How Long Before Your Blog Will Start Making Money?

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JohnCow has a post up with information on how long it can take to make money from your blog.

Here is a snippet from his post:

A lot of new bloggers seem to think that once you’ve setup your blogspot.com account and you’ve written your first article, you’re set. Slap a couple of ads on and you can start planning your early retirement. If only..

The only thing that will make your blog money is you. Setting up the blog and providing it with (good or interesting) content is only half the the work. You’re going to have to sell yourself the best way you can –with your words.

I think the whole thing is interesting to read, but a little light on the key information that the post sets out to answer. He sums it up saying that it depends on the blog, and honestly, that is very true. It depends on the blogger, the blog, the subject, and how well linked and like the site is, but when it comes down to it, I would say that for the best bloggers, you are looking at around six months or more. Some bloggers won’t see a dime until their blog reaches the one year mark or more. It really depends on how aggressively you market your site.

If you are not bringing in some revenue by the six month mark and making money from your blog was your goal, then it is time to reassess what is going on with your site.

If you need help figuring out why your site isn’t monetizing well, feel free to purchase some time from me with my consulting service, and I will help turn your site around.

Originally posted on October 17, 2007 @ 8:49 pm

Google PageRank Penalty: Text Link Ads

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Well, it looks like Google is cracking down on paid links, and some people are being hit hard with their rank dropping. The Stanford Daily saw their PageRank drop from an incredible PR 9 to a PR 7.

I have yet to hear one person say that their rank has gone up. This doesn’t mean that people won’t see their rankings rise over the next while, but Google is on the warpath against paid links.

It looks like Text-Link-Ads and similar companies might have a huge issue on their hand, and if nothing else, it can’t be good publicity, since the majority of their pricing is based on Google’s PageRank, and people buy these links in hopes of gaining PageRank to their own sites.

I have yet to experience any negative side effects on any of my blogs, but I am a very lightweight advertising sales person. I think I currently have one text link sold amongst all my blogs.

So far many of the sites owners I have talked to aren’t concerned about their dropping rankings as they continue to focus on bringing good content and an abundance of traffic to their sites, but over time this could become a competitive edge for those willing to forgo selling text links, and monetizing their blogs other ways. These sites that find these alternative revenue builders, could then eventually rank higher in Google, causing those selling links to re-think their lack of concern.

The question I have been getting quite often by people just entering the world of advertising sales is, “how does Google know I am selling text links?” Well, with systems like Text-Link-Ads and other text link sales companies, they have you put code on your site, and that leaves a footprint that Google can then search for, and once identified, and probably checked by a real person, they can adjust your PageRank accordingly.

The whole paid link market has to change, Google is forcing them to. It is a very interesting time to be an Internet marketer.

Originally posted on October 9, 2007 @ 9:13 pm

Your First 10,000 Blog Posts are Always the Worst

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Darren Rowse hits the nail on the head when talking about becoming a blogger, in his short, but succinct post entitled “Your first 10,000 Blog Posts are Always the Worst“.

Like anything – blogging is something that the majority of us are not brilliant at in our early days. I look back at some of the posts I wrote in my first year of blogging and shudder with embarrassment. The mistakes were spectacular and frequent.

However with each mistake and failure comes a lesson, with every post comes comes a new skill and with each experiment comes a discovery of a technique that works (or doesn’t work).

As always, amazing writing by THE Problogger.

Originally posted on October 10, 2007 @ 10:28 pm

Unexpected News: 1938 Media Joins Facebook

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Loren Feldman has said a few times that he hates Facebook (warning: profanity) and all that it represents (warning: more profanity), and now, not only does he have a profile on the popular social networking service, but he has even made a group with his company name: 1938 Media.

Of course you have to be invited to the group to become a member, but Loren is a good guy, and so as long as you don’t cause any issues, he might let you in.

This is a closed group. Members must be invited or approved by an admin.

He has started posting pictures, little videos, and chatting with the folks in his group. He calls the people in the 1938 Media group Anti-Socialites, which I think suits a fair bit of them, and I don’t find it offensive either. I really enjoy his videos, and I hope Facebook will just make it that much easier for him to post snippets of content to his group members.

Good for him for eating his words and joining the Facebook world.

Originally posted on October 2, 2007 @ 9:21 pm

MyBlogLog.com: Increases Your AdSense Earnings

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Over on AdesBlog, he writes about how you can use the MyBlogLog service to increase your AdSense revenue. He does this by using the statistics that the service provides to better target and position his advertising.

That is – some pages appear every day among the most viewed top 10 pages. In my case, 7 out of 10 are the same pages that appear as the most viewed pages every day.

What does that mean?

That means, MyBlogLog is begging you to make some changes to those pages. It’s asking you to optimize them for AdSense (or any other publisher program that you use). It’s saying “these pages have the highest traffic, but you are not making use of it”.

An interesting tip for those out there using the service, and something I might try on a variety of blogs, though at the same time, if you put too much advertising on your best pages, you might notice them getting shunned by the community at large, so please remember to balance your need to make money with the usability your users crave.

Originally posted on September 29, 2007 @ 10:30 am