It’s not enough to blog - you’ve got to SELL something
Thursday, November 8th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
I’m a fanatic about time management; I even wrote a book about time management for Prentice Hall a few years ago.
That’s why I was disbelieving when I read about a new “make money online” blogger on Rosalind Gardner’s blog. In November, the blogger worked full-time on her blog, and:
Money Earned $0
Let’s get one thing straight here… I did not quit my job to launch a successful blog! I quit my job so I could earn a living online! I love that the blog has done well but all it’s doing right now is stroking my ego. A great (unmonetized) blog does not pay the bills! I slipped further into debt this month as I will every month until I am bringing in enough money to cover my living expenses.
HUH? I wondered. How could this be? I coach new bloggers, so I know that just about anyone can monetize a blog.
Once I checked out the blog, all was explained. Caroline isn’t selling anything at all… and it’s impossible to make money if you’re not selling anything.
Caroline is aware of this because she says “A great (unmonetized) blog does not pay the bills!”
Rosalind has an excellent post on how to make money blogging which is how I became aware of Caroline’s blog: 235 Hours Worked - Zero Dollars Earned. Excellent point: “Write to sell. Much of your informational content should be written with a product in mind - i.e. to drive traffic to your product recommendations.
Start with the question, ‘What product do I want to sell today?’ followed by ‘What problem(s) does that product solve for my readers?’. Answer the question(s) in your article and link to your endorsement.
Depending on the nature of the market and my subscribers, anywhere from 20% to 50% of my articles ultimately link to a product recommendation.”
Forget traffic, it’s about SALES
When you start a new blog, it’s tempting to fall into the Traffic Trap. You want readers! Unfortunately, unless you’re the public library, readers don’t pay the bills.
Traffic to a blog is inevitable. With RSS feeds, it arrives at your site in due course. Once the traffic arrives, you need to sell something to make money.
I’ve got dozens of sites and blogs. I get an idea, set up a site/ blog, monetize it, and mostly forget it, because it’s not about the traffic. You don’t want a lot of traffic; it’s pointless.
Traffic, to put it bluntly, just eats your bandwidth. 
So if you’re Web writing, or blogging, please husband your time. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of wasting time - and focusing on traffic, unless you’re selling, is a huge waste of time.
Make money writing Web sites
If you can use a word processor, you can write Web sites.
Many writers shy away from creating Web sites… they imagine it’s too techy, too complex. It’s not. A small simple site can begin earning money for you very quickly. As a rule of thumb, if you’ve created a site in an area in which there are advertisers you can start earning five to ten dollars a day per site. Now $10 a day isn’t much. But what if you had ten sites all earning $10 day? That’s $100 a day, which is $36,500 a year, just from ten simple sites. What if you had 20 such sites, all earning you $10 a day - or even more - in fact, some sites will earn you $100 a day? “Super-Fast Money-Making Web Sites For Writers: Join The Web-Publishing Bonanza” shows you how.
[tags]writing, blogging, make money writing[/tags]
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November 8th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Thanks for the mention! Unfortunately what was not very clear from my stats post alone is that I did not work full time on my blog, nor did I make any attempt to monetize it.
My marketing efforts were focused towards building niche sites. I had three of them on the go and those were where I was trying to make money and failed. The blog is merely there to report the progress.
However now I’m in an odd situation where I could potentially make more money from the blog than the niche sites just because of the traffic so I’ll probably put some ads on there.