Money?

[maestro-musicmeaning]

Is it actually possible to make a nice sum of money (not a salary or anything) off of a blog's adds? I mean, is it even fesable for an ordinary blogger?

[InfoHelper]

How do you define "ordinary?" It takes a lot of time, focus and persistence to really generate good extra money with a blog. It is easy to become frustrated, and most give up before meeting their goals. It helps immensely to be passionate about your core topic(s).

There are lots of great threads here on Bloggeries that will help you out if you search around the Blogging Basics and Marketing forums.

[trishacupra]

There are more ways to make money than just advertising. You can make more by advertising your own products/services that you create around your niche. For instance, you can sell an eBook.

[maestro-musicmeaning]

Well, by ordinary I meant that it's not all I do. I"m on the computer for only a fraction of the day. Do you have to be 24/7 blogging to make money?

[stephen todd]

Originally Posted by maestro-musicmeaning

Well, by ordinary I meant that it's not all I do. I"m on the computer for only a fraction of the day. Do you have to be 24/7 blogging to make money?

about half of my blog sites are making money on any given day - and I usually spend 10 to 15 minutes a day on each site

sometimes adsense income just falls for no apparent reason - so I cut it down to about 5 minutes a day till things pick up

if a site suddenly takes off and makes more money than usual I start spending more time posting and promoting - but it will fall off after a while, so I reduce the time I spend again

there doesn't seem to be any sense to it all - most of the traffic comes from google - and google is erratic!


PS. I use auto posting google news feeds on all my blog sites - so there is a contant supply of fresh content - so I can ignore a site for a while if I want

[maestro-musicmeaning]

What's auto posting google news? And can it help get the blog on search engines?

[stephen todd]

Originally Posted by maestro-musicmeaning

What's auto posting google news? And can it help get the blog on search engines?

all my blog sites use google news - so my weight loss blog has a category called "weight loss news" - my car insurance blog has a category called "car insurance news" - you get the picture

I use a plugin to aggregate/auto post google news to the news category - so the home page gets a few new posts every couple of hours - day and night auto content creation

unfortunately the posts are very short - but contain links to the full stories - and if you wanted you could identify the top ranking news posts and manually edit them to make them "real" content and possibly add links to other pages you want traffic on

on one site I had every category aggregating google news but the site ground to a halt in about a year with over 30,000 posts - so I trashed it and started again - even though it was getting 1,200 to 1,400 visitors a day and averaging nearly 15 dollars a day in adsense earnings - and good clickbank earnings

I now only have 1 category per site with auto content posting and use auto article submissions supplimented with manually posted ezinearticles for the remaining categories

about 10 days ago I had a surge of traffic and adsense earnings on one of my blog sites - it was from a google news post - just happened to be a hot topic - traffic lasted about a week

if you spend hours looking you can find 2 or 3 "full text" feeds for a niche - these are GOLD - they bring in traffic for no effort - and provide valuable content for you site visitors

[klutze]

That is a great post Stephen, full of great information. I am going to look into a google news feed for my blog.

Thanks

[InfoHelper]

Originally Posted by stephen todd

all my blog sites use google news - so my weight loss blog has a category called "weight loss news" - my car insurance blog has a category called "car insurance news" - you get the picture
...
if you spend hours looking you can find 2 or 3 "full text" feeds for a niche - these are GOLD - they bring in traffic for no effort - and provide valuable content for you site visitors

Excellent post -- really appreciate the idea!

[maestro-musicmeaning]

THanks Stephen todd. That should help my blog keep updated without having to post every day.