Written on December 6th, 2005 at 12:12 pm by mahor dave
How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs
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How do bloggers make money from blogs?
I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogging.
I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.
The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.
Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging
Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. Another two popular ones with many is BlogAds. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and CrispAds, Text Link Ads.
Adgenta, Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, Peak Click, DoubleClickTribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, Industry Brains, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, AVN, Pheedo, Adknowledge, YesAdvertising, RevenuePilotTextAds, SearchFeed, Target Point, Bidvertiser, Fastclick Value Click and OneMonkey (to name just some of the options - I’m sure I’ve forgotten some) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (so I hear).
RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.
Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.
Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.
Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.
Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.
Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.
Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!
Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fundraising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.
Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).
Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell enternetusers.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress (although I have to say they’ve lost one of my own orders and are being quite unresponsive to my requests to follow it up at present). While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.
Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.
As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.
Update: Looking for more information on how to make money blogging? Here’s a post I wrote talking about my own experience - particularly looking at the top ways that I make money from blogs.
Written on December 6th, 2005 at 10:12 am by mahor dave
Blog Network List
If you’re into watching Blog Networks (and it seems an increasing number of bloggers are if the news aggregators I’m watching are anything to go by) you might be interested in the Blog Network List a site by Blog Media which is designed to watch and list the statistics of many blog networks. They are currently tracking 58 networks and 1140 blogs.
They’ve obviously put some work into it as they are listing networks and blogs in a number of ways - ranking them by size, value, inlinks and total traffic just to name a few methods. They are having a few problems by the looks of things with some of their stats - especially from Alexa with traffic but it’s interesting just to see the vast numbers of blog networks (of all shapes and sizes) that are emerging all in the one place.
Written on December 6th, 2005 at 09:12 am by mahor dave
Australia’s Best Blog Announced
Congratulations to Singing Bridges Travel Diary for winning the $10,000 prize in the Australia’s Best Blog Competition. The winning blog is a travel diary that records the sounds of bridges from around the world (now there’s a niche I’d never thought of blogging about!) I guess it takes all types….
Singing Bridges edged out 10 other finalists. The final standings were:
1. http://www.singingbridges.net/diary
2. http://www.loobylu.com
3. http://www.ausculture.com/blog
4. http://www.karencheng.com.au/
5. https://enternetusers.net
6. http://www.trollhattansaab.net
7. http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/tpn
8. http://www.hearye.org
9. http://www.browncardigan.com
10. http://antonyloewenstein.blogspot.com/
11. http://www.camwheeler.com/wine/
There are some great blogs there so congrats to Singing Bridges for taking it out.
Congratulations to SmartyHost for taking the initiative for hosting the awards. It’s nice to see a company willing to throw some money and effort behind the Aussie blogosphere. A few hints however for next year (they’ve talked about it being an annual event) that they might want to take onboard.
- Make the links on the competition’s blog live links - it’s what blogging is all about
- Perhaps some categories for different awards would be good
- Stick to the dates and times you set for announcements (this award was supposed to be announced yesterday)
- Consider a more interActive award - ie let people vote in a category or two (people’s choice award). This would enter more into the spirit of the blogosphere. Perhaps also they could take nominations not only from bloggers themselves but others?
- Make the judging panel a little more blogging focused. While I know some of the judging panel blog they could be accused of being a bit more mainstream media focused than new media focused. Of course having MSM on the panel does have some advantages in getting the competition covered more widely in the media but maybe to have some other bloggers would add some credibility to the competition.
As I say - it was a fair effort for the first year and I’m sure SmartyHost has benefited from it and will do so in the coming days with some extra media attention - but I’d love to see this go to the next level and become a bit more ‘blog like’.
Update - reactions to the winner of the award have been mixed to say the least around the Aussie blogosphere. Tim Blair has cracked it (to say the least). LoobyLu was a little more supportive of the winner.
update II - Judge Charles Wright is obviously not too happy with the result either. He’s just written on the Age blog about the process and actually reveals how he voted and what the voting process was like.
Judges only saw the 11 ‘top blogs’ and the voting system was out of 40 points per blog. Each blog gave a very different weight to their voting (ie some gave extreme votes) and some more moderate. Charles writes:
‘In fact, only two members of the judging panel voted it No. 1. It took the prize only because one of the judges gave it a total of 40 points - by far the most generous award by any judge - and the other 35 points. And both those judges marked between six and seven of the final 11 sites much lower than the other judges. Their spread was from 15 to 40, and from 10 to 35.
One of those judges awarded between 10 and 15 points to seven of the entries - which in our view indicates an entirely different frame of reference from the rest of the panel - and the other awarded 15 to 18 for six of them.
The other three judges marked in roughly the same band. Razor’s top vote got 31.5 points, and the bottom 19. The two judges whose votes were roughly in line with us, awarded from 33 to 22, and from 34 to 22.
In our opinion, there should have been some effort to standardise the points. If that had happened, the probable winner would have been Looby Lu or Trollhattansaab. ‘
Sounds like a bit of a bizaare way to run the voting. Perhaps a system where each judge had to rank blogs in order of preference would have been a better way to score blogs.
Update III: And if you havn’t had enough of Australian Blog Awards - check out Kek’s Australian Blog Awards which has just opened up for nominations. Keks has run this awards for at least a couple of years - it’s got categories, it’s voted on by the people and it seems to grow in popularlity every year. No big prizes but much more ‘bloglike’.
Written on December 6th, 2005 at 08:12 am by mahor dave
Australian Blogging Conference
Duncan is talking about and Australian Blogging Conference, something many have talked about and have even attempted but few have done. There has been one or two but they tend to be somewhat specialised either focussing tightly upon education or business.
I’d love to see something aimed a bit more at a wider market that incorporates a few different streams.
For example I could envisage a number of large sessions with keynote type speaking - but a number of streams with workshops (interActive), electives (more talking heads) and panels. Streams could be arranged in a number of ways - either upon a sub niches like:
- Educational Blogging
- Business Blogging
- Entrepreneurial Blogging
- Political Blogging
Or perhaps aimed at levels like:
- Beginners
- Intermediate
- Advanced
Another option instead of streams would be one off session electives on the above themes and others including:
- Blog Design
- Blog Promotion
- Blog Writing
- Blog Metrics
- SEO
Of course the biggest problem with conferences is getting people along. I’m sure a few of us could plan a brilliant event but the question will always be around whether Australia has a big enough blogging population to get everyone along - especially because our population is scattered so widely.
I think the key would be to make it a low cost, low maintenance event that could somehow run with small numbers but which could run with larger numbers if we got that far.
Anyway - my other big problem is time to throw at the planning of such an event. The year ahead is looking quite full already from my perspective. I could pitch in a little time but this thing would really need a champion and probably a major sponsor from the beginning to take it and run with it.
Written on December 6th, 2005 at 01:12 am by mahor dave
Blog Stats - Page Views
Stuart left a comment on a previous post pointing to some traffic graphs of a few of Weblogs Incs that he was interested that none of the WIN blogs seem to have an average of more than 2 page views per visitor.
I replied to Stuart’s comment that I’d be interested to see how this compared to other blogs and that someone should research it.
As I hit publish on that comment I decided that perhaps I could do a quick survey of blogs and find out for myself what is ‘normal’ for the page views per visitor statistic.
So today I took a look at the top 50 blogs in Truth Laid Bear’s ranking by traffic page (note that this only measures blogs with sitemeter stats packages - and there are some real inaccuracies with it as at present it seems to be being gamed by the sports blog network).
Despite the inaccuracies of this list it’s a quick way to get a picture of how some of the webs most visited blogs are going in terms of their stats as all have the same public stats package available for comparison.
After surfing the top 50 blogs listed there (I couldn’t find stats on 6 of them) I found that on average they have 1.7272 page views per visitor. The highest any of them had was 3.3 page views per visitor and the lowest was 1.1.
I then decided to see if this figure was comparable to blogs with less traffic and then surveyed a random 50 blogs from other pages on the traffic rankings. These ranged in traffic from about 10,000 visitors per day down to just a few visitors per day.
The average of these 50 random blogs was 1.7083 page views per visitor - a remarkably similar figure to the higher trafficked blogs.
While my ‘research’ is far from scientific or accurate it’s an interesting figure. The average blog reader spends looks at less than two pages per visit.
I don’t have figures to compare this to other types of websites but this number seems depressingly low. As I wrote in my comment replying to Stuart - there could be many reasons for this. Perhaps it’s because blogs tend to have so many outbound links, perhaps its because the way they are designed doesn’t tend to push people deeper into the site, perhaps its because the most visited page on a blog is usually the front page which tends to have a number of posts on it (meaning a reader can read 10 or so pages worth of content without leaving the one page). I’m sure there are other reasons - but the question it might leave some asking is what strategies might one put in place to maximize page views on your blog?
I’ll unpack this question in the coming days.
Written on December 5th, 2005 at 10:12 pm by mahor dave
25 Tips for Battling Bloggers Block
I didn’t really highlight this too much when it happened a few posts back - but I’ve now hereby officially finished the Battling Bloggers Block series. If you want to read the whole series in the one place I’ve put it all over on the one page at Battling Bloggers Block.
All in all it ended up being a 25 Tip series of posts - one of the biggest I’ve done. I hope it was helpful to some.
Thanks to the many people who’ve commented along the way - feel free to share your own thoughts and reflections on the full series of posts here if you wish.
Now - I’ve just got to work out what to write about next…. I’m stuck for ideas ;-)
Also for readers just logging into enternetusers after the weekend away - you’ll notice I started a new poll in the sidebar asking about how many blogs you own. There’s already around 350 votes which I’m pretty amazed by - feel free to cast your vote and have your say on the poll announcement post.
Written on December 5th, 2005 at 03:12 pm by mahor dave
Steve Closes in on Six Figure Blogging Mark
Congratulations to Steve Pavlina who posted a few days back that in less than a year he’s grown his blog’s income from less than $10 per month to last month hitting $4700 for the month. That’s some pretty impressive growth for 10 months!
‘My income goal for the year was to reach $3000/month (from this site that is — this isn’t my primary source of income). In January of this year I made less than $10 from this site, so that’s a nice increase. Aside from adding new content, every month I dive through the metrics and do more experimenting and optimizing. This year my plan was to put down a solid foundation for future growth without concerning myself too much with making an income from it — the second year will be a lot more exciting. Even if I did nothing but continue to write new content and stopped working on optimization altogether, I’d be very surprised if this site generated less than $100,000 next year, so I expect I’ll soon be joining the ranks of six-figure bloggers.’
Steve goes on to talk about his plans ahead - particularly to take on an assistant to help out, something I’ve pondered on and off this year also. Another thing to add to my list of ‘things to think through in 2006!
Written on December 5th, 2005 at 03:12 pm by mahor dave
The 2005 Weblog Awards Finalists Announced
The Weblog Awards for 2005 have posted nominations and voting will start sometime in the next 24 hours. Congrats to all the nominations (there’s a lot to wade through).
There’s a lot of quality blogs in the list as usual, I always enjoy these awards for finding new blogs that I’d not stumbled upon before.
Diverting to a local interest comment now - It will be interesting to see how their Australian and New Zealand list compares with the Best Australian (and NZ) Blog Award finalist list that is supposed to be announced today. I wonder how many will feature in both.
Written on December 5th, 2005 at 10:12 am by mahor dave
Mind Mapping - Battling Bloggers Block
This will be the last post in the Battling Bloggers Block series of posts. You can read the full series all in the one place at Battling Bloggers Block.
Blog Tip 25. Mind Maps
I think I’ve talked briefly about Mind Mapping here at enternetusers before - but have never really expanded upon what I do. I should say up front that I’ve never really had any training in Mind Maps and probably do it all wrong - but I do find what I do to be very helpful in coming up with outside the square kind of ideas.
In short - what I do is get a piece of paper or my trusted white board out and in the centre of it write a word that relates to the post/series/blog that I want to write. I usually put a box or circle around the word - it’s my central idea.
Sprouting out from the central word I begin to write other words that relate to it. Each one is joined to the first word with a line and has it’s own circle around it. These words could relate to the first word in any number of ways. They might be fanciful crazy ideas or thoughts with tenuous links or they might be concrete and predictable ones. At this point I don’t stop long on any word but stay in brainstorming mode.
From these second words come other words that link to them with lines - the process continues. Some threads of thought might end up being 7 or 8 words long, others might stop after 1 idea.
What ends up happening is that the page fills up with words that all link to one another. It can end up looking very chaotic and unordered but amidst the messiness is often a few gems of ideas that I come back to once my ability to brainstorm comes to an end.
At this point I note down some of the key ideas and enter into a phase of exploring each in turn in a slightly deeper and more critical way. I won’t bore you with the rest of the process - but want to leave the first part with you as a great way to get your mind working and coming up with ideas.
Pick a broad topic for your first word and then do this exercise and you might just end up with a plethora (always wanted to use that word in a post) of ideas for posts. You might find a number of series of posts emerge - or even a new blog or two.
I try to do this sort of exercise at least every month (although lately I’ve let it slip). It’s especially useful after you’ve done a bit of a blog review and are looking for fresh direction.
Written on December 4th, 2005 at 06:12 pm by mahor dave
New Colors for Adsense Firefox Referral Ads
Adsense have just released a few new colors of their Firefox Referrer ads. In addition to their white background ones they now have yellow/orange and blue as follows:
hat tip to shirster for emailing me with this news.
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