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?
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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?
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Back in February, I wrote about "The Top 3 Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Blog" -- number one being advertisers:
Dedicated advertisers are usually your best source of revenue. They pay a much better rate, they’re a guaranteed revenue stream every month, and they tend to stick around. The only downside is that you usually need to have really healthy traffic levels to make it worthwhile for advertisers to work with you directly.
I noted later in the comments that what constituted a "healthy traffic level" really varied from nice to niche -- some sites may be able to attract advertisers with a tenth of the traffic of others; it's just so dependent on what type of readers you're attracting.
Additionally, you definitely want to avoid monetizing too soon. Very few things can kill a site quicker than letting your advertising overwhelm everything else.
Let's suppose, though, that you do have healthy traffic levels for your niche and are indeed ready for advertisers. How do you go about finding them?
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One of the most difficult parts of selling advertising on your site is actually figuring out what rate to charge. Here's a super easy way to get started, though.
When you determine where you want your ad(s) to go, put an AdSense ad there. After a few days or a few weeks you'll have a firm idea of how much that ad is making you. Then, you can simply mark up your advertising over that rate.
For example if ... Keep reading »
With the first post on Ask Shane, I think the place to start is with the best advice I can give you: you're not going to get rich blogging. I promise. Yes, there are obvious exceptions like Darren Rowse, but remember what they say about the exception proving the rule. To make any real money blogging, you have to be an a-list blogger with tons of traffic, and it takes a lot of hard work and more than ... Keep reading »
