In my last post, which was written many moons ago, I talked about How to Make a Full Time Income Blogging and after a split second of deliberation I realized that was entirely too ambitious a goal. My revised and more achievable strategy with Paycheck Blogging will be to make something more inline with a part time income.
After some thinking and reading throughout the blogosphere I realized that it was just unrealistic to think that I could make a full time income — something more than $3000 a month — off one blog in any short amount of time. I thought that I knew a great deal about blogging and the “make money blogging” world. I realized there is a lot that I don’t know.
First, I have realized that in order to make a significant income blogging that you need a significant level of traffic. This can be achieved in a few ways but essentially it boils down to social traffic and search traffic. Social traffic is achieved through links from social websites like Digg or through no-follow comments on popular blogs like JohnChow.com. Search traffic comes from search engines, namely Google, and is more difficult to capture.
Right now I am only getting the occasional visitor, like a handful a month. But, that is perfectly understandable; I only had one post on the blog. But I have come to realize that I will need at least one thousand unique daily visitors (UVs) if I am even going to reach my goal of earning a part time income with Paycheck Blogging.
Now how do I define part time income? I think a part time income goal for this blog should be $500 to $1000 a month. And the question becomes how many daily visitors will I need to achieve these numbers. I mentioned the 1000 UVs above and I think that that may be accurate for with 1000 UVs a day to the blog I can sell advertising. The problem is that search traffic seems to be more prized than the social traffic by advertisers and unfortunately search traffic takes a lot longer to get.
if I wanted this website to bring in a significant number of visitors I would need to rank highly for a term such as “make money blogging” and this seems out of my reach at the moment. Ranking on page one for a term such as that would take a lot of resources, namely time. It would take me months to reach the first page for that term and I’m not even sure how many visitors I could expect to bring in with that ranking. Regardless, it seems totally out of my reach at the moment. I have other blogs and I do not have the time, money and energy to devote to ranking Paycheck Blogging on the search engines.
Besides, I don’t have any confidence that I could rank on page one for that term even if I wanted to. That’s just the reality of my present situation. I have only been at this for six months and I am not making any significant dough as a result of my efforts.
So, what is the point of Paycheck Blogging? I intend to make money with this blog and I will detail my progress along the way. In a year I believe this site will be a useful resource for others who wish to make a part time income blogging.
For the moment, let me talk about strategy. There are several ways that I *could* make money from this blog, let’s look at each to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
Method #1 – Adsense
No doubt you know what adsense is already. If you do not then google “adsense” and come back once you’re up to speed. Here’s what I’ve learned about adsense. Adsense can be a pretty nice monetization method if you have significant search traffic that wants to click on ads and buy advertisers’ products. There are many blogs that run this type of advertising and some, like Griz’s make money online blog, make decent money. Griz seems to make more than $3000 a month from his adsense. That alone would qualify as a full time income for many people and is surely something to aspire to.
The problem is that you need a lot of search traffic in order to rake in a significant amount of money through adsense. And for this blog, it simply would take many, many months of dedicated work for me to attain those levels of search traffic. However, adsense does work well for me on other blogs in less competitive niches. However, with Paycheck Blogging I will not be utilizing adsense to monetize my traffic. It just doesn’t make sense for me.
Method #2 – Writing Paid Reviews
Another way that I could make money with this blog would be writing paid reviews for advertisers. Through sites like SponsoredReviews.com and ReviewMe.com I could sign up as a publisher and be paid by advertisers for writing paid posts about their sites, products, or services. There is a problem however with this strategy.
First, in order to write paid reviews you have to generally be willing to include a do-follow link to the advertiser’s site. A link equates to a vote for the site’s content in the eyes of google and by voting for a site you pass page rank from your site to theirs. Advertisers want the do-follow link because it helps their sites get search traffic. But, google doesn’t really care for the practice of selling page rank through sponsored reviews and it seems that the Big G will slap your site if they catch you writing paid reviews with do-follow links. And there’s the problem. The advertisers want the link but if you give it to them you can lose your site’s PR (though, obviously, not a problem for me at the moment).
This makes revenue option #2 seem less than desirable. All in all, you can’t make sustained money writing paid reviews.
Method #3 – Selling Text Links
Sites like Text-Link-Ads.com and Linkworth.com allow advertisers and publishers to find each other via a large online database. On these sites, you can sell advertising space in the form of text links. However, this method since it has the same basic flaw as method #2. The advertisers who buy text link ads want a do-follow link and it simply is not in your best interest to sell them.
Method #4 – Selling Affiliate Products
In order to make money online you need to spend a little sometimes. There are various folks out there selling some product or service claiming to help people make money online. I could recommend these products and earn a percentage of each sale. The problem with that is there are very few products that are any good. Most of the make money online products are completely useless and you won’t find me peddling them here.
Though, it is possible, should I find any worthwhile products or services in the space that actually do what they say they are going to do, that I may start to recommend products or services for commission in the future. However, I will only recommend things that I use and that make me money. And at the moment, since I don’t know of any such product, I will not be marketing affiliate offers on this site.
Are there any other methods? Fortunately, yes there is another option.
Method #5 – Selling Ad Space Direct
I’ve realized that my best bet would be to offer advertisers the option of buying space on PayCheck Blogging. Now, like the other methods, this method will take quite a bit of time. However, it has some advantages that the other methods lack.
First of all, assuming I have the traffic, I can sell others my traffic. By this I mean that I can make the links on their ads no-follow so that I am not actually voting for their sites and as such they will get no boost in the search engines. But they will get traffic from the ads. Assuming that I reach my goal of 1,000 Unique Visitors per day, I should be able to sell 125×125 ad buttons for $75 a month. By my math I could have ten such buttons on the site bringing me about $750 a month.
There are no shortage of advertisers in the make money blogging space and there’s no reason that I can not lure a few of them to advertise on this site. However, I will need the traffic and this will be a hurdle. My strategy will consist of writing a few posts a week until I have about 20 pages indexed in google. I am a patient person and I don’t mind waiting.
Once, I have 20 pages in google I will attack the social networks like Digg and StumbleUpon. I will try to bring in social traffic in mass. So I will need to write catchy, web 2.0 kinds of posts. I think I have it in me to write a few of these. Then, comment or guest write on some of the bigger blogs in town and presto – within a few months I might have my 1000 UV/day.
Now, while I grant that this is an ambitious plan, the benefits of it seem plain. Within six months or so, Paycheck Blogging could be earning me $750 a month which I can use to put towards other sites and continue to build my online income in other areas. Because, let’s face it, the $750 a month itself doesn’t really make the project that appealing. It is what I could with the extra $750 a month that has me excited.
So stay tuned, and I will continue to share how to make a part time income blogging.