Posted by Commie B on February 25, 2008 at 6:34 pm
I recently wrote a small, not so comprehensive post about how my blog went from receiving 34 hits a month to over 5,000 unique hits a month in under a year. I also mentioned that your primary goal, when making money, is NOT to get people to visit your blog and click on your pay per click ads like Adsense and make you money, but it is to provide genuinely relacant and good content with an ultimate goal to drive traffic. Once you get some of that with good relevant content, well, there are much more efficient ways than PPC advertisements to monetize your blog.
What if you got paid to blog rather than get paid if someone clicks on your PPC ads? Sounds more attractive doesn’t it. It should, because maybe, MAYBE 1% of your visitors will click on your PPC advertisements. If you were actually getting paid to blog, you would have two benefits that you wouldn’t with pay per click advertising:
1. You’re blogging on a topic or content someone wants you to blog, which means there is a market for that particular product out there, and that actually means that you’re putting useful content on your blog, thereby inviting more traffic to your blog.
2. Your making money from your blog is NOT solely dependent on pay per click advertising, which can be a nice alternative to you logging in to your adsense account 5 times a day to see whether you’ve actually made any money.
In addition to the above two benefits, your visitors will NOT be bothered by obstructive pay per click advertising banners all over the place, which will make for a more pleasant experience, possibly attracting more traffic to your blog.
I know you’re dying to know what this way of blogging for money is. The good news is you CAN make money from your blog, but the bad news is you CANNOT do it with bad content. You have to be willing to blog, and NOT just to make money. Here’s how to actually make money with your blog, or what can actually being coined as ‘blogged advertising.’
Use Smorty, a blog advertising service.
Smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinion posts with links back to the advertisers site. Smorty can tell you who’s willing to pay what. This is something you could attempt as an individual too, but unless you’re someone who gets over 20,000 unique valid and relevant hits on your blog, chances are an advertiser will turn you down. With Smorty, you don’t have to worry about that. Once your blog is approved for writing, you can make money with articles you write on your blog!
This may sound too good to be true to some of you, but it isn’t. And, quite frankly, if you’ve been relying on PPC networks to make you some extra money from your blog, this will sound like quite the pay rate! Check it out for yourself!
Continue Reading
Posted by Commie B on February 24, 2008 at 4:17 am
I’m aware that there are hundreds of articles out there that tell you how to blog, how to drive traffic to your blog, and how to get rich off of your blog and get an independent income. Well, that’s not what I’m going to do here.
First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who has made this site a success, whether or not you came here for HP QuickPlay, you contributed to making this a site where thousands of people come every month. Here, then, before I go on telling you how I accomplished it, is proof that the site has increased traffic on a monthly basis.
Asifism.com is a domain I bought at University some time in 2003-2004, to build some kind of a personal website. From that time, the site has taken many different faces. However, this blog was put up a year ago, and from the 34 visitors I received in February, 2007, I am now expecting the total number of vistors to cross 5,400 for this month. That’s a sharp increase, keeping in mind that this is a unique number of visitors, and is not the number of hits, which, as of this moment, are 14,598 for the month of February, 2008.
You’ve seen all the guides on the internet on how to get traffic to your blog: widgets, domain name, content, advertising, marketing, etc. etc. However, ultimately, your strongest source of traffic is going to be the major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft Live Search. Even your advertising and marketing, be it on forums, blogging networks, or via social bookmarking can help drive an extremely decent amount of traffic to your web site.
But the magic, the key, to getting traffic, is content. You need to have the content that people want. If you have the right content, that is written well, you’ll get listed on the search engines, and your social bookmarking will get visitors soaring onto your web site. 95% of the traffic on Asifism.com has come from search engines, and it’s not because i’ve spent time writing some fantastic articles, but because I offered something no one on the web did.
I spent many, literally hundreds of hours pulling my hair out and trying to resolve a problem that quite possibly had a solution somewhere on the internet, but it was scattered, and scattered all over the place. Before that solution disappeared, I was able to collect and put all the pieces together, and become, at some point, the only web site to offer a solution. Then, I was willing to help out. HP QuickPlay was the product that I spent hours with, and the experiences I had with my HP laptop, support, and software were so horrid, and I figured since I’ve been able to get through, I can help others with it. The idea was not to get traffic, but it worked wonders as you can see.
As traffic relevant to HP grew, I wrote another article on getting deported from the US. Again, this article did well, and immigration and deportation, always being a hot topic in the US got some hits. At one point Asifism.com was listed # 1 on google when someone searched for “US Deportation Facilities,” and people searched for that term because the beloved ICE would move people to facilities without telling friends or family of the deportee.
The social bookmarking thing is new. I have recently started to promote the web site on social bookmarks like BloggingZoom (http://www.bloggingzoom.com), Technorati (http://www.technorati.com), Delicious, Digg It (http://www.digg.com) & Mixx (http://www.mixx.com). Social Bookmarking can be a very effective way to drive traffic to your site, but you’ve got to be crafty and skillful to lure people to your content. It takes practice and time, but it’s something that most people can do.
When blogging, I think the key is to not focus on the making money part. Once you have the traffic going, you can worry about placing your adsense ads or other widgets that can help you monetize; but if you keep wondering about how you’re failing at making money, you probably won’t make it. This article: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ways-to-make-money-online-with-website/ is a wonderful tool on how to monetize your blog, but it’s phase 2.
Remember, when blogging, quality matters. If you have content that people want to read, that has continuity, people will keep coming back and possibly subscribe to your feeds. That’s key, just like any business, repeat customers do the trick! Scout the internet for what kind of articles and blogs are doing well on the web, and write content on similar things. Alternatively, you can write on something you’re good at and come across likeminded people. Remember, just one or two articles won’t do it. You have to keep plugging away, add more information, and eventually, through a social bookmark or a search engine, the right people will find you.
Concentrate on giving the information people need. That’s the most important thing when getting traffic. This isn’t a detailed article on how to conquer the internet, it’s me, in very simple terms, telling you how I got traffic to my site. If I can do it, so can you.
Continue Reading
