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| | #1 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
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Hi guys, I wanted to share something with you about making money online by blogging. Hopefully this helps someone out. Let me start with this. About 16 months ago I decided to launch a blog focusing on an area of life I've been studying for well over 13 years which is Personal Development. In April 2006 I launched PaulPiotrowski.ca which later became SelfHelpWisdom.com. My intention when launching the site was to write free Self Improvement articles, similar to Steve Pavlina, to help people out. I never went into it looking to make big money because I already have a job and I don't "need" to make money from blogging. However, lately I've been doing a lot of research online and realizing that I have been growing dissatisfied with the amount of traffic coming to my site. Meaning, it is pretty disheartening when you spend 4 hours writing an article only to later find out nobody read it, or 2 people read it. Now, I understand that blog traffic doesn't happen overnight and I understand that it takes a while to get going, but lately I've been doing research and I'm finding out that writing useful content is totally not enough when it comes to blogging. I'm realizing that I am doing a disservice to my POTENTIAL READERS by having a blog that doesn't get enough traffic. Let me give you guys an example. Recently I wrote this post: » Will Power is Nothing: How to Get Yourself To Do What You Want To Do - Self Help and Personal Growth Blog by Paul Piotrowski It's an article I wrote up on the topic of Will Power. I sent a copy of it to a few of my friends that enjoy my articles and it had a big impact on them. I'm not trying to stroke my ego, all I'm trying to say is that when people DO read my articles, I normally get good responses, so I must be doing something right? Also, outside of the blogosphere I have been very successful, so I know the stuff I talk about WORKS. I've used it in my life and it WORKS. Anyways, now look at this link and check out the video John Chow posted of Sally doing the Potty Dance: Miscellaneous Ramblings - 8/24/2007 | John Chow dot Com Ok. I'll try to say this as nicely as I can, but basically I spend HOURS writing my articles, all of which have personally tested knowledge in them that took me YEARS to derive and simplify from reading hundreds of self help books and personal experimentation - and I get very small amounts of traffic. John Chow has posts of a little girl doing the POTTY DANCE - and his site traffic outranks Steve's. Do you see where I'm going with this? There's something wrong with the formula here. Yes I do realize that John Chow makes useful posts as well, but my point is that 90% of John Chow's success is his ability to DRIVE TRAFFIC and MARKET his site and 10% is the value of his content. His topic of interest is Making Money Online, which requires lots of traffic so he works on getting traffic to his site (and then monetizing of course). SO, instead of bellyaching, after MONTHS of research on building traffic online, etc. I have decided to launch a new blog seperate from my Self Improvement blog aimed at helping people to improve driving traffic to their blog and helping them make money online using their blog. My intention is to document every step I make from having a site at a complete ZERO to building it's traffic up to the level of StevePavlina.com or JohnChow.com etc. I know that ProBlogger.net and JohnChow.com already kind of do something similar, but I think they have some big gaps on their sites. I've been reading both of them plus many others for months (including Steve's) and haven't found all the anwers I've been looking for how to make money from a blog and how to drive enough traffic to it. Anyway, my new blog is called http://www.InspiredBlogger.com and if any of you would be willing to offer ideas, comments, suggestions, I would be very grateful. I am very excited to build this site focused on making money with it and sharing how I'm doing it with everyone else. Note that if the URL doesn't work, it's because the DNS hasn't propagated yet. I only registered the domain a few hours ago. It should be up very soon.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com Last edited by impaul99; 08-27-2007 at 09:08 AM. |
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| | #2 (permalink) |
| Senior Member |
The thing that bugs me about this is you admitted that you really didn't get good amounts of traffic with your personal development site. So what you're going to do is show people how to get good traffic, all the while using yourself as a success story I assume. The problem I see with this is one of the main reasons you'll get a lot of traffic (if you do) is because your readers are interested in the topic of building lots of traffic. It's not a huge deal, except your readers can't go out and have the same kind of success unless they copy you. It's kind of like Steve Pavlina. He has done some neat things in the past, but he admits that his game development business wasn't the success he had hoped for. Now he uses his website as a success story, but he was only able to do that by telling people how to be successful. And it seems like a large majority of users on this site are choosing the same topic as Steve including you. It's not a zero sum game, but it can get crowded... I don't want to be so cynical about it, but this seems to be a very popular trend in the field (Robert Kiyosaki supposedly made most of his money through speaking, not real estate). My main advice is just to provide your audience with tips and strategies that are easily replicable even if they don't choose a topic such as yours. Try the traffic strategies on your other site to see if they work there. And please be brutally honest if you portray yourself as a success story. I didn't mean to be so negative about your idea. It's definitely going to be a popular topic that could help a lot of people. I sure could use some help building traffic. It seems like I really have no returning visitors and even with advertisements I purchased, my traffic isn't growing much. I know some of the reasons for this, but I don't really understand it completely. Good luck! |
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| | #3 (permalink) |
| Moderator Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Berlin, Germany
Posts: 4,979
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You have a blog which has a design that breakes in Opera and Firefox. It simply looks like an amateur has designed the page and took some template. First impressions count. In addition some Firefox fans would never visit a site again which breaks in Firefox because it is optimized for IE. Layouting a site like this drives activly readers away. Do you think that someone who wants to build traffic takes advice from you? What do you have that problogger doesn't have (who knows how to build traffic which you don't seen to be able despite writing good articles).
__________________ I am always open for feedback on my posts. If your feedback would go offtopic feel free to send me a Personal Message. My posts generally don't contain medical or legal advice, if you have a problem seek the opinion of an expert Talking about this in terms of “bad news” or “bad judgment by business leaders” seems archaic. It’s like describing World War One as “a serious diplomatic concern.” Bruce Sterling about the financial crisis. |
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| | #5 (permalink) | ||||||
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
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Thank you for your feedback. Much appreciated.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | ||||||
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| | #6 (permalink) | |||
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
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If you're talking about my SelfHelpWisdom.com site, I'll have to look at that, because it's a template I downloaded for WordPress and made some very minor modifications. Maybe the template is wrong, or maybe I broke something. I use IE so I haven't checked it out in Firefox, but I will install those and keep that in mind. Thanks! Quote:
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However, I have been reading ProBlogger and my site still doesn't get as much traffic as I would want to get, so maybe he isn't communicating properly? Maybe he's only reaching a certain type of personality? Maybe it's too difficult to find the articles that really make a difference? Maybe the articles that really make a difference were written before I visited his site? My point is, there are many others just like me who know about ProBlogger and who've tried all the strategies out there, and are still stuck. That's my target market. I don't see ProBlogger as competition to me. As my site unfolds, you'll see the difference in content between our two sites. Thank you very much for your feedback. Your concerns are very valid, and I appreciate you taking the time to express them.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | |||
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| | #7 (permalink) | |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
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LOL, the text looks like crap. If that's what my site design was I would deserve to be shot, hehehe. It looks like the first HTML site I was playing with back in 1994.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | |
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| | #8 (permalink) | ||
| Moderator Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Berlin, Germany
Posts: 4,979
| ![]() Your site looks in Firefox that way their is nothing near the line "Subscribe to my feed" and their is an ugly space between your headline and your image. ![]() Their is a similar problem in Opera. Their is lots of free space. In addition the line "Subscribe to my feed: " isn't displayed and the feed icon is on the left side. Quote:
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Take Steve and his Polyphasic Sleep experiment, he proves that he has the will power to do something like this and gets in return attention, in addition he finishes his Bachelor degree in record time. Take John Chow who titles his page with "The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul. How doesn't want to read how to make money online from a Dot Com Mogul? The guy from problogger also etablishs himself as someone with authority, as he made money with blogs even before he started problogger. But overall sorry if my first post was a bit harsh.
__________________ I am always open for feedback on my posts. If your feedback would go offtopic feel free to send me a Personal Message. My posts generally don't contain medical or legal advice, if you have a problem seek the opinion of an expert Talking about this in terms of “bad news” or “bad judgment by business leaders” seems archaic. It’s like describing World War One as “a serious diplomatic concern.” Bruce Sterling about the financial crisis. | ||
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| | #10 (permalink) | ||
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
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ie. Steve and John Chow might blog about getting from 100k visitors to 3,000,000 visitors. I might blog about "Getting your First 10 LINKS!" or "Getting Google to Recognize You're Alive" etc.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | ||
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| | #11 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Singapore
Posts: 433
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Hi impaul99, The title of your thread is 'make money online blogging'. So how do you intend to monetize your blog? (You know what I'd recommend by now; don't count on passive sources like Adsense, market a product or service)
__________________ 21 Dragons |
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| | #12 (permalink) | |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
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In the end, everything boils down to the individual with 80-90% of the success rate determined by the psychology of the person and 10-20% the mechanics of what they actually "do". Most blogs on "Make Money Online" only focus on the mechanics - I plan on focusing on both. I also wanted to say that in my "day job" I've lead a team of developers that has already developed several websites that generate multi-million dollar revenues, so it's not like I'm new to this, but my focus here is more on making money online for the individual person, not about building a corporation with employees offering an online product/service. I'm much more interested how a single person, working from home can make $500/month part time or $5,000/month full time by providing value in their unique area of expertise/passion. That's my target market.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | |
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| | #13 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Singapore
Posts: 433
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Yes Paul, so how are you intending to monetize your blog? Or would you prefer not to share? If you've already helped developed websites that generate million-dollar revenues, then what you're planning next should be very interesting
__________________ 21 Dragons |
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| | #14 (permalink) |
| Member Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 96
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What I'm wondering is if you write great articles about Personal Development. Why not stick to that and increase the traffic to your website that is your niche? One forum I would suggest is WebMasterWorld. There's lot of good information over there IMO. Another is....ok so I gave in and checked the original URL. You have an Ad that says a post on this Blog is $5. Umm...at least lie about price Aim for the moon, even if you land among the stars. So I'm just going to focus the rest on SelfHelpWisdom because I really like that URL. You have Feedburner. I forget the account levels but get the digg this, stumbleupon, del.icio.us buttons at the bottom of each post. Digg is your friend. Traffic is short lived but hey you want to build it up! Personal opinion, turn off the U comment, I follow. Readers don't care. If a blogger is going to pick it up they'll do it either way. It took me clicking on that link to figure out what it is. I'm working on a site monetized by Ads, so I completely understand having them. But underneath the title on the right hand side of 2 posts? Your Affiliate ID on the one Blogroll link is viewable. And none of the rest seem to have anything to do with Personal Development. Though I didn't click. As usual, take with a grain of salt. -OJ |
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| | #15 (permalink) | ||||||||
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
| Quote:
SO, I decided to start the other blog on Making Money Online because there I always have some snippet of information that I learned that I can whip up in an article in 10minutes. Therefore I can have much smaller but way more frequent articles there, and I think that seems to be a good way to get traffic going to a new blog. People don't seem to like a blog that writes an article every week or two, they want daily. Once I get the money making one much more successful I can find creative ways to funnel traffic to my first blog. For example, imagine having a blog on "Stupid Things Britney Spears Did Today". Just think how easy that would be to update daily! That's one reason. The second reason is that I need to learn how to build traffic to my SelfHelpWisdom.com site, and one thing I've learned in life is that if you really want to learn something, teach it! Quote:
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__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | ||||||||
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| | #16 (permalink) | |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
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(1) I get the idea to do this type of blog because I set an intention to learn how to make money on the Internet. (2) I look for ways how it could work, and find some really cool ideas. (3) I register and launch the site immediately while I'm still excited. (4) I post my first 2 posts. (5) Via Law of Attraction, a totally new opportunity arrives at my doorstep which will blow anything I thought of in #2 totally out of the water. However it will require a large monetary investment on my part to start and some time (2-6 months). (6) For 3 days I do my research and struggle with the decision because it's not a small chunk of change. (7) This morning I decide to commit to the new plan. So the blog's purpose hasn't changed. However, I will soon have a new plan of how to accomplish the feat. Will keep everyone posted on progress.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | |
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| | #17 (permalink) | |
| Moderator Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Berlin, Germany
Posts: 4,979
| Quote:
I guess you take coaching and dokument the process in the new blog?
__________________ I am always open for feedback on my posts. If your feedback would go offtopic feel free to send me a Personal Message. My posts generally don't contain medical or legal advice, if you have a problem seek the opinion of an expert Talking about this in terms of “bad news” or “bad judgment by business leaders” seems archaic. It’s like describing World War One as “a serious diplomatic concern.” Bruce Sterling about the financial crisis. | |
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| | #18 (permalink) | |
| Senior Member | Quote:
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| | #19 (permalink) | |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
| Quote:
Anyway, I'll keep you posted.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | |
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| | #20 (permalink) |
| Senior Member |
Luck, obviously. And yea, I do think luck is a factor in even blogging. I would say timing and skill are more important, but I suppose luck plays into it. I really couldn't guess where you're going with this, but I don't expect you to tell me. Regardless, good luck with that! |
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| | #21 (permalink) | |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
| Quote:
So lets say 30 days later your blog made $25 or more. What changed inside you to all of a sudden generate 400% more income from your blog?
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | |
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| | #22 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Western Canada
Posts: 295
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Buying every domain name you can think of so mistakes and people typing in random domain names go to your site? Or advertising the blog? |
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| | #23 (permalink) | |
| Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Midlands
Posts: 305
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Seriously, I look forward to hearing about your progress... | |
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| | #24 (permalink) | |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
| Quote:
I've done quite a bit of work on the blog today just installing a bunch of plugins, getting Feedburner setup, Technorati, Adsense, Analytics, etc. All the goodies I already have on my other blog. Man it takes a while to get everything setup and working properly. One thing I do want to say is that Making Money online is not some form of Get Rich Quick thing. And if you don't like writing, it's even harder. But, there are a lot of bloggers out there who do like writing and aren't looking at this as a short term get rich quick thing, who still aren't making money. That's who I want to help. Especially if they are passionate about the topic they blog about and "making money online" from their blog will allow them to spend more time bloggin about that passion and less time working at a "job" doing something not-so-productive that someone else would be happy to do.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com | |
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| | #25 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
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I have a quick favor to ask anyone who runs a blog here who's making even just a bit of money from Adsense. I wrote an article on the effects of knowing your "30 Day Google Adsense Earning Trend". I describe how to create a report like this using Adsense reports and Excel. I'm wondering if someone could have a quick read-through and tell me if these types of articles would offer value to readers wanting to Make Money Online by blogging. Just looking for some feedback. The article is here: 30 Day Google Adsense Earnings Trend Will Get You Excited | Make Money Online with InspiredBlogger.com Thanks!
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com |
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| | #27 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: San Rafael, CA
Posts: 4,894
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I think when your blog is as informational as Steve's is, as smart the Daily Kos: State of the Nation, or outlandish as John Chow's is you'll make plenty of money. Its really that simple. I think you're missing the big picture. Your website is a product. Make it a good one. |
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| | #28 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
| THat's the plan.
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com |
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| | #29 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 1,682
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Found a little gem today on making a quick $20 with your blog: Make $20 With PayPerPost.com | Make Money Online with InspiredBlogger.com
__________________ Paul Piotrowski Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Fitness, Health and Healing Blog RCCarBasher.com |
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| | #30 (permalink) | ||
| Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: New Delhi
Posts: 613
| Quote:
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Last edited by munish; 09-07-2007 at 05:13 PM. | ||
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