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How to win fame and fortune by blogging
24 July 2007While I started this blog in a fit of outrage after listening to the Rell propose a massive increase in taxes to pay for a questionable program during a fiscal year showing a rather large budget surplus I have learned a good deal about blogging.
Rule 1: If you want to make money by blogging then don’t blog about saving money. Because the people who will read your blog ARE CHEAP SOBs WHO DON’T SPEND MONEY! And it is hard to make money selling ads to people who don’t buy a lot. The advertisers know this and will price the ads very low. Pennies per click.
Rule 2: Most people make money blogging by running ads, and they get paid for every time someone clicks on the ads, this is called pay-per-click and it is the most popular method of generating cash in the blogging world, such as the google ads on the top of this blog. The second method is running ads that only pay if someone actually buys something. Such as the ads running down the right side of this blog.
I have to say, the performance of visitors to this site has been somewhat disappointing. The click through rate is very low, less than .1% and since I am running a blog on taxes the value of the ads placed by google is low, typically pennies a click. Contrast this to my technical blog which probably is only of interest to a very small population world wide, maybe 10,000 engineers at best, has ads that are worth dollars a click. And while on my techno blog I get far fewer visitors, they tend to click through more and the clicks are worth more money when they do. So my techno blog is considerable more valuable from a revenue point of view, even though the cttaxed.com blog gets hundreds of more visitors.
Rule 3: You have to blog a lot, probably every day. Try being interesting everyday. Most of us are not that deep. The search engines love and rate websites that have fresh content higher.
Rule 4: It really helps to have other websites link in to you. If they are highly ranked sites then a link on their website pointing to your website raises the value of your website and hence your position in the search engine results much higher. And search engine placement is the name of the game. I got linked in from 3 websites on my “read the bill first” post. Two sites were from England and One from good old Washington DC. My ranking went from a couple of million to 250,000th on Technorati.com. Not bad! Really that is not bad at all. But since then no one of any merit has bothered to link me in and my ranking is slowly sinking, currently at 900,000+ and rising.
Rule 5: The top blogs are political in nature, but the top money making blogs are social sites, gossip sites and sites that deal in tech toys. I think the largest grossing money maker is selling …………….ring tones for cell phones. So here you go, you have one chance to redeem yourselves….hmmm seems the ring tone company deactivated my account. So how about some Apple iTunes instead?
Complete Your Favorite Albums Now. $7.99 or Less. Download on iTunes now.
Rule 6: Pick a niche. Don’t compete with drudge or dailyleftwingnut. Pick something you know about and can write with passion, often and frequently.
Some of the behind the scene details: I use wordpress for blogging. I like it and I know it and I can make it do what I want. There are other great packages out there that do the job rather nicely. I use bluehost.com and I am happy with them.
A word to the wise be careful checking out domain names, be prepared to register (you can register your domain through your bluehost account and it makes it very easy, no messy transfering of domain names) at once if you find a name you like. There are services out there that will see your query about a domain name then grab it if you don’t register it. The concept being if you thought it had value then maybe it does, they will hold it for a month and try to get some ad revenue from it, if it pays off they will procure it for good. So be prepared to act! Luck favors the prepared!
Bluehost makes software set easy with automated scripts. But then again so do most.
Enjoy and don’t quite your day job. If any of you feel so inclined I’d be happy to charge you for setup services and domain name registration. I’ll only do bluehost.com and wordpress because it is what I know and what I can be efficient on.
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