My young web project now has AdSense carefully ‘plastered’ across various popular pages and makes a few dollars here and there (and it is just a few $!). I’ve also tried an affiliate program with a national florist and have had very few clicks and zero financial results from that.

I’ve dedicated a tab for another affiliate program that sells hotel rooms around the country (Thailand). This would generate a bit of commission for me once bookings were confirmed. Again, zero results and we’re 2 months down the line.

So there we have it, a bunch of pages with Google AdSense, 2 affiliate programs, around 10,000 unique and targeted visitors every month and yet diddlysquat for my efforts. Phew! It can be quite frustration sometimes but I’ll keep pressing on, listening and learning.

Hey, perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree and what I thought was a great idea for a website at the time was in fact not so smart!

Love the success stories though so will keep coming back for inspiration.

Cheers everyone.

Aitch

The question I pose to myself and to others that run a business is whether they would do so if there was no need for money. What’s the purpose of business if you don’t need to make a profit. How do you have motivation to create if there is no need to make money? Even a charity aims to make as large a profit as it can so it has more money to help people with.

Take a fictional society where money doesn’t exist and our basic needs are met. Innovations in health, technology, production etc are still sought after – we still have that desire to better ourselves – however we don’t need to make a profit in order to be successful. Do you think the motivation to create would still exist? Would we have built airplanes if the potential to profit from air travel wasn’t there ? Can Star Trek really happen!

Take a moment to actually step back and look at what this post is saying: go to this course about making money and thereby help me make money and you *do* make money because other people are attracted to the idea of making money and so on

Spot on. I would hope that the course will also help the student to make money. Much of my blog is about making money, it’s a business blog and pretty much every how-to article I write is designed to either directly or indirectly help people make money – by building a profitable online business.

For a lot of people *part* of the motivation behind blogging is to make money. It may not be the only reason but I doubt many in the business field would blog if it had no potential to help their bottom line in some way.

Being a business minded person much of my success is tied in with my ability to create a revenue generating enterprise, this blog is the same. That’s what business is about – and profit is the main evaluation tool (whether that’s a good thing is another question – but that’s the way society works at the moment).

I suspect you will find some blogs will become/are advertiser driven, some will be independent but aiming to make an income, and others will remain staunchly independent and all about creativity, not the profits. As a user you can decide which blogs you frequent and in the end that decision will be based on whatever motivates you. If you want to make money then you will probably enjoy posts like this. If you abhor the idea of capitalising from blogging then you might never come back to read this blog again.

The days of “adverblog” were quite predictable but it will be very sad as the blogosphere ends up being dominated by adverblogs whose content is influenced by the advertiser or influence by the need to ‘keep’ the advertiser (etc, etc as per Chomsky’s 6 filters for media content).

Take a moment to actually step back and look at what this post is saying: go to this course about making money and thereby help me make money and you *do* make money because other people are attracted to the idea of making money and so on… But somewhere along the line we forget the reason why we are blogging in the first place: not to make money (I hope!!) but to get as yet unheard opinions out there and to have an unparalleled access to readership without going through formal publication process (and many other non-commercial reasons).

I’m sure this attitude makes marketing a dead-end career choice for me, but hey just trying to keep it real for a second!

I agree with you regarding the comparison between affiliate income vs. PPC income on marketing blogs. It’s also my experience that affiliate income outperforms PPC ads on my blog. After all, look at who we are writing for. They are people who are interested in marketing online. They prefer to read good, honest, no-hype reviews about a product and wouldn’t mind buying through our affiliate links if they trust our reviews.

Hock

It’s about time this blog started paying for itself – 2000 downloads per podcast is starting to get costly!

Is just that when you have the affiliate link laying there, and you did everything you can to communicate the benefits, there is always a guy that just posted one link on his site and earn it twenty times more than you do! and that guy always say: “that was great, I just posted a link at the bottom of my site and now I have 240 sales confirmed. I’m getting rich!”

That kind of stuff makes me crazy!!! (AHHH!) but I think the secret is having a good quality of content so people trust you on your advices. And of course, being real on what you say; being honest on what you think and advice. People knows when anyone is cheating

Great post Yaro, I already make a good use of your last post (my titles looks better! let’s see how GOOG index my blog) and I’m ready to explore this one!

Thanks!