Entries Tagged 'moneyonline' ↓

No, but later yes.

A few of my friends have recently asked about making money online and whether it is worth trying. These are some observations from my experience in the past 2 years.

My first site, I tried to use for commercial purpose was quite hard work to make money from. I invested a lot of time in writing biographies of people. The return was relatively low. The ads had a low click through rate and relatively low earnings. However, it does get a reasonable amount of traffic and know earns about $100 a month. The thing is that because, it gives a low return, I have stopped adding content. Even though I spend no time on the site, it still earns a reasonable amount each month. This is the power of making money online. You work really hard in the beginning, but, then you can earn without doing anything. For the first year, the hourly rate was probably less than $0.01 per hour. With this kind of return, most people give up because why work for $0.01 an hour when you can earn $8 an hour working at McDonalds.

But, after the initial effort of the the first 18 months (and it was a lot of many hours) you can generate a steady stream of income, with minimal effort and hopefully this will be an income source for life. (The first thing I did after starting blogging for money, was to stop my private pension) I hope a blog will be my pension.

Other blogs I started, have a better ability to monetise because they are about finance or cycling products. These niches lend themselves to monetisation quite well because advertisers are willing to pay higher amounts.

Netwriting a blog on writing and blogging is relatively poor at earning money. However, I don’t mind, because I just enjoy adding content anyway. If you want to make money online, I would suggest a different niche to making money online and a blog about blogging (maybe due to the huge amount of competition)

The best bet to make money online is to find a niche, which you enjoy writing about. In this way you can combine a hobby with earning; this is the best motivator to keep going when you don’t make much money.

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Recently, I received my first cheque from affiliate marketing for a new blog about cycling. It was only a £100, but, it is good to open up income streams other than Google adsense.

I have experimented with several affiliate schemes and these are some of the things I have learnt.

Amazon.

Amazon offers one of the most attractive affiliate schemes becaise it sells such an extensive range of products.   I have an account at both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. It has been a little slow, but, slowly the accounts are building up. The only downside of AMazon is that it has one of the lower commission rates, reflecting its popularity.

Text Links vs Banners.

People often have a blindness to banners. Text links often offer the best click through rate. If the text link is relevant to the blog post, then you have a much better chance of getting customers to click through than a banner. I think that using text links and linking to specific products is the secret of successful affiliate marketing. This does take a little more effort, but is worth it in the long run.

• For example, look at this post at Gardening tips. It is a post about plants for Kids. The links go direct to the relevant page. This makes it more successful than just a banner.

Don’t Be Discouraged By Low Click Through

If you start off with a blog, you are likely to face a lot of frustration as initially, affiliate links offer a poor return and low click through rate. However, as you accumulate more pages and more affiliate links, you gradually build up a cumulative effect of greater sales.

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Readers Question from pauline santos: how did the top/most successful blogs make money? Through ads, donations, links, etc? How do ads work as a revenue stream? What makes the most money (ads, donations, etc)?

There are various ways to make money with a blog.

The most popular source is Google adsense. These are ads which are automatically displayed by Google. The advantage is that (usually) they display ads relevant to the content. The blogger then gets paid per click. (PPC). Therefore, the more traffic you get, the more clicks and revenue you get. A typical click through rate (CTR) is about 1-2%. This means out of a 100 visitors 1 or 2 may actually click on the ad.

The payment you get per click can vary alot. For some topics and niches advertisers are willing to pay a high price for advertising. For example, insurance, mortgages, online drugs e.t.c. However, for funny videos and poetry the return per click is likely to be low.

If you get enough traffic and have the right product you can end up getting a lot of money.

Note: Google take a high % of the advertising revenues.(about 50% I believe)

Selling Ads Privately

Another way for bloggers to make money is through selling ads directly to sponsors. This means there is no intermediary like Google to collect a %. You may also get a higher return because the advertiser can better target is ad.

Affiliate Sponsors

Another way to make money is through using affiliate ads. These are usually linked to a product. If someone buys a product via your blog, then you get a % of the sale. The most popular affiliate program is Amazon, who may give upto 6% of a sale.

Donations

This is another way to make money. John Chow made popular a plugin called ‘Buy me a coffee’. I have it on My economics blog - buy me a coffee. But, to be honest it doesn’t make much money despite answering people’s economics questions.

For a new blogger, Google adsense is the most easy to use, this can soon give a regular monthly income. However, it requires a certain amount of traffic. Generally, the longer you have been blogging the more earning potential you will have. Income from affiliate deals again can provide a good monthly income, but, it requires having a suitable blog and enough traffic.

I hope to be a full time blogger. At the moment, about 20% of my salary comes from blogging. I started trying to earn money from blogs 12 months ago.

Related

• How much does John Chow earn per month? - See what an ‘A list’ Blogger earns
• Problogger - How do bloggers make money from blogs

Some may say, it has had a bad reputation for along time, because it is used on so many splogs.

Recently, I posted why I had decided to remove Google adsense from Netwriting. Interestingly many top bloggers are also saying that they are giving up on google adsense. Problogger’s new design is adsense free. Kevin from Blogging Tips writes a post - Adsense good for the lazy blogger. John Chow is also selling his google spot.  Numerous other top bloggers recommend maintaining an adsense free blog. Yet, of course there are top bloggers doing very well out of Google adsense

Michael from Problog design asks a good question does not adsense still have some value, especially for beginners ? I think it always will. However, the crucial thing is that it’s usefulness depends very much on the blog niche.

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“I earn $6,000 per week, and only work 2 hours a day!”

No, unfortunately I cannot say this applies to me. However, there do seem to be quite a few such adverts floating around the internet. (Although, I can’t help but wonder - if it’s so easy to make money, why do they work so hard trying to sell these e-books?)

Anyway the model of earning a living through blogging is pretty enticing.- Write on your favourite topics, work from home - whenever you feel like it, and then just watch the dollars come flooding in. However, the reality is that earning money from blogging is not as easy as sometimes we would like to believe.
Part of the trouble is that A List bloggers such as John Chow, Darren Rowse, and Steve Pavlina seem to make big money effortlessly, yet it is worth bearing in mind, such bloggers are in the top 0.05% of bloggers. To match their income streams is not at all simple. The reality is that most bloggers trying to make a living online, don’t make it. For every A list blogger, there are maybe 10,000 would be aspiring blogger’s, struggling to make more than a few dollars a day.

What does it take to Make Money Online? 10 Tips.

1. Focus.

If you are uncertain about whether to monetise your blog, it is important to clear up any ambiguity. It is no good trying to make money with slight feelings of guilt about having ads on your site. If you don’t like the idea of ads on your personal site, start a new site with a commercial purpose. The important thing is that if you want to make money from your blog, you should have this as a clear purpose. This will help you to do things, which will actually make money.

2. Choose Right Topic.

You need to match your interests with a commercial aspect. Whatever advertising you use, you will get paid more if you blog about products or services people actually pay for. If you blog about Mortgages, mortgage companies will be willing to pay a good amount to advertise on your site. This is because, if people click on the ad and buy a mortgage, it is a big profit margin. Therefore, the mortgage companies are willing to bid a decent amount per click.
If you want to make money from a personal blog site, you may need to attract 100 times the traffic of a mortgage site. See: Choosing right blog niche.

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