Very often, it can be hard to figure out what products or companies to advertise on your site. Some sites have obvious tie-ins (a site about cars, for example) but others are much more difficult. If that's your situation, or if you could just use some fresh ideas, check out sites like yours who are successful and see how they're generating revenue. Who advertises there? Where are the advertisements on the page? Use some of the same ... Keep reading »
I wrote last week that you can learn a lot by looking at the public stats of those who are already successful. Well, an article in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle reveals that A-List blog TechCrunch makes $240,000 a month with about 1.25 million unique visitors. That's $0.19 per visitor. You have to dig deeper into those stats to get the real story, though. The 1.25 million visitors comes from comScore, who in ... Keep reading »
Alright, I know I said you need to think beyond AdSense, but I'm also all about grabbing all the low-hanging fruit you can. This is one of those cases. If you haven't read Joel Comm's AdSense Secrets, you need to get a copy. I bought it back when it was $97, but I made that back in a week with a site that was getting less than 100 visitors/day. Now ... Keep reading »
I track everything. Success for my sites is always a math problem. "If I move this AdSense ad here, what happens to my overall revenue per visitor." Things like that. I'll write more about that later, but this post from Scott is worth a read simply to see how a successful affiliate makes business decisions.
One of the best ways to figure out the model that will allow you to go from day job to independent business owner is by looking at the specifics of other people's models -- particularly those who are very successful. By looking at what actually works for them, and other detailed information that they give out, you can determine what's realistic and what's not. Here are a couple of recent examples. Shoemoney has one of ... Keep reading »
Too many times, I see people focused on AdSense as the sole source of their revenue. That is a huge mistake. Even Eric Giguere admits that AdSense is a crapshoot. Don't get me wrong. It is often fantastic for getting a site off the ground -- very often I can instantly make my money back with good AdSense placement -- but you're leaving a ton of money on the table if ... Keep reading »
Alright, I know many of you are dying to make some money with your blog despite my advice to be patient, so I figured I'd throw you a bone today and list the top 10 blogs that I've found about making money by blogging. First, though, this was a surprisingly hard list to come up with -- partly because I tried to limit it to making money with blogs in particular (not just any website), but mostly because most people who start a blog about making money online do it to make money online. That don't actually have a ton of experience doing it, so they're not going to be able to teach you much. It only makes sense if you think about it, though. If I know how to really make money online, am I going to spend my time telling you, or am I going to spend that time making more money? Keep reading »
Time for another collection of links for those of you who have subscribed to the feed and don't get to the site often. Keep reading »
If you're serious about your blogging, you should consider attending the upcoming Elite Retreat in Orlando. I went to the first one back in December, and it led directly to me getting to the point just three months later where I was working 100% for myself. If that's at all on your radar, I would highly recommend this conference over any other. Here's why. Keep reading »
Lisa Sugar had an inkling that her online celebrity gossip blog PopSugar was on the right track when Banana Republic called in July 2006 and offered to buy up all the ads for a week -- six months before she had even hired an ad seller. -- "The Sweet Spot," Forbes, April 23, 2007 How would you like that? A huge advertiser calling you up out of the blue to offer you money. Judging by the size of ProBlogger's readerbase, I imagine most of us would consider it a dream come true. Care to venture a guess as to how many visitors she was seeing at that point, though? Keep reading »
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