn about anthropology, history, the arts, architecture, science and technology, and whatever else you can manage.
7. Write every day, even when you don't feel like it.
8. Don't overwhelm yourself; ease in.
9. Utilize the crossroads of the Internet: the Blogosphere.

When you have time, come back and read the full article, and also read the superb article by Brian Clark/ Copyblogger, that I've linked to below. It's coincidence that I wrote most of this article around the same time, but once I read Brian's, I tied in my article with his - to join the conversation.

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If you've watched the news in the past day, you probably already know that U.S.-based economic worries triggered a stock market meltdown all over the world. There are fears of a U.S. recession in 2008 - or the closest thing to it that it doesn't matter.

While this isn't something to be proud of, I've been saying for two years that a recession will come. However, I expected it to happen between 2009-2011, not this early. In fact, this Monday meltdown was triggered by President Bush's announcement of an aid package to prevent a recession - or so I understand. (What's more, Jan 21st is supposed to be the worst day of the year for seasonal depression.)

Unfortunately, that sort of talk from a head of state often triggers worse events rather than helping. The last thing a recession needs is for people to stop spending, but that's what usually happens.

Now, should you as a blogger worry about this? If advertisers start to worry, there might be less ad inventory to go around - and it very likely will go to the top blogs in a given niche.

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If you work for yourself and spend a substantial portion of your day online, have you consciously considered how important your computer and Internet connection are? Do you have a contingency plan if something goes wrong?

While it's nice to keep a positive attitude, sometimes things just go wrong. Consider: This past Wednesday night, for the first time in several years, I decided to write down some "affirmations". After spending 10-15 minutes typing into a mindmap all the great things that would happen in my life for the next two years - and envisioning it all - my computer shut down on its own. It wouldn't turn back on until Thursday morning, only to display a message about the CPU being shut down due to some "thermal event".

Of course, my heart beat rapidly. My entire work life, passwords, contact info, online banking access, etc., was on there. And while I had intentions of getting another computer because of the way I work, I hadn't planned on it financially just yet. Out of worry, I did buy another computer last night (thanks to my brother and a generous loan from Ryan). The service guy did manage to fix the old one, after nearly an hour of working on it, but I'm relieved to have a backup.

At this point, I have some redundancy in my equipment and accessories. While I don't earn much in ad revenue, I do make a reasonable income freelancing. So like any business person, I have to protect my income-earning ability by ensure I have the necessary tools, even to the point of redundancy:

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Today is a milestone day for me, and it'll surprise some people. AdSense gave me a nice treat for Hallowe'en - but it doesn't make up for the trick of my pagerank dropping on several sites I spent good money buying and/or building. At any rate, I finally cracked $100 in Adsense earnings in a single month, for the first time since I started using the ad network around April 2005. That's a very long time, and has allowed me to reflect upon it. Here's what I've learned:

1. Focus. Stick to building one site at a time and reach a modest amount of success before starting another site.

2. Build traffic. You need a lot of traffic to monetize through AdSense, especially in competitive niches and obscure niches.
3. Fine tune. Don't run AdSense on sites that are giving you low ad CTR (Clickthrough Rate). Try it out, but if after a couple of months the CTR is low, stop using it until you determine why.
4. Refine. Make sure to blend ads into your blog/ site theme. Don't hide your ads but don't make them stick out like a sore thumb in terms of colors and borders.
5. Refine some more. Try the rectangular and square AdSense formats. These apparently have higher CTR, though I didn't keep track of any AdSense channels to prove it.
6. Improve quality. Write quality content that you can promote with social media, and keep it up or you'll lose readership. This will give you the traffic you absolutely need to monetize CPC advertising. If you have older posts you're embarrassed to have, don't delete them. Instead, when you can't think of what to write, browse your archives and see if you can write a better version of a bad post.
7. Choose the right niche. Consider that some niches simply don't monetize well with any sort of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. One such is the "how to blog" niche. You're better off running appropriate affiliate offers. It helps considerably if you some how introduce discussions of gadgets or software no matter what your niche. Any niche that has higher priced items tends to also have higher CPC (Cost per Click) ads.

But I don't consider this by any means a success. That $100+ isn't for a single site, it's for about 50 sites. What's more, it includes sites that I'm partnered on, and have paid bloggers - who will eventually share in the revenues.

My problogging goal is to build up to at least US$3000/mth in ad revenue by making sure less of my sites suck. I get paid in US dollars, and the Canadian dollar's current exchange rate is cost me several hundred dollars per month. The film school I want to enter in 2009 costs Cdn$5,000/term [updated] and lasts for six terms over two years. Because I refuse to ever get in debt again, I have to come up with my own cash. And since I only work online at present, freelancing, consulting and ad revenue are my only income sources.

My approach will be to continue the way I've be going: maintain freelance revenue and increase ad revenue by putting more effort into my own sites. It'll be quite some time, if ever, before I earn money making movies.

What are your pro blogging goals, and how do you plan to use your earnings? Will you use them to support a career change or some other dream that you have?

It gets pointed out to me a fair bit that I seem to be all over the blogosphere. The fact is that I write for probably 1/4 the number of blogs that I worked on last year. I'm focusing on fewer high PR blogs. Or was until Big Daddy G smacked some of them with PageRank penalties. Now, the focus is writing for quality blogs.

To say I'm not worried would be lying. If sites are affected in earnings abilities due to the penalties, will that mean fewer freelance blogging gigs - my primary income source? However, I stopped considering blogging as a career on its own, so that's a few less knots in my stomach. I've learned a few things in the past 2+ years:

1. Blogging is like a game of golf. You could have skills in various facets of blogging, but if everything isn't just right and synchronized, your blog will not be a giant success. Which is not to say that modest success is bad.
2. Problogging is not a career for everyone. This is a conclusion from the last point: most bloggers will not make enough to sustain the work on their own blogs, no matter how hard they try not to suck.
3. Try blogging for hire. The blogger for hire route will probably make the average good blogger more money than their own blog(s). I emphasize "good". If you're good, disciplined, and timely, freelancing is the way to go - especially if you're finding less success on your own blog(s).
4. Apply discipline: quality, not quantity. Don't start more blogs until the first few have reached the minimum level of success you want for them. Seriously. It's tough because as a generalist, I tend to be interested in a lot of topics. I sneeze and I've just registered another handful of domains. But for most bloggers, $50/mth revenue from one blog is much better than $1/mth from fifty blogs. If you can't make one work, you can't make fifty work. Most people do not succeed with too many blogs. Focus on 1-4 blogs maximum, build them up, then hire out. Then expand if you feel the urge.
5. Blog as a means, not as an endpoint. In line with the above realizations, blogging does not have to be a singular activity. It can be a full-time career, but I'm no longer expecting it. If it happens, it happens. I'll stay positive.

While many people are praising the fact that they can blog from home, after 2+ years of doing so, I'm actually missing the social aspects of working somewhere, with other people. Does this mean I'm giving up blogging? By no means. What I am doing now is using it as an effective supplement/ platform for earning money in other ways. In fact, today I spoke to someone from the Toronto Film School, which I'm hoping to enroll in for Jan 2009. I'm also going to go back to my photography, film reviewing, and scriptwriting. Blogging will not only move me towards those goals, it'll sustain me for some time to come.

So what lessons has blogging taught you so for, in terms of your career? Do you use blogging in a supplemntary way for another career, or do you want to simply blog?

I've been into professional blogging for the past two and a half years, and I've been through most "stages" of problogging, including being a corporate blogger, a network blogger and an independent problogger trying to earn my own income online through advertising and affiliate programmes. I know I haven't exactly been earning riches from my blogging, but I do get a decent living--at least to my standards. However, I've been regularly reading blogs by the "Gurus" in problogging (you probably know who they are), and of course the very useful tips here on Performancing, and I thought I could probably earn more if I'm able to better optimize my blogging. Maybe if I followed certain formulas in my blogging work and business I can earn better.

Checking out bloggingtothebank.com, the site at first came to me as one of those standard get-rich quick schemes carried out via affiliate marketing. The home page starts with a promise that one can earn up to $34,244 per month from just a few hours' work. Well, it's not really a promise, but an example that author Rob Benwell makes of himself. He says that even "one dumb little blog can earn over $3,947 per month."

So I thought maybe it's worth checking out. There's no harm in trying to learn more about my trade, and probably even earning more than I already am. Actually that's the most difficult part of working any job or running any business--trying to unlearn and re-learn stuff with the hope of being better at what you do.

I did go on to reading more, and eventually downloading a copy of the Blogging to the Bank 2.0 ebook. I've actually read about "BTTB" before, and this one is a revised version, supposedly updated with more lessons and tips from Rob. I did realize that the point behind the ebook is that the author is sharing a success story, and would like to share his "formula" for that success in making money from blogging, so that other bloggers might follow suit.

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There's a lot of money made surrounding the idea that anyone can easily make five figures as a problogger. That's a blatant myth. And it very well maybe one of the greatest v-Myths (virtual myths) ever sent 'round the Neterwebs.

If you're considering the possibility of becoming a problogger and making a living for the rest of your life from the comfort of your own home, you need to take a long, hard, sobering look at yourself and ask whether you've got what it takes.

Oh, you haven't heard about the hardships of making it as a problogger? Not sure what it takes?

Then check out this killer article called Con’s of Being a Problogger

It doesn’t matter.

Ia Lucero’s post on the Perils of Problogging is an interesting read for Performancing.com users, who more or less look to earn money from their blogs. The post has also been picked up by a couple of other blogs, most notably by The Blog Herald.

In the post, Ia raises a lot of points, ranging from bad site monetization choices to blogs being given a bad name by the numerous unoriginal “money mills” out there. My attention was piqued by one line she wrote (emphasis added):

With the abundance of article sites out there, amateur probloggers (what a paradoxical term!) think they can get away with posting unoriginal content, an especially attractive tactic since minimal effort is required.

Hmm, “amateur probloggers”? Does that pertain to Z-listers earning mere Adsense cents a week, or part-time probloggers? Heck, what makes a problogger in the first place?

Darren Rowse has a guest post by David Wilkinson about it, and so does Michael who talks about it in a country context. For me...

I don’t really care. If someone blogs and makes money from it, whatever the method or ethics, then he can trumpet to the world that he is a problogger. I’m hoping he doesn’t give the ‘job title’ a bad name by filling his site with content o’ junk and loads of poorly placed ads, but really, that’s out of our control. Why, how many people regard lawyers and salesmen with suspicion? (Not to offend our lawyer and salesmen friends out there.) For every profession, there’s somebody out there who thinks it’s make-believe or a joke. We’ve got to live with that.

I believe the best way to approach the word “problogger” is with guarded recognition, especially during the blogging industry’s formative years. It’s a title that is secondary. Because before you blog, you might be already a freelance writer, journalist, corporate executive, web designer, comic artist, and so on. I guess this is why many people – even those who already earn substantial amounts from their blogs – go “Huh?” when given the word “problogging”. They see blogging as just a supplement to their incomes and an extension of their main jobs. This POV in turn conflicts with full-time bloggers who eat, breathe, and live by their blog earnings.

Now, I’m really interested in hearing your feedback on this one: Do you call yourself a problogger? Do you get weird reactions from friends and relatives when you tell them you are one? And what alternative job titles do you use or suggest your problogging comrades use?

Me: I call myself a problogger; it’s proudly displayed on my tech blog’s sidebar. Yes, I’ve gotten dozens of “Whaa?” faces, especially from those who own only LiveJournals and other diary-type blogs. More recently, when somebody asks me what I do for a living, I simply say, “Writer”. (Many think it’s too generic, but I believe it’s just one of the most elegant titles in the world.) And if the person who asks me looks like a Net user, I chip in, “Website owner” or “Webmaster”.

How about you, guys?

Let me tell you a little secret. In this day and age of Text Link Ads monetization, the key to squeezing income out of your blog is setting up discrete partitions.

When I first got started in blogging, I would dedicate a whole domain to a single blog. And often I still do this to get started. But as a long term strategy, I no longer limit each domain to a single entity. Once a domain is established, I utilize its strength to create new monetizable sections.

New monetizable regions of your site can come in the form of:

1. Directories
2. Sub-domain or sub-directory blogs
3. Paid press releases
4. Paid services (e.g. classifieds, rental listings, etc.)
5. Recommended products (affiliate)

And I'm sure there are more. The important thing is to set up your site so that it is structurally optimized for monetization.

Ok. So that's the theory. Let's get to some practical examples.

Identifying Potential Regions

Let's say that you have a moderately successful poker blog that's pulling in $400/month, but which has plateaued in its income growth. What do you do? Well, for starters, you could start a paid poker directory. The directory would draw income from paid submissions plus be a discrete unit for monetizing via Text Link Ads. No need to start a new blog from scratch, do link building, etc. If your current domain is strong, you'll have much faster success by sticking with that domain then starting with a new one.

The paradigm shift that I'm asking you to go through here is to not think "one service per domain" but to think "how can I squeeze as many worthwhile services onto the domains I already own." If you have a blog and you're chomping at the bit to find ways to earn more monthly income, you should seriously consider capitalizing on the property you've already built rather than trying to build a new property from scratch. The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course. But I find that far too many people think that they need to start something like 50 new websites to make a living wage as a problogger. By maximizing a few domains, you can achieve your immediate goals faster, and build stronger equity at the same time (your property becomes more valuable with more services and more sources of income).

Capitalizing on recent success

One way to capitalize on the success of your blog is to build out your brand by introducing new blogs on sub-domains. In January, my company hired a new writer at PopCrunch. She took the blog from making $3/day to making over $100/day in the matter of a few months. So how did we capitalize? By starting three new blogs as subdomains under the PopCrunch brand (a hiphop site, a style site and a television site). The subdomains we used were "hiphop" "style" and "tv" - each of these sites is now blossoming into success, and the cool thing is that each will eventually be separately monetizable via Text Link Ads.

Another Example: This time from scratch

To see my new philosophy on monetization in action, let's take a look at the most recent site my company began developing, called OneBigMaine. As a rule, we've found that location based travel and real estate sites offer mucho bang for the monetizing buck.

But let's take a look at our strategy in developing this site (which we've not fully implemented yet). In the past, as bloggeres, we might have just thrown up a WordPress blog and cranked out content, hoping to generate a mix of AdSense and TLA income 6 months down the road. That model is quite limited, though. It's limited by its structure: a single discrete section.

Instead of just throwing up a blog, we've decided instead to strategically maximize the site's earning potential by planning for as many discrete monetizable sections as possible. We've identified five:

Region 1 is the main page (i.e. the home directory) and it will serve as an informational guide (i.e. articles) on the state of Maine (property buying, history, vacation info, etc.). Region 2 is a blog about Maine, focusing primarily on Maine related news. Region 3 will be a property and rentals listing section of the site where people will pay an annual fee to list their Maine vacation homes. Region 4 will be a OneBig feed list and will serve a dual function. First, it will be a huge PageRank boost (getting linked in from more than 10 other sites in the OneBig network). Second, it will serve as an informational source showing up to the minute Maine related blog headlines. Region 5 will be a Maine related niche directory.

We haven't implemented all five of these sections, but you can get a glimpse of our mindset. There is no reason to limit yourself to a lone blog per domain. When you develop your next blog, think about how the blog might fit into a broader, more monetizable context.