Maximise Your Income With Common Sense

As I am so often found to say (at the risk of being irritating), common sense is seldom common practice. Here’s a bit of common sense that only the successful pro bloggers seem to follow!

What I am about to say might well seem to contradict the very good advice given not so long ago by our monetisation expert, Andy. Actually it is complimentary, the two facts are partners in your success. Read on..

Answer this, what is the basic unit of blogging? The blog post. Each post is like an individual worker in your workforce. Some posts might work harder than others. Some attract more attention than others. Each earns you a little revenue, together they are your means of gaining income. So common sense point number one; it makes sense that if you grow your work force, your body of work within your blog, that your income potential will grow. Get posting!

The more you post the better at it you will become. It’s like a muscle, once you have a good technique (where you do not get cramp every five minutes) the muscle will grow stronger and faster. You will also train your brain to think up topic ideas. Before my recent trip to Canada (*deep sigh*) I was posting about 3000-4000 words a day. Just that week away later and my ability to think up new topics had crashed, lack of practice had meant the grey cells were just not producing. Keep your posting frequency up and your ability to produce will improve.

Main factor though is this, more posting means more bait to attract visitors, links, ad clicks. So what about Andys advice to improve CTR/conversions? The two tactics are both necessary and complimentary, it is no use having great conversion rate with no content and visitors, much as it is useless having great content and traffic with a pitiful conversion rate.

Common sense point two: You need four things

1. A converting, usable design
2. Lots of great, focussed content
3. Lots of targeted, motivated traffic
4. A pool of high-paying advertising or other top revenue source

Now back to your posts. Imagine these post workers are miners. It could be that they are working a rich seam but it could also be possible that starting a new seam would provide richer rewards. Many bloggers think that working harder on their current blog is the wiser move, perhaps a bit of SEO, a little guerilla promotion, some ads ..

Diversification might be a much better approach. I am not saying start a blog then ditch it if it doesn’t work out right away, quite the opposite. Stick with the original blog and also start a new one!

If you have tweaked blog number one to the point where it does the best it can, you have a great design, lots of content, good traffic, start a new blog taking everything you have learned. I often find new blog projects teach me things I can take back to old ones too.

With two blogs you have protection against a niche going sour, you have double the potential audience, double the pool of topics to write about. You also carry with you the experience of getting the first blog up and running. Hopefully you would be able to bring with you some of your existing readers and if your topics overlap a little you can link to your new blog heavily to help launch the new one.

Take a look at some of the more successful pro bloggers. Yes there are names who are famous for having a single blog (usually attached to Microsoft, Google or Yahoo!) but then there are others like Darren who not only has a blog network he is practically a one-man blog network with several blogs of his own.

It needn’t be much more work to launch more blogs. Keep in mind what I say above, the more you write the better and faster you become. If you are short of time though, and currently posting four posts a day to your current blog, would your readers be that much upset if you were to drop to three or two? And the new blog, do you absolutely have to post every day?

Of course I would recommend you find time to post good quality and post a lot, but let’s be realistic. Also you may find your new blog produces so much more than the last it becomes your new number one blog and its the other you post less frequently to. I find though when I post on different topics my mind is refreshed and better able to come up with ideas for all topics. It actually helps the creativity to get out of a single blog rut!

As well as a new revenue stream and diversification of income and different monetization methods a new blog affords, network effects will also potentially increase the value and prominence of both. Add another and another and it will only increase.

Common sense point three: one blog is great, more is better – you can’t have too much of a good thing!

Summary

If you are serious about blogging then it is worth putting in the work, post great stuff, post often and post to more than one blog. Don’t hoard all your attention on blog number one, spread the love!