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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.

Selling Advertising vs Selling Products

What does it mean for a blog to be a shop rather than a billboard?

As a rule of thumb, the ‘billboard’ approach means that you are driving leads to someone else’s business and you get paid a commission for doing so. In other words, you get paid for sending people away from your website.

The ‘shop’ approach allows you to make money from your visitors directly, and as such requires a different approach in design and blogging (your blog design would now be optimized to highlight the product you are selling and if you shun advertising revenue completely, then you have plenty of space on your blog for not only promoting your products but also promoting your site’s content in prominent locations on your blog.

There are pros and cons for each approach:

Advertising is easy to start off with but if you want to make serious money from it you’ll have to work hard to increase traffic and to attract the big advertisers. There’s also the trade-off between space for content and space for ads.

Selling products requires a lot of work in the beginning (getting the product and sales text and graphics ready – although if you outsource everything and you have the money for it (through advertising, maybe?) then it’s easier) and setting up the sales process takes some level of knowledge / expertise. On the other hand, once you get going and automate the whole process (from bringing in leads to converting them to pitching the back-end products to them, selling products will make you far more money than just advertising.

It’s been said here on Performancing before – if you make your ads the content – if everything you write promotes and sells your products (implicitly), then you’ve got an almost perfect business model.

Last month, Splashpress Media (the parent outfit of Performancing) revealed a re-energized Blog-Tutorials.com. While Performancing is the place to go for your regular dose of professional/advanced blogging tips, Blog-Tutorials takes us back to the basics. Definitely useful for beginners; that’s not to say that veterans won’t pick up new things from the blog!

Here’s an appetizer of some sorts, a quick list of several Blog-Tutorials posts that you might find helpful:

• Make Yourself Found! (Or, Promote Your Site Web 2.0-Style) — “The idea: step out of your blogging space and find sites that let you link to your blog, posts and all. Consider this a very natural way of optimizing your online presence and socializing around the Web.”
• Two Design Tactics To Improve Your Blog Income — “What’s the workaround? One way is to use Google’s own image ads beside beside text ads. For instance, you can use Google’s Firefox Ad beside Google text ads as follows…”
• When Not to Blog, Part 1 & Part 2 — “Breathe first before you write. You might be aiming to be the first to get the story out, but really, what are the chances of that happening if it’s a popular event?…Better to come up with an excellent and complete post. Remember, the excitement over the event will not die down for the next few days and people will still be on the lookout for posts, so you can afford to trade 1-2 hours for a comprehensive article.”
• Make Your Blog Posts Readable — “The key idea here is to divide your paragraphs and sentences into easily digestible chunks. Second, HTML is your friend: I’ll be mentioning several tags you can put to good use.”
• Protect Important Folders in your Blog — “Here’s how it works: we should not allow sensitive directories on our blogs to list their contents publicly. We do not want malicious visitors getting any hints on how they can compromise our websites. We should not let search engines list irrelevant folders in their results.”

After recently passing the official two year mark of blogging full-time, I realized that I had too many blogs and sold some off, thanks to my friend Ryan Caldwell. But the bug bit me again, and I found myself immediately launching new blogs, only to find once again that I simply didn’t have the time to maintain them all, nor the capital to hire bloggers for all the sites. So I pulled out my clipboard and started sketching out some ideas for blog building based on the recent advice of Ahmed, Ryan, Brett and others, particularly about working smarter, conquering a niche, tips on link building, consolidatng blogging efforts, and more.

What I came up with is a bit of a roadmap for myself. No longer will I blindly rush into a new blog, with the exception of maybe two blogs that I’m prepping behind the scenes as future blogger resources. (They’ll be announced here once they’ve accumulated some content and free tools, but I will be posting plugins, theme hacks, and techniques here in the meantime.) Back to the roadmap idea…

For me, I don’t consider a site of mine successful until it reaches at least PR5, though that’s simply one measure in a suite of metrics that I apply. That’s true for sites that I’m monetizing via ads, but in an of itself, PR means different things to different people. Still, it’s a measure I use, and it’s probably one of the more visible metrics, because of browser toolbars, etc. As a result, I believe it has invisible positive synergetic effects. It generally means your site is less invisible than it was at PR4. However, there are many PR4 sites with far more traffic than PR5.

So, given my chosen metric for defining partial success, my plan for building future sites came out as follows, tailored for my own preferences. Now, if PR means nothing to you, then the following list isn’t going to mean much either, though you should still create your own roadmap, even if you’re just going to build a single blog.

1. Create fewer blogs.
   Too many blogs take up a lot of time to maintain, and drain you.
2. Mini-sites.
   Create more mini-sites and concept sites that are self-sustaining. (Less work means I can join Brett blogging by the lake, if only in essence in Toronto rather than in Virginia, where I believe he is now.)
3. Get more into rich media.
   While I love writing, I love producing streaming media more. I plan to slowly shift into mostly media production, which fits into my very long-term goal of being a film maker – decided upon probably over 20 yrs ago, but encouraged by the brother of a famous filmmaker I once met.
4. Create more resource/ how-to sites.
   This is ideal for me, from a background of being a university teaching assistant, a corporate trainer and a technical writer. And since my subject background is computer programming, math/ stats/ analysis, I plan to focus on building analysis tools that’ll be useful to other bloggers and hopefully even SEOs. For lack of a better term, I’m referring to these tools collectively as a blogmaster’s toolbox, but they’ll go beyond bloggers.
5. Stay focused.
   Build a new site up to PR4 before starting another project. The diagram above shows just a few types of links you can work on building, though there are a few I’ve left out (such as blogroll links, purchased links, links from free themes, etc.) Links are not the only factor in increasing PR, but they are an important factor.
6. Follow-thru.
   Don’t abandon a new site when it hits PR4. Flesh out the other metrics to take it PR5 or PR6. That includes more subscriptions and backlinks, and continuing to add content in the hopes of drawing more comments and trackbacks. Read/ follow the advice offered here and many other sites for link building techniques. Also use your own existing sites to promote your new ones, as well as guesting elsewhere, in return for a link back. It’s really relatively easy to get to PR4 within a single Google PR rollout duration of about three months. If you plan ahead of time, promote a lot, and have solid content, you can get to PR5 in the same time. Some have managed PR6. And then you find “things” happening, that the same type of content gets higher readership and thus more comments, trackback, etc. It’s an exponential effect.
7. Stop obsessing.
   Don’t worry about a site earning no/little revenue before PR4, even if advertising appears on the site. Obsessing over the CTR, CPM, etc., just serves to stress you out. Focus on the content and promoting your site. If you’re going to waste your time, why not do it “visualizing” your goals. The worst that can happen is that you did a bit of daydreaming, which usually is more enjoyable than obsession. And of course, you might suddenly be inspired from your daydreaming to produce content.

So before you launch more blogs, I urge you to make your own roadmap. I’ve intentionally been specific about how each item above fits in with my own goals and desires so you have example of how to be specific for yourself. What do you really want to blog about? Do you really want to maintain 20-30 blogs like I’ve been trying to do (and failing miserably at it), or just 1-4 and making them the best they can be? Maybe you want to get into how-tos, podcasting, video or other visual content.

What defines success for your blogs? It’s unfortunate but it’s part of human nature to measure, and that means using some sort of metric, be it Page Rank, traffic, subscriptions, back links, comments, trackbacks, mentions in old media (newspapers, TV), and/or daily revenue. That’s just the way it is, but you can make your own defnition of blogging success. A roadmap will just make it easier to get there, making your goals concrete.

[Advanced] So you’re planning to launch a new blog but don’t want to reveal it to anyone quite yet, for a variety of reasons. You want to be able to view individual posts as they would normally appear, but neither want them indexed nor visible to anyone. Or you want to test some themes on an existing blog without your visitors having to see.

There are a few ways to accomplish either, and it’s relatively easy. Just make sure you take precautions to back up your existing blog and database. (I’ve wiped out a few sites. Fortunately, they never had more than about 9 posts, and could be fixed manually.)

Subdomain Method for Existing Blogs

This method is useful for testing changes to a blog that already exists. It amounts to creating a test blog on a subdomain. Your hosting account must allow you to not only set up a subdomain for your, but also access the existing database. You should know that many hosts do not allow this. And as I’ve only tested on WordPress this method may not work for you on other blog platforms.

1. Create a subdomain. So if your blog is at http://www.myblogdomain.com/, then create something like test.myblogdomain.com. You’ll need to do this in your hosting control panel, not your blog platform control panel.
2. Install your blog platform on the subdomain. If you have “one-click” blog setup through your host, just make sure that you specify the subdomain during installation, else you may wipe out your existing blog.
3. Tweak the test blog’s configuration to access the real blog’s database. If your hosting provider does not allow this, you will need to backup the main database and import into the test database.
4. Turn off access to your test blog to search engine bots. Newer versions of WordPress have a “privacy” setting. For older versions, look under the “Writing” options of “Options” and get rid of the entries in the “Update Services” section that “ping” one or more blog pinging services. For other blog platforms, you will have to look for something similar.
5. Make your changes and test them. No one will know that the test blog exists, provide you don’t click on any links to either the main blog nor outside your domain. Also make sure not to change the database or you may affect the main blog. (That is, if the test blog is accessing the original database.)
6. When you’re done, just get rid of the test blog and apply changes to the main blog, if desired. Just make sure you don’t get over-zealous and delete the wrong database. [I would highly recommend backing up the main blog’s database before starting this process.]

This method is good for when you have an existing blog and want to test a few themes and plugins before going live. But what if you want to launch a new blog and don’t want anyone to see any of the content until you’re done tweaking?

Hide Your Home Page Method

This method is ideal for a new blog. No one knows your URL yet, and posts and pages are not indexed.

Last year, I came across a WordPress plugin that disallows access to the home page, unless you are an admin. However, I never managed to get it to work, as simple as it was. My method requires no plugin, but does require a bit of code tweaking. The general essence of it is to tweak your theme’s main page code. What you’ll do depends on both your specific theme and your blogging platform. My specific instructions will be for WordPress’ “default” theme, for simplicity. Here is the general procedure:

Whether your theme uses a single template file for rendering the home page, post (permalink) pages, and archive pages, the process is the same. Note that for most themes I’ve tried (a good several dozen), all had a different template file for “page” pages. (That’s “pages” in the blog sense, where the page is not part of the reverse chronological bunch of post pages.)

1. Backup your theme’s files.
2. Tweak your home page’s template file.
1. In WordPress, that file is called index.php but in your WP panel’s Theme Editor, it may be labelled something like “Main index”. Select that file for editing. and look for the conditional code that determines whether the URL being rendered is the home page, a post (permalink) page, or an archive page. [Not a “Page” page, though.] Note that even if you have a theme that uses a separate template file for the home page than for post pages, the process is the same.
2. In the conditional code of the template file that checks whether the URL being rendered is the home page, remove any code that displays post content.
3. Replace that code with a message or graphic stating that the blog is “in beta” or whatever you like.
3. Remove all links in the sidebar template(s).
4. Remove any advertising in all templates, in case having ads on pages with no content violates some network’s TOS.
5. Turn on the privacy setting to block search engines. In some blog platforms, you may need to disable the “ping” settings. That way, when you post a new article, the URL will not be sent out to various blog pinging services. If that happens, then your whole effort is pointless.
6. Tweak themes and plugins, add new content. You’ll be able to access specific posts and pages from your blog platform’s control panel. However, if you try to view the home page, it’ll be blank except for your message.
7. When you’re ready to go live, just replace the template files with your backup copy. Remember to turn off privacy settings and add any pinging services you want to access.

There’s generally no need to do anything to the “page” template because it will not affect the home page. We also don’t need to do anything to the post template, only the code that renders the home page.

Keep in mind that both methods above fall apart if you click on any link to an URL outside your domain, since those sites could have a list of referring URLs. This of course exposes your otherwise hidden blog