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

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

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

Over on Serverdome.org there is a very interesting post looking at around half a dozen blogs and what percentage of their above the fold space is filled with advertising.

Blogging for money has become a million dollar business, top bloggers make thousands of dollars each month for paid reviews and displaying ads on their sites. I took screenshots of the visible portion of some of the top blogs and counted how much of that was paid space. The screenshots below are taken from a maximized Firefox window with three toolbars, at a resolution of 1280×1024.

Not surprisingly John Chow has the most advertising with more than a quarter of his screen real estate being advertising in one form or another, while Copyblogger, one of my favourite sites, comes in with the least in the list at just over ten percent. The other blogs listed in the project include, Problogger, Daily Blog Tips, Steve Pavlina, and ShoeMoney.

Two pieces of information that would make this project say so much more would be if they had both unique visitors and revenue information. Then they could correlate all the information and say once and for all if more advertising above the fold means more money per unique visitor.

Originally posted on September 28, 2007 @ 8:18 pm

Kelly Phillips Erb, from Tax Girl, recently did a post about tax deductions on Problogger.net. And while it is true that tax information on the net doesn’t ever fit every situation, there are some great items on the list that I never even thought to deduct for my business.

Things like web hosting fees, web advertising, and prizes for contest giveaways. I am not sure if all this information is valid for Canada, which is where I live, but it is still a very interesting list.

Here is a snippet from her post:

The most popular question in response to my guest post on Problogger last time was invariably some form of “Can I deduct…?” It makes sense. Figuring out what constitutes income in the blogging world is pretty easy. But what constitutes a proper deduction is another story – and bloggers usually err on the side of not deducting enough (and not the other way around).

I know that I did a fair amount of deductions last year, as I really tried to get my business going. This year, I really scaled back on how much money I put into my business, but with tips and advice such as this, I might just have as many deductions as last year.

Heck, I could have saved myself more money last year had I known about all these. Definitely a post worth checking out on Problogger.net.

Originally posted on September 29, 2007 @ 10:47 am