The Microblogger

Posts Tagged ‘blogger’

The key to being a successful blogger, from both a following perspective and a monetary perspective, is to focus on the content of your site – not optimizing contextual advertising or trying to make an ad sale. Rich valuable readable content is crucial because it is what will drive traffic to your site and that, in turn, will entice readers to show up.

I would argue that if you have fewer than 500 unique visitors per day, you really shouldn’t focus on earning advertising money and instead focus on ways to get traffic to come to your site. Outside of a couple adsense blocks, focusing on content will yield the biggest gains down the road because as you gain exposure and backlinks, your value as an advertisement platform increases. In fact, if you sell advertising too cheap and experience typical blogging growth curves (especially if you sell an ad before reaching some sort of critical mass) you may start kicking yourself in the ass because you sold something off for too cheap.

For example, I sold my first private sale text link ad on Blueprint for Financial Prosperity on January 6th, 2006. I don’t have traffic records or anything but I know that I had relatively low Pagerank (probably a 3 or a 4), with fewer than 500 unique visitors, and not that impressive a list of backlinks. I was growing, not growing tremendously, but I wasn’t making a tremendous amount of money. I sold a text link ad for $12 a month for six months – a grand total of $72.

By comparison, my total take that month was $1,114.75 after expenses which included the once a quarter payment of $326.99 (For 4th Quarter of 2005 in which a post I wrote about Amazon’s Price Drop Policy was Dugg, so it was atypical). So, that $72 represented almost 10% of the otherwise $787.76 I would’ve probably pocketed sans the Amazon excitement – so you can see why I signed it.

By the time that arrangement was up for renewal in July of 2006, I was asking for and getting $50 per text link sold.

The lesson is: Don’t focus on advertising, focus on content. Content will make you more popular and more money than devoting energy to monetizing. Not only that, you might sign yourself to a long term deal that ends up being bad for you.

Blogging can be very financially rewarding but that can’t be your primary focus when you first start or you might become very disenchanted very quickly. See, in the beginning you’re not going to get much traffic, so programs like Google Adsense aren’t going to give you the monetary returns that will make the time you put into it worth it. When you start, you’ll get under five or ten hits a day. Of those, likely no one will click on an Adsense ad, thus you won’t earn any money. If you put up a program that pays per impression, that won’t pay out much either because ten hits is nothing.

The moral of the story is to not focus on the money at first, focus on generating good content, participating in the conversation, getting that link equity, and building your site’s brand. After all that, once you’ve gotten a foothold into the niche, that’s when the money will start coming in. At first it’ll be a trickle… but you never know

If you’re new to microblogging and optimizing your content for search engines, you’ll be in for a bit of a surprise – blogging is a lot like gardening. You plant your seeds now but you won’t reap the bounty for at least another two months.

Why is this? It’s because Google (and the other search engines) updates its index on an irregular basis, updating things like PageRank (though that doesn’t happen nearly as regular as it used to) and the search engine results pages; so the decisions you make now won’t take effect in the search engines until much later. All the links you’re trying to earn, all the content you’re putting up, all that is great for your current readership but it won’t come into play for a little while longer for the search engines.

So, if you’re dabbling in some SEO, just be aware that the effects are like the Fed, they happen a little while after you make them.

When you’re a new blogger trying to make a name for yourself and increase your exposure, the best thing you can do is write compelling content that people will be interested in reading. The second best thing is to start linking to other sites in your niche. Compelling content will keep someone who finds your site, on your site. Linking to other sites will get other bloggers’ attention because everyone looks to see who sends traffic to them and who is linking to them.

I recommend linking to other similarly sized blogs. Linking to the largest and most popular blog in your niche is going to less effective because their traffic will make it difficult to see your referrals. If you send one or two people to their site and they get a thousand hits an hour, your referrals will be lost. If you send one or two people to a site that gets ten or even a hundred visits an hour, you stand a better chance of getting noticed.

Don’t send emails at first. Don’t send emails “asking permission” to link to someone, you know that an email isn’t necessary and they know an email isn’t necessary; don’t use your links as an excuse to email someone. There are plenty of reasons to contact someone, don’t use such a transparent reason. If you link a few times and start seeing traffic back from their admin panel or something similar, you know they’ve started noticing. Then you can email them and perhaps ask for a guest post or vice versa.

Linking out to sites also has a side benefit, you start associating yourself with a particular neighborhood and that never hurts.