Last night was research. If I'm going to find out what it takes to make money on the internet, I should be as knowledgeable as possible. Per my own suggestion yesterday, I searched for "make money on the internet" in Google. As I feared, I was completely overwhelmed by the results. There is a LOT of information. Everyone thinks that they have the solution. Most of them want to sell you something to help you along (which was my biggest fear). But a lot of information was pretty good. What I really find ironic is that sites that are legitimately trying to help you learn typically have paid advertisements from companies who don't.
I did get a comment yesterday (which really surprised me since I didn't think anyone was reading this). It was from a friend who pointed out that the easiest way to make money was to write a blog, turn on adsense and add an Amazon affiliate site to the blog. Although I don't disagree in theory with her, the primary problem with that tactic alone is that you need traffic, lots of traffic. And unfortunately, you can't get traffic without being well known or established. Its truly a Catch-22 situation. For the record, I've had all three blogs for approximately one month currently. I set up adsense on the sites immediately and slowly built out an Amazon affiliate site for the book review site and for the Chef site. 30 days into it, my stats are as follows:
Site Hits This Month Hits All Time
As a Fine Wine 83 459
Fantasitc Reading 88 143
Run Amok 23 33
Total Adsense Revenue all time: $3.58
Total Amazon Revenue all time: $0.00
Ok, so my friend has a good idea, but how do we monetize it? How do I get enough traffic to the website to increase those numbers to the point where Google is cutting me a check. Again, I don't know, but I'm going to find out. The leading theme on the web is to follow the path that I've started, write a blog, work at it, and over time you'll get more popular and thus make more money. It's the "over time" part that I have a problem with. My blogs are done in my spare time and with a family with 3 children there isn't a lot of that. Given enough of my life I may be able to get enough followers that I"m suddenly making a little extra. I'm really concerned that when this becomes too monotonous and I still feel like I'm writting to just see my own words on the screen, then that is when I give it up. That I think is the number one reason why most blogs don't make money. That most people aren't successful at this. Returning to my friend who posted yesterday, her own blog has only a handful of posts. Keeping it up to date is extremely difficult.
So lesson one, do you keep the blog fun and personal (so that you want to continue writing it) or do find that special niche (which everyone who writes about such suggests) in order to make some extra cash. I'm torn here. I think either option is not conducive to making money. The first one takes entirely too much time to get any sort of following and the second becomes too much like work. Who can continue to write about a small niche and still make it interesting. I've too many interests as it is, to tune that down to just one, or worse yet, a slice of that one interest, does not appeal to me.
Ok, I don't have an answer, but I see what my homework for tonight is. I have to find out how to truly promote what I write in order to get traffic to the site. I just don't feel like I can write to a niche effectively and really want to write about what I want to write about. Therefore, I need people to read it if I want to make some money.
See you tomorrow with what I find out!
I did get a comment yesterday (which really surprised me since I didn't think anyone was reading this). It was from a friend who pointed out that the easiest way to make money was to write a blog, turn on adsense and add an Amazon affiliate site to the blog. Although I don't disagree in theory with her, the primary problem with that tactic alone is that you need traffic, lots of traffic. And unfortunately, you can't get traffic without being well known or established. Its truly a Catch-22 situation. For the record, I've had all three blogs for approximately one month currently. I set up adsense on the sites immediately and slowly built out an Amazon affiliate site for the book review site and for the Chef site. 30 days into it, my stats are as follows:
Site Hits This Month Hits All Time
As a Fine Wine 83 459
Fantasitc Reading 88 143
Run Amok 23 33
Total Adsense Revenue all time: $3.58
Total Amazon Revenue all time: $0.00
Ok, so my friend has a good idea, but how do we monetize it? How do I get enough traffic to the website to increase those numbers to the point where Google is cutting me a check. Again, I don't know, but I'm going to find out. The leading theme on the web is to follow the path that I've started, write a blog, work at it, and over time you'll get more popular and thus make more money. It's the "over time" part that I have a problem with. My blogs are done in my spare time and with a family with 3 children there isn't a lot of that. Given enough of my life I may be able to get enough followers that I"m suddenly making a little extra. I'm really concerned that when this becomes too monotonous and I still feel like I'm writting to just see my own words on the screen, then that is when I give it up. That I think is the number one reason why most blogs don't make money. That most people aren't successful at this. Returning to my friend who posted yesterday, her own blog has only a handful of posts. Keeping it up to date is extremely difficult.
So lesson one, do you keep the blog fun and personal (so that you want to continue writing it) or do find that special niche (which everyone who writes about such suggests) in order to make some extra cash. I'm torn here. I think either option is not conducive to making money. The first one takes entirely too much time to get any sort of following and the second becomes too much like work. Who can continue to write about a small niche and still make it interesting. I've too many interests as it is, to tune that down to just one, or worse yet, a slice of that one interest, does not appeal to me.
Ok, I don't have an answer, but I see what my homework for tonight is. I have to find out how to truly promote what I write in order to get traffic to the site. I just don't feel like I can write to a niche effectively and really want to write about what I want to write about. Therefore, I need people to read it if I want to make some money.
See you tomorrow with what I find out!
You are where I am at but at least you are keeping your blog up to date! LOL! Also consider sites such as
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cj.com/
This is a site where you sign up as an affiliate. If you direct someone to a paticular product or site and they buy than you can earn good money. You can even have a paticular product on your site with a buy me button. Problem once again is getting traffic to your site in order to direct someone to the other.
Let me know how it works out!