SheToldMe is another cool site that share AdSense revenue you. I recently registered to this site which was referred by letblog. There are so many AdSense revenue sharing websites and it is quite handy when you really do not get much income specially at the beginning. It will keep positive statistic for you. Plus there are couple of more advantages with shetoldme website as a blogmaster or webmaster...


Even though it says she told me not only girls but guys can join it as well. Once you registered you can submitting links to it. What they call it is "Create Scoop". Providing the URL and the 10-100 characters long title and 200-5000 description, category and related tags you can submit the links. Once you submit the link it will start publishing the content and base on the user rating it will start going up in the ladder. But under upcoming you can always find your newly submitted links (Scoops).

If you have provided the AdSense publisher ID to SheToldMe it will start displaying AdSense ads next to your content and it will start sharing all the revenue it gets from valid clicks.

Forget about the AdSense revenue. It is a good way to build back links to your website or blog by Scooping all the interesting links with SheToldMe. Also good way to get some extra visitors on your way as well.

If is 100% Free to register and cool site that you can have fun, income, back links and visitors. Give it a try and see how it is going to work out for you.

In this post I want to talk about importance of INVESTMENT of time and/or money in your Business which could be ecommerce website or a Blog.


There are TWO ways to increase the money that you have (in other words to increase your wealth)

1. By Adding


2. By Multiplying

Consider case 1:

John earns $500 per week. He spends $400 each week and puts away $100 into his money-box. This way John is increasing his money by $100 per week

In approximately 100 weeks he would have increased his wealth by $10,000

i.e $10,000 / $100 per week = 100 weeks (approximately 2 years)

Consider case 2:

James earns $500 per week just like John. He spends $400 each week just like John. However he invest $100 per week with an approximate 10% return per week. This could be an investment in his own Website to increase site look & feel or SEO optimization or marketing or promotion or one of thousands of other techniques.

How long will it take James to make his $10,000?

About 6 months his savings will increase by about $11,000 and after 100 week he will have $13 MILLION!

Thus if you thinking of making it big think of a way to multiply your wealth instead of adding to your wealth

Last night I was chatting with a blogger who was feeling completely overwhelmed with their goal of making a living from blogging.


I asked them how much they wanted to make from blogging.

They responded that they wanted to be a full time blogger.

I pushed them for a figure – what does ‘full time’ mean for you?

They thought for a moment and said that they could live off $30,000 USD a year (note: they wouldn’t have minded earning more but would be able to quit their current job at this kind of rate).

$30,000 a year sounds like a lot to make from a blog – especially when you’re starting out and are yet to make a dollar. To this blogger it seemed so overwhelming that she had almost convinced herself that it was not possible.

Advice for Becoming a Full Time Blogger
 
My response was threefold:


1. Don’t Give Up Your Day Job…. Yet

It is possible to make $30,000 a year blogging, but it’s unlikely to happen over night. Keep your feet on the ground and your expectations reasonable. IF it happens (and there are no guarantees) it is almost certainly going to take some time.

2. Be Specific

Saying that you want to be full time as a blogger is a great goal – but it’s not really specific enough. This is why I wanted the blogger I was chatting with to name a figure. For her full time was $30,000 – for others it could be more or less – the amount is not the point, the point is that you need something more concrete to work towards so that you’re able to measure where you’re at.

For me when I decided I want to go full time as a blogger I decided that I wanted to aim for $50,000 (Aussie Dollars) in a year as the bench mark (at that time $50,000 was around 36,000 USD). That’s around what I would have been earning in my current main job if I had been doing that full time (I was actually working a number of part time jobs at the time as well as studying part time).

Knowing what I was aiming for helped me in a number of ways when it came to getting to that goal.

3. Break it down into something more Achievable

$30,000 USD still sounds big when you’re a new blogger – and in some ways it is. However there are different ways of thinking about that figure. Lets break it down in the way that I used to look at my target.

$30,000 a year = $576.92 per week

$30,000 a year = $82.19 a day

$30,000 a year = $3.42 an hour

We could break it down on a monthly or on a minute by minute basis if we wanted to (in fact I did do it by minute from time to time for fun) – but the exercise is really about helping you to see that perhaps your big goal is a little more achievable if you are to break it down. Making $82.19 somehow seems a little bit easier to me than making $30,000 (or is that just me?).

OK – the other way that I used to break down my goal that I found really helpful to me was to do it based upon what I need to achieve to meet that target. For me I would usually look at the daily figure – in this case $82.19.

What do I need to do to make $82.19 a day ($30,000 a year)?

Well there’s a number of ways that much. Lets look at a few:


CPC Ads – lets say we’re running mainly AdSense on our blog and that the average click is paying 5 cents. That equates to 1643 clicks on AdSense ads (note: AdSense also runs CPM ads so it’s not quite as simple as saying you need 1643 clicks… but to keep this simple lets just go with that).

CPM Ads – lets say that we’re running CPM ads on our blog and we’re being paid $2 CPM per ad unit and we had 3 ads on each page (which is effectively $6 CPM per page). This would mean we’d need 13,000 page impressions.

Monthly Sponsorships – one way to sell ads directly to advertisers is to sell ads on a month by month basis as a sponsorship. To make $30k in a year you need to sell $2500 a month in ads. You might have 6 ad spots on your blog so this is 6 advertisers at $416.66 per advertiser per month.

Low Commission Affiliate Products – Lets say we were promoting affiliate products from a site like Amazon and your commissions were on average about 40 cents per sale. To earn $82.19 you’d need to sell 205 products.

High Commission Affiliate Products – In this case you might be promoting ebooks and earning $8 a copy (that’s what you’d earn selling my 31DBBB ebook per commission). The math is simple on this one – you’d had to sell around 10 e-books a day.

Really Big Commission Affiliate Products – of course e-books are not the biggest product out there to promote – there are products like training courses where you can earn hundreds per sale. Lets take one that might pay out $300 for a yearly membership on a bigger product. In this case you need to sell 8 of these per month.

Selling Your Own E-book – got your own product, perhaps an e-book, to sell from your blog? At $19.95 a sale you need to sell just over 4 of these a day. You can do the sums on cheaper or more expensive products.

Of course there are many many other ways to make money from blogs. Subscriptions, donations, paid reviews, selling yourself as a consultant….. etc. You can do the sums for yourself on your own model.

I know that some of the above figures still sound out of reach for bloggers – 1643 clicks on your AdSense ads sounds massive to a new blogger…. and it is – but do keep in mind that you can combine some of the above (in fact I’d recommend you diversify your income).

You might run 2 ad networks on your site, promote Amazon affiliates, sell your own e-book and promote someone’s membership course.

Looking back on my own figures for around the time when I hit my $50,000 AUD (around $100 USD a day) goal and for me at that time my income mix looked a like this (going from memory here):

AdSense: $35

Chitika: $20

Private Ad Sales: $20

Amazon: $15

Other Affiliate Commissions: $10

Note: I didn’t achieve this milestone until I’d been blogging for over 2 years (I blogged for the first year without trying to make money).

This didn’t happen over night (let me emphasize this – blogging for money is neither quick nor is it easy money) but I really found that breaking things down into more bite sized pieces helped me to stay motivated but also helped me to identify what I needed to work on in order to reach my goals (and for me to quite my day job).

Again – don’t quit your day job yet (in fact you may not want to quit it even when you reach your goal – it can be good to have a back up plan) but do work hard at being specific about your blogging goals and attempt to break it down in a way that helps you move towards them.

In this first part, we discuss topics like getting started with blogs, choosing niche topics and the general rules of blogging. In Part II, you’ll learn about various methods to make money from blogs, using advertising and affiliate programmes. The concluding part III will feature advanced techniques for tracking readers, optimizing your blog for getting more traffic and how to convert those “staring eyeballs” into “serious money.”

A blog is an online website, in which posts are arranged in reverse chronological order. The activity of posting contents on a blog is called blogging, while the person who writes content is called a blogger. The entire universe of blogs and bloggers is called the Blogosphere.

Blogs gained much popularity during the US 2004 Presidential elections. Merriam-Webster also voted “blog” as the most requested definition of the year 2004. According to Technorati, a service that tracks the Blogosphere, there are 45.5 million blogs and a new blog is added every second. That’s double the rate at which Pakistani population is growing.

Even when there are millions of blogs already in existence, there’s no such thing as missing the boat. It’s still a perfect time to start a blog. After all, only a few percent of those blogs are actually putting effort to create good content. It is even possible that few blogs cover topics that you want to blog on.

This ‘Professional Blogging as a Career‘ series aims to help you turn your blog into a cash cow.

So let’s get started. Google Blogger, MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 are popular services for creating blogs quickly. These services even provide professional looking web-design templates, incase you wish to change the default look-n-feel of your blog without requiring any programming skills. The only caveat is that you do not own the blog domain and the blog URL will end either in blogspot.com or spaces.com/username depending on the blogging service you choose.

Always invest good time in choosing a blog platform since migration to a different blog platform is not only tough (and sometimes impossible), you risk losing your site visitors and search engine rankings. For giving a more professional touch, you can consider buying your personal web domain name and install the Wordpress blog platform. Wordpress is free to download, community support is excellent and millions of users are already using it. Another good alternate is the Movable Type publishing platform.

Once you have a good blog domain, the next question in your mind is – what should I blog about? Since I want to make “real” money, should I blog about Asbestos related lung cancer or NYC lawyers, since these topics attract the top-paying advertisements? Or should I write about my cat, activities of my school-going daughter or what my wife cooked the last night?

Choosing a niche for your blog can sometimes be the toughest part. But here’s a simple answer – write on topics that you are passionate about. Think of topics that really interest you, topics on which you can continue to write for months to come.

Your blog can be just about anything ranging from shoes, cooking, technology or even about the latest happenings in your city. You will always find readers who are interested in your topics, provided you keep supplying them with good content. But if million other bloggers are already covering your favourite topics, study their blogs and research areas that they are neglecting. Then you will have just discovered your niche.

To be really successful as a blogger, you always have to keep your momentum going. New bloggers tend to write too many posts in a short span of time, or write infrequently over a long period but the real target should be to write regularly. Publish at least one good post per day. Visitors will revisit your website in the hopes of seeing new updated content, it becomes your duty not to disappoint them.

Once your blog is up and running, there’s a big urge to send an invite to friends and relatives. Before doing that, ensure that you have written at least 10-15 good articles. All links must work and there should be no “Under Construction” pages. This may give a bad impression and visitors may not bother visiting you in future.

There are a couple of rules that bloggers must strictly follow. Most important, if you quote from another website, always give credit and a hyperlink back to the original story. For images, the issue gets a little more complex. Always check the image licence before using it on your blog. Do not hotlink images, since it is equivalent to stealing someone else’s bandwidth. If you plan to use someone else’s image with permission, store a copy on your own server.

To display advertisements on your blog, you can either partner with existing advertising programmes (like Google Adsense, Chitika, etc) or contact prospective advertisers directly (say you have a popular blog about Shoes, then Nike or Reebok could be interested in showcasing their products to your visitors).

We will first discuss the popular advertising programmes and then suggest a few other approaches to generate income from your blog.
BlogAds are the pioneer in blog advertising. BlogAds generally pay well and also provide you the liberty to choose which ads are displayed on your blog. The other big advantage is that BlogAds offer a fixed payment irrespective of the number of site visitors. But the downside is that you can gain entry into the BlogAds network, only when your website receives a decent amount of traffic and some advertiser is willing to sponsor you. That could be a huge requirement for a new blog but established bloggers should consider BlogAds, provided they find sponsors.

The biggest and most famous player in web advertising is Google. Their Google Adsense programme is hugely popular because it offers contextual ads, meaning Google spiders scan the content of the webpage on which Google Ads would be displayed and then show ads based on the context of the content. Contextual Ads offer very good returns, as site visitors are more interested in knowing about products that are related to the content they are reading. For example, someone reading about cars will show more interest in advertisements about car loans than in software like Microsoft Office. Google algorithms make sure that your site visitors see only relevant ads.

Getting Google Adsense ads for you blog is very simple. There are absolutely no pre-requirements like finding sponsors or site traffic levels or geographic location except one – your blog should stay away from topics like gambling, piracy or sexual content. Once you fit the bill, applying is a one step process. Google engineers review your site the next day and send you a small “ad code” that you can integrate in your blog. Ads start getting displayed almost immediately.

Google Ads can be either “Pay per Click” or “Pay per Impression”. Their reporting system is almost real-time – you can check at any time of the day what your earnings have been since the start of the day. Google even has the largest pool of advertisers, so you can virtually write on any topic and Google will find relevant ads for you. Also.

Chitika is another player though relatively new. Chitika Comparison Shopping Ads are generally more popular on product related blogs that write about gadgets, clothes, software since Chitika displays merchandise from Shopping.com. Chitika Ads, known as Chitika eMiniMalls, are presented in an interactive ad unit – one can compare prices from different merchants, read the main features of a product and even search the shopping database – everything inside one ad.

Chitika is known to offer good returns but there’s one drawback. Though anyone can apply for their programme, Chitika won’t pay you for traffic from India, Pakistan and some other countries. That means if a site visitor in Pakistan clicks a Chitika ad, the site owner won’t receive any benefit. Sites that primarily receive traffic from US, UK can consider Chitika as a good alternative.

TextLinkAds and Adbrite are other popular site-targeted non-contextual advertising programmes. They are extremely popular with gambling, adult content and file uploading sites like rapidshare or megaupload. The reason that these programmes are popular lies in the flexibility and small entry-level requirements – an advertiser can choose to run his ad on your site, for just one day or maybe seven days and immediately calculate the conversion ratio. No bidding competitors and the ad is guaranteed to run on the blogger’s website. These programmes are particularly popular among small advertisers or who do not fit the Adwords Policies. Recommended.

So we have looked at advertising, now let’s examine some different approaches to make money from blogs.

Become an Affiliate – Companies like Amazon, ClickBank, Commission Junction offer affiliate programmes – the way they function is that you promote a product like a book or a software on your blog, your readers visit the merchant’s website and when they actually buy it – you get a commission ranging from 5% up to 50% of the sale proceedings. Remember, the ratio of a site visit converting into a product sale, is very low.

Donations – Don’t be surprised, you can actually make good money from Donations – There are a lot of “good people” on planet earth who are willing to share their fortune (maybe just 0.00001%) provided they enjoy reading your blog and probably benefit from the blog content. For example, if you wrote about some fuel saving tip and if it actually worked, people may be interested in sending you a token of appreciation via Paypal.

There’s one more option ‘Sell your Blog as a Brand’ – If you are a popular blogger and have a huge fan following, it’s time to capitalize on it. Start selling T-shirts, coffee mugs, handbags with your logo and your fans will actually buy them. CafePress is a popular choice here – When someone makes a purchase, Cafepress sends you a commission.

Or if you can write eBooks on your favourite subjects, Blogs can be a good selling place.