The Million Dollar Question – Do Blogs Pay?   –  Part 1 of the Make Money Online Series

Intro

The answer that everyone who isn’t doing it wants to know, but everyone who is doing it doesn’t want to say. Kind of sucks to be us on the side who would like to know. We ask questions, and are led to scams, pyramid schemes, and other worthless traps. The fact that people take the necessary time to keep a successful Blog running year after year is enough for me to assume there is some sort of reward besides the warm and fuzzy feeling of having people follow you.  Don’t get me wrong I really love every single person that reads my Blog and I do my best to provide useful information in return.  If you were thinking of starting one or more Blogs, then stick around and I’ll try to save you some time and tell you how it really is, for me anyway. New! Part 2 &  Part 3 of the Make Money Online Series are posted, the links are at the end of this article.

The First Two Weeks

For those of you that don’t know, I lost my corporate job in March of 2010.  The weeks after were probably the hardest that I’ve experienced in my life. I’ve been the bread-winner all of my life and never been out of work for more than a day since I was 15 years old… a while ago.  I decided that this would be my opportunity, the one that I’ve always wanted, to try and make something work on my own.  I was always successful in my career working for someone else so why shouldn’t I be able to do it myself?  Thankfully my wife still has a job and carries health insurance for us. So, my first impression of Blogging in general, is that it was far easier making money doing PowerBuilder development. It took me about a week to get WordPress up and running, experiment with Themes and trying to write as much content as possible.

  • Purchase Domain & Hosting
  • Installation of WordPress
  • Experimentation with WordPress Themes
  • Starting to learn about Google Ad-Sense.

The First Month

I not quite at the month mark but getting close enough to guess where I’ll be. The second half of the month was spent writing content which is not easy work for me yet. Also learning WordPress better, and experimenting with Themes to make things look more professional.  I have also been spending more time learning the Ad-Sense program and made changes that I hope make my site look better and provide useful resources that blend into the content like it should.  I spent some hours on the Google Ad-Sense Forum and got a feeling that I was on the right track, and that I had a long road ahead of me.  After working so long for nothing the thought of making just a few bucks was pretty exciting, and it really was for the first day or two of seeing anything but a zero on the Ad-Sense dashboard.  After that it was a reality check.   I need to focus on content, content and more content of good quality.  If there are any good writers out there who want to write, make me an offer I could use the help.

  • Improving WordPress Skills
  • Pushing myself to write content.
  • Learning Google Ad-Sense & Implementing Ads
  • Made a couple dollars and learned a lot
  • Created Forum for community involvement.

Expectations and Reality Considering everything I’ve said so far I would say that my expectations to this point are about right on with reality.  I will probably end the month at around ten dollars income, most of which came in the last ten days. So making money from home is about as hard as I expected it to be.  The last I checked the number of ad impressions was around 1000 (since start) and has been averaging around 75-250 per day the last week.  It seems like my CTR (Click Through Rate) is settling around 1% which isn’t good, but it could be worse.  Using the rough 1% CTR, and approximate $10 per 1000 impressions that it would take about 100,000 ad impressions to earn around $1,000 monthly.  That is a huge, huge number of impressions for an amount still be under the poverty level.  I guess my goal would be 1,000,000 ad impressions, if my math is right should work out to 120k yearly.  LOL – The only way I’d get a million ad impressions is if the Botnet decided to attack my site! But gotta keep on going…

The hosting provider that I use for most of my domains is Hostmonster, they have a simple interface, unlimited everything, and support better than anything I’ve experienced with any hosting company.

by The DisplacedGuy

(a.k.a Rich Bianco)

New! Make Money Online Series – Part 2 & Part 3 are available

Make Money Online – Part 2:

Learn Google Analytics with real DisplacedGuy.Com statistics

  • DisplacedGuy.Com Site Performance Summary
  • Introduction to Google Adsense and Adwords.
  • Google Analytics Overview – Benchmarking Screen
  • Analytics Terms:
    • Visits
    • Pageviews
    • Pages/Visit
    • Bounce Rate
    • Avg. Time on Site
    • New Visits

Make Money Online – Part 3:

Adsense Statistics & Ugly Secrets of Making Money Online

  • Site Summary To Date – DisplacedGuy.Com
    • Traffic Increases of over 100% monthly, THANK YOU ALL 🙂
    • Traffic v.s. Revenue Earned – Traffic doesn’t always mean money.
  • Revenue Generation Failing for DisplacedGuy
    • Only one in 241 visitors clicks an ad.
    • Blog Category – Why technical blogs have poor ad click through rates.
  • Ugly Secrets – Squeeze Pages Overview.
    • Squeeze Pages not for everyone but they do squeeze money out of readers.
  • Generating Traffic – You’ll never guess what works!
    • Making Money Online – A simple numbers game?
    • Statistics are good, but not everything. Occams Razor!

Help us?   If you help with these questions I’ll be sure you get plenty of credit.

Questions:

  • Is it possible to make a living (comparable to programming) with a technical blog?
  • What money making techniques work, which do not?
  • Have you used Squeeze Pages?  Are there ethical implementations?
  • Why does Google hate me with a PageRank of zero?
    • I post original content regularly.
    • I use ads sparingly.
    • I have traffic approaching 3000 unique visitors a month.
    • My pages load quickly.
    • I have a fixed IP address
    • My domain is renewed out several years in advance.
    • I have a good domain name, dot com, no dashes or numbers.
    • I try using proper SEO such as page structure H1, H2, etc., use Meta Tags, Fill all Alt Image Tags
    • I don’t do anything considered “unethical”

6 Responses

  1. Hi, You obviously are someone who recognizes the electrical power of target and how to make ambitions that you realize stage by stage.Bravo for you.In my own existence I’ve only witnessed accomplishment when I have kept my emphasis and produced the actions wanted to attain my ambitions – quite tiny happens by transform alone. It is anything I prefer to frequently share with my readers.Really, I am delighted to study about other peoples achievement via laser like aim and you’ve got it.Continued accomplishment to you,David

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