Make Money Online Blogging

[impaul99]

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.

[Addict]

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!

[Brutha]

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).

[Addict]

Wow, I thought my post was harsh.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by Addict

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.

No, actually I'm going to use my Personal Development site for contrast of what "Doesn't Work". Meaning, I still think my personal development site succeeded in what it intended to do (Help me gain experience writing, putting out some of my thoughts on personal development) but because I never set out an intention to build massive amounts of traffic to it and make money from it that never happened. The problem with it is that when you don't get traffic, you have no desire to write, unless you enjoy writing simply for yourself (aka help me get experience writing). Anyway, Personal Development is my passion, and I want to build that site as well, but I also want to have it get traffic. So that is why I'm jumping in with both feet and getting into the "How do I really build traffic to my site?" side of things.

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.

I totally get what you're saying. That is why I haven't done this sooner. It took me months to get over the inner turmoil of this "chicken/egg" paradox. However, I discovered there is no paradox, except in our heads. I'll be diving into this on my site as well.

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.

Yup, exactly.

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).

I have 5 of Robert Kiyosaki's books. They are great books. Lots of powerful wisdom, slightly biased towards the Real Estate side of things. I'm very happy for his success writing books. It's wonderful that he was able to experience greater success sharing his wisdom with others than just applying it himself. That is a very common thing that happens. Go help yourself, you'll see success. Go help a MILLION others have success, and you'll REALLY see succes.

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.

Excellent advice, thank you.

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!

Yeah, doesn't it suck? Doesn't it feel like a frustrating fire in your belly when you *know* you're writing well, but you feel invisible? I've tried a lot of the so called "strategies" that so called "experts" tell you, but they don't seem to work, so I'm now on a mission to find out the real truth and share it with the world. I really get the feeling I'm going to piss off a lot of people with this site, telling people what seems to be hidden. It's going to be so awesome.

Thank you for your feedback. Much appreciated.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by Brutha

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.

Hmm...sorry I wasn't aware of that. Are you talking about - Self Help and Personal Growth Blog by Paul Piotrowski or my new site www.InspiredBlogger.com ? If you're talking about my new site, it's the standard WordPress template that it comes with by default. I'm surprised that it doesn't work with Firefox.

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!

Do you think that someone who wants to build traffic takes advice from you?

Not yet.

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).

If you run a blog that is getting the kind of traffic that Steve gets and John Chow gets and you accomplished it by reading articles from ProBlogger, please let me know. I would be super excited to know which articles I need to read and what I am doing wrong. If the answers are already on there and I've just been too stupid to see them for the last 16 months of writing my blog, then I would even be willing to pay you to help me solve my problem.

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.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by Brutha

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.

Sweet mother, I think I know what you're talking about! The page just looks like a bunch of text with crap at the bottom. This is NOT what it's supposed to look like. I think it's looking like that because the CSS file is missing due to my domain not being fully registered yet. I don't know why it's taking this long for the DNS to propagate (I guess it's only been about 10 hours since I registered). Sorry, the real site with proper CSS should be up pretty soon.

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.

[Brutha]

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.

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.

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.

Blogging isn't only about content.
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.

[ginkgo]

I think it looks OK and that it is a good idea to track your learning from point zero.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by Brutha

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.

Thanks I fixed it. It was a setting in my CSS file, I had a margin set to like 10000px; instead of 10px;. I have no idea how that happened. Maybe my cat stepped on my keyboard while I was away from it and I didn't notice. I installed Opera and Firefox both so I can check my sites with both of them and ensure my readers get the best experience no matter which browser they use.

Blogging isn't only about content.
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.

No worries, I hear your concerns. I think where my blog with provide the most value is picking up where they leave off. Meaning, for example, aiming at people who are just getting started with blogging, where as they mostly target talking about stuff to do with "tweaking" once you're already successful. I think most successful blogs out there were small years ago and what worked for them now to get the first few "hits" might not work anymore.

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.

[Alvin]

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)

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by Alvin

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)

I'm doing massive amounts of research on how people are making money online today. Everything from blogging successes like Steve Pavlina, John Chow, ProBlogger etc. to other ways of making money online like Affiliate Marketing, selling eBooks, NitroMarketing, etc.

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.

[Alvin]

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

[OnionJack]

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

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by OnionJack

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?

Here's my reasoning. My personal development articles take a lot of research to write. Some of them take hours and hours of writing and in most cases I have to condense so much into one article that it's hard to blast them out very fast. Meaning, it will be very difficult in my current circumstances to write a post or a few posts a day.

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!

One forum I would suggest is WebMasterWorld. There's lot of good information over there IMO.

Thnks, I'll check it out.

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

Yes, you're right. I meant to change that but I forgot my password for the site. I figured it out just now and updated my price. You'll have to visit my site to see what it's at now. Cmon, you know curiosity won't let you NOT check it out.

Aim for the moon, even if you land among the stars.

You are absolutely right.

So I'm just going to focus the rest on SelfHelpWisdom because I really like that URL.

Thank you!

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!

Yeah, I experimented with a few plugins for those but I forgot what I ended up getting stuck on. Hmmm...maybe that was on an old theme I was using. I definitely need to look into those.

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.

Once again, I agree. Nuked it.

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

Thanks for your suggestions.

[impaul99]

Originally Posted by Alvin

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

Ahhh..heheh...hard to answer this one. I say that because here's kind of what happened:
(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.

[Brutha]

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.

Sounds exicting.
I guess you take coaching and dokument the process in the new blog?