Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I have another blog recommendation for you although if you know the blogosphere well then chances are you already know about this blogger. His name is Darren Rowse and of the 20 or so blogs he manages I recommend ProBlogger.net if you are interested in blogging for profits. When I first came across Darren I was pleasantly surprised to see that he is from Melbourne. It’s great that there is an Aussie out there making a living, and a substantial living, via blogging and in fact becoming a celebrity blogger if there really is such a thing.

Ironically ProBlogger.net doesn’t make him the big bucks, but it does educate other bloggers how to make the big bucks by going through various techniques and methods for making money online using blogs. Darren makes a six figure income from his blogs and he was slashdotted in July when he announced that his May Google AdSense cheque was over $14,000 USD.

ProBlogger is a great site for anyone interested in making money online using advertising, affiliate programs, AdSense and using blogs as the vehicle to distribute your content and create an audience. Darren openly admits though that despite all that he teaches from ProBlogger chances are most people won’t come close to the sort of earnings he makes.

Darren is somewhat coy with the specific details about the sites that actually make him the most money. He recently mentioned that there are three sites that he depends on for the lionshare of his income, but the revenue from other sites is growing. He links to a few of his gadget-ware sites such as camera and laptop reviews so it’s safe to assume that sites such as these bring in good money via AdSense if you work long and hard to grow an audience, and long and hard Darren works — 8 to 12 hour days writing content for 20+ blogs.

I find Darren’s situation encouraging in some ways and certainly his income level is something to aspire to, but the amount of work he puts in seems a bit too much for my liking. I’m sure with his current income he could start to reduce his workload and hire some people to create content for him so he can get away from the computer now and then and get that working day down to maybe 6 hours or so. I’m a little discouraged that ProBlogger itself doesn’t make much money since his topic is very similar to Entrepreneur’s Journey. My plans for this blog are to keep it growing as a resource site and use it as a marketing tool for my own projects but it would be nice if it could also bring in more than coffee money on it’s own from advertising and affiliate programs.

Publicity

One of the main reasons I believe Darren has made it from say an everyday average earner from blogging to an above average wealthy man is because of the publicity he has gained. Thanks in part to the blogosphere that has happily linked to his blogs sending a lot of PageRank and traffic (not to mention his own blog network linking together) he probably managed to start bringing in a lot of search traffic (this is speculation mind you). Of course this came from consistently writing good content that people wanted to link to. Imagine attracting 5 incoming links per day to your blogs over 3 years growing exponentially - that builds up over time.

Fast forward to today and now Darren has hit the big time with publicity from mainstream newspapers, Slashdot and even Google calling him asking for feedback because he is one of their biggest AdSense affiliates. All this is great publicity moving him along from the good to great in terms of income and traffic.

More Publicity

Finally Trevor Cook has posted a great article titled Payday for bloggers which he originally wrote for his column in Walkley Magazine. It features a lot about Darren Rowse, blogging and podcasting.

I thought this section was worth quoting for those getting excited about making money from blogging after reading Darren’s story.

The wide disparity in the revenue producing power of blogs, even those maintained by the same blogger, raises some questions about what draws traffic especially from people who will then click on ads.

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