Advertising

Yesterday Amy Derby gave us a peek into how she earns $1,000 a month on a blog receiving very little traffic. I sometimes earn that much on a blog receiving fairly decent traffic, but I don’t earn that much every month and I’m sure I can earn more. Still, for a writing blog it’s pretty good. You see, writing blogs are difficult to monetize.

Here’s how I do it:

Adsense – Adsense is still my biggest money maker. Though I’m still playing around with other forms of income, I have success with this and I’m not parting with it any time soon. For the end of October and beginning of November, my Adsense revenue is way down however, so I need to keep finding methods to monetize my biggest money-making blog.

Amazon – I have some luck selling books using Amazon but the bulk of my earnings with this affiliate is through the search box during the holidays. While I do earn a little using this throughout the year, during the holidays I can count on it for a few hundred bucks from people looking to do holiday shopping from home.

Kontera – I was hesitant to use Kontera at first, I’m not a big fan of context links ads but this was recommended and I’m so far pleased with the results. It’s good for a couple of hundred dollars each month.

Buy me a cup of coffee – This is something else I struggled with. A couple of years ago members of my community asked where they could make donations. I tried one of Paypal’s “donate” buttons and received a couple of dollars here and there. When I made the switch to WordPress I installed a “Buy Me a Cup of Coffee” plugin and couldn’t believe the amount of people who wanted to purchase my next White Chocolate Mocha. Actually most of my earnings for Freelance Writing Jobs is used pay the two people who help out – Jodee, who researches job leads for me and Ajay, who handles the techie stuff.

What didn’t work for me

I tried affiliate programs such as Commission Junction and so far no combination of affiliate ads or buttons have worked. I also had Auction Ads up for the better part of the year and while the beginning of the year wasn’t bad, the last few months have been a complete zero. I took auction ads out yesterday. I’m not saying these programs won’t work well for others, however.

Still Experimenting

I’m still experimenting with other affiliate programs for writers. I followed Amy’s advice and installed an Indeed ad box. I feel this program will be beneficial to my regulars. I’m also looking into affiliates for writing magazines and stores.

I think the lesson here is that you can’t just throw a few ads on your blog and forget about it. You’re constantly playing with new formulas and sources of revenue. I know a couple of people who have hinted that now that I have some help maintaining FWJ I can sort of sit back and collect profits. That’s far from the truth. Finding a way to keep the profits rolling in takes time and patience. I doubt I’ll ever get to the point where I’ll stop experimenting.

What formulas work for you?

EatonWeb is doing things the old fashioned way.

We’re looking for category editors of our blog directory and we’re willing to pay $100/month for the service.

Here are the requirements:

1. You should be familiar with the top 10-25 blogs in your category
2. You should be able to write 100 word reviews of each blog that gets submitted in your category
3. You should be interested in helping to make “a blog directory that matters” – not one that passes link juice;-)

Each editor will be required to submit 5 new blog submissions per month in exchange for $100. Submissions will be filtered by the EatonWeb editor for both quality writing and quality blog selection.

So let’s get started. To apply for a position, just PrivateMessage me via Performancing along with the category that you are interested in editing.

Back from a nice 2+ week vacation to Italia and Greece. Vacation is a definite must for all bloggers;-) But it did occur to me while I was on vacation that I enjoy my work because I had the urge to get back into the cockpit.

So it looks like Performancing got nuked while I was gone.

That makes Performancing less important than the DrudgeReport. Which, in all candor, is probably correct.

However, some of the nuke’s collateral damage seems to have hit YouTube – currently at PR 3 😉 And that makes Performancing, at PR 4, more important than YouTube. I’m sure we’ll see a few more jerryrigged epicycles added to correct this situation and get YouTube back up to PR 8+ where it belongs.

All of this nonsense points to just one fact:

PageRank should not and should never have been a factor in shaping your vision as a web professional.

I found these interesting pictures on Neil Patel’s blog. Neil Patel is a personal branding expert and personal branding is definitely something bloggers should be focusing on. Check out the pictures and see why branding and public relations (PR) is more effective than marketing and advertising.

As you can see, the message in marketing and advertising originates from you. However, the PR message comes from a third party. And PR leads to branding. In branding, the prospective customer/visitor is interested in you because of what someone else said.

Neil ties everything together by saying:

If you want to brand yourself you need to understand that it is much more effective when other people talk about you in a positive fashion compared to self-promotion.

So, how can you get other people to talk positively about you?

Network. Webmasters are much more likely to promote you if they know you. Get out there, knock on some doors, make some contacts, and build friendships especially with people in your niche.

Blog for the long haul. The longer you blog, the more people will notice you. As time goes by, you’ll be considered a fixture in your niche. This leads to links and traffic.

Do something unique. Webmasters are much more likely to talk about you and link to you if you do something different from the rest. This means you need to know your niche well. Find out which topics in your niche are not getting enough coverage. Then, write quality content about those topics. For example, in my market research, I found that many of us bloggers were juggling too many blogs to our detriment. But not many people were writing about this phenomenon. So, I wrote this post, which attracted a couple links and went viral on StumbleUpon.

What other things can you do to get others to promote your blog?

This article was inspired by an offhand rant in an IM session with David – thank you for listening mate.

Over the weekend I was looking at my own life (you know, the usual introspective Sundays) when I was – to put it mildly – interrupted by another whining session from someone who has been seeking success all their life and hasn’t achieved it. It made me angry at the time (hence the rant) but after a while I figured that for most people, going from failure to success was a process that they just couldn’t get started on.

I’ve tried to catalog that process here. It all starts with a plea to …

10. Stop Whining.

The world is a tough place, we get it. We ALL GET IT. You’re not doing yourself any favors by focusing on the bad stuff. In fact, you’re just polluting the world and bringing down the energy of the people unfortunate enough to be in hearing distance at the time (or as the case may be, to read what you write). The faster you get over your self-importance and start working on making things better (you know, real shit, like working on that linkbait that you can’t crack, or those blog posts that you don’t have the time for, or outsourcing that theme you just don’t know how to code), the faster you’ll get to where you want to be.

The fastest way to stop focusing on what’s wrong and start working on improving your current condition is to…

9. Channel Your Energies

Suppose that you’re shafted in a project you’re working on – the person who’s hired you collects the work and makes off without paying you. Understandably, you’re angry. But how would you deal with this anger? Venting is good (and necessary), but there is a difference between using that anger to achieve something positive and letting that anger eat you up inside.

Could you set in place practices that ensure that you get paid for 100% of your projects? Is there some way you can get back at the person who’s wronged you (religion allows for revenge, in case you’re objecting) without spending too much time / energy (publicly cataloging this incident on your blog / website / forum you frequent)?

At every junction of your life you’re presented by choices – and (as I venture dangerously into feel-good mumbo-jumbo) you’ve got a responsibility to yourself to make the right choices – the ones that help you move your life forward and take you towards your goals.

If something evokes a strong emotional reaction, find an outlet, get the initial and strongest reaction out of your system and then channel your remaining emotions into something constructive. To do this, you have to…

8. Focus

It’s easy to tell yourself that you must focus on a particular task, in practice its virtually impossible to do so if you have problems with paying attention. There’s no big secret to razor-sharp focus – barring genetic pre-dispositions and childhood habits, the best you can do to help yourself focus is to:

• catalog distractions and ruthlessly eliminate them.
• setup a stable daily routine for your work – forming stable work habits are the best way to get (and stay) focused on your work.

The biggest obstacle to focused effort is your resistance to doing tasks / work that you’re not interested in (and in contrast, the easiest way to build focus is to work on something you enjoy). This leads us to the next two steps…

7. Find Yourself and Your Target

When it comes to success (and making money), it’s important to know what you want. To figure that out, you need to know what your strengths are (fields of work as well as type of work) and what impassions you. While your interests will evolve with time, getting your bearings right at the start makes it easier to make course corrections in the future.

Once you know what you want, you have to figure out what to do.

Let’s say you’re struggling to provide a comfortable living for yourself, and your aim is to earn at least $5k / month. Knowing what you want at this point is not enough – you need to choose projects (and therefore develop habits) that bring you to that total. In other words, if you cannot achieve a goal in your current circumstances then you need to change them, step out of your comfort zone and in short cause radical change in your life in order to get to where you want to be.

The most common excuse (see #10 on how to deal with such excuses) I’ve heard (and given a few times myself) is that stepping out of the comfort zone is difficult, and there are risks involved with it. A different version of this is the worst excuse known to man (because it is self-deceptive and only manages to keep you stuck in the same place for a longer period of time):

“I’m working on it, and I’ve got it all figured out – it’ll take me this long (insert fashionably long period, more than 6 months) to achieve this target (something that this person could achieve in less than 3 months if they changed the rules and made a genuine effort to step out and take a risk).”

Yes, take risks … but calculated risks, backed by knowing exactly what you want and knowing how to get there (points 6 to 3 will help).

6. Sacrifice / Self-Discipline

So now you know what to do. The problem is, you probably don’t have the time to get it done (sound familiar?). When we talked about ‘Focus’ (#8), the key ideas were to eliminate distractions and build habits that help you focus more.

Eliminating distractions means sacrificing things that you may enjoy ‘now’ but are not helping you achieve your goals – such as talking to your friend on the phone at 10am in the morning, or browsing Amazon for Dilbert books at 10:30am. Switching your phone off (having an assistant or using a second number that’s only for emergencies works better), avoiding checking your email like the plague (twice a day, max – otherwise you’ll spend your day looking at email piling up) and staying offline (unplug your DSL / cable modem and hide it if you have to) when you’re working are just a few of the sacrifices you’ll need to make, and this requires self-discipline.

It’s not rocket science – by establishing a regular routine (and thus making it easy for you to develop habits), you can eliminate distractions to a large extent. The problem comes when you have a variable routine (like me) – in that case, at least ensure that you work for the same amount of time, at the same hours, each day.

5. Consistent Effort

It may seem moronically obvious to hear this, but you need to work hard consistently on a project in order for it to be successful (insert suitable plant growing analogy here). While you don’t have to wait a century to get something done, you also can’t build Rome in a day (or something to that effect).

The unfortunate thing is, most people are divided into two categories. They’re either bloody impatient, or they’re stuck in the pattern on wanting to do everything by themselves. Neither approach will succeed. You need some patience (consistency is more like it), and more importantly, you need to leverage…

4. Other People’s Resources

By yourself, you can only expand to a certain point (self-cloning is out of the question, at least for now). With the help of others, there is no limit to what you can do (although self-cloning would still be out of the question).

Outsource. Hire. Give yourself more time to do the important stuff by getting others to do the unimportant stuff. This form of leverage usually costs money, but the time you free up can allow you to earn a lot more – allowing you to be better off than when you were doing everything yourself.

If you haven’t done this yet, stop everything a read this article.

3. Always Improve

Most people will read this article, bookmark it and then forget about it. Some will apply one thing from it, and then forget the rest.

Truth be told, improving one time is almost as useless as not improving at all. If you take one step forward and then step, you haven’t really gone anywhere. The real benefits will come when you’ve taken several steps forward, one after the other, in a short period of time. You don’t change your life with a single step – it takes a journey (even a short one) to move past old comfort zones and establish yourself at a higher level of success.

And whatever you do, don’t settle for being good enough.

2. Share

Sharing your knowledge, your expertise, your experiences – sharing what you know – is one of the fastest ways to improve your own understanding of how things work. And (to take the cynical route) even if you think you’re successful enough, the network benefits you receive from helping others ensure that sharing is perhaps the best way to achieve #4 (leveraging other people’s resources).

1. Act Now

Do you still think that there’s any ‘secret’ recipe to success? Everything I’ve said here is common sense – find out what you want, do whatever it takes to get it, even if it means giving up on smaller dreams and getting help from the world around you. It’s not magic, there’s no mystery, the keys are right in front of you.

All you have to do is take action and get started. What are you waiting for?

2 things that have added fuel to the fire of home-based business are the rapid pace at which the Internet is spreading on the back of high-speed broadband connectivity, and the easy ability of marketing yourself with audio/visual tools as against simple texts only.

True, you can spend ad dollars to bring in prospects, but that is just half the job done. After they arrive at your website, it becomes incumbent upon you to live up to the promise you made in your ad.

Which means you have to again market yourself – this time more convincingly for otherwise they will leave your site as fast as they had come.

Why is the focus on audio/visual content? There are several reasons for that. Here are some:

1. A majority of people is averse to read contents because for them that is almost like wasting time. Yet unless they actually go through your content they are unlikely to get a full grasp of what you wanted to tell them. The dilemma is how to make them read the whole content without letting them feel bored.
2. On the flip side, audio/visual contents are usually far easier to follow and form opinions about. Just as a picture speaks more than a thousand words, audio/visual contents can convey a message you want to transmit easily.
3. Unlike in the past, major search engines now consider audios and videos too as contents as they do in case of text content. Considering that Google is implementing universal search to include all forms of contents in search results, there is no doubt that relevant and targeted audio/video contents will increasingly attain high visibility.
4. The cost of producing audio/video contents has come well within the reach of small website owners. For example if you have a video camera you can easily upload a short, well-made video clip to YouTube or Google Video or Vimeo, which in turn you can embed in your webpage.

What however still remains a puzzle is what home business should you be considering to make a head start?

I believe this is where most of us get stuck. Before I started this website on sharing information on search engine marketing I too was hesitant for long. I have seen that even when you know what your home business is likely to be, you are still held back for the fear of unknown or because of plain lethargy.

Let me mention 2 scenarios most of us pass through:

• Even before we take the first step we look for assurance that our home business will succeed. This seldom happens. Like any business, a home business too has to face ups and downs, and there is no certainty that it will succeed.

  However as you proceed, face obstacles, and commit mistakes you need to keep your eyes and ears open so that you are not averse to learn what went wrong. As long as you do that you’re unlikely to face a complete wipeout, and you’ll find you’re nimble enough to change track when the going gets tough for reasons beyond your control.

  The lesson therefore is you need to be willing to learn as you go along instead of fearing the unknown or just sitting tight and doing nothing.

• On many occasions we look for immediate results. Once again that seldom happens. True, there are Amazons, Googles, and eBays that are phenomenally successful. But for each of them there have been hundreds of thousands that simply perished after glowing for a while.

  What this means is that the days of quick results are truly over. You’ll be struggling like many others from every corner of the globe. But then the opportunity to make it big has also increased dramatically.

  What’s the lesson? Just stick around and have faith in your ability. Do everything ethical you can to promote your business steadily in place of either dashing through or placidly sitting back. It’s more than likely that you’ll succeed in your home business.