Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Back in August 2005 I wrote a three part series of blog posts about how I have made money online. This was one of my first pillar article series and forms one of the foundation content pillars that this blog was built on (my business timeline and typical day in my life articles were other foundation pieces I wrote in 2005, during this blog’s early days). These article types are concepts that are crucial to a blog’s growth during the first few months and are part of the methodology I teach in Blog Traffic School (and yes, the course is still coming, the mentoring program will be released first though).

I thought it was about time I updated my how I make money online series since I now make a significant proportion of my income from blogging. I was asked in my last post were I revealed that I made $6549.52 from blogging in March to break down specifically how I did it, so in this post I will explain the particulars for you.

How I Make Money Blogging - Video Explanation

I’ve explained how I monetize this blog in a 23 minute screencast video. It’s a 60MB video or 10MB audio only download, so I recommend this only for my broadband readers. If you have problems with the video I suggest you wait for it to download completely rather than watch it streaming.

Click the graphic below to open the video in a new window.

[ Click here for a smaller version of the video ]

If you like the video and want to see more screencast presentations like this, stay tuned for my blog mentoring program as I will be using screencasts throughout the program.

March 2007 Income Breakdown

I maintain a monthly income spreadsheet, which lists revenues generated from my blogs and websites. Here is a snapshot from March, minus some private data that is not appropriate for release to the public.

Read the rest of this entry >>

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Since Text-Link-Ads.com (aff) makes up a significant proportion of my regular income I have to say I am happy to see them acquired by MediaWiz - I think - as long as things keep moving forward, which I expect they will.

We are excited to announce that Text Link Ads Inc will be joining forces with MediaWhiz. This will bring some exciting changes to our platform. Here is how this will benefit you in the coming months…

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Congratulations to Patrick Gavin and co and if you are reading this Patrick, I hope my front page link isn’t taken down during the merger
It will be interesting to see what new CPA-style advertisements we can integrate into our blogs as a result of this merger, since MediaWiz is quite the central hub for online advertising broking.

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I’ve recently become impressed with the potential for making money from a website by selling text link ads. During May I generated over $250 USD from selling text links on my blogs just from the brokerage service provided by Text-Link-Ads.com. It’s not a huge amount of money but it’s cash I didn’t have before. If you are aiming to become a full time blogger then any extra sources of income helps, so you may want to try selling text links yourself.

John Webster from AdBrite Guide contacted me about his new website aimed at helping publishers and advertisers maximize their return from another text link broker, AdBrite.com. AdBrite offers a similar service to Text-Link-Ads.com, brokering deals between website publishers and advertisers. As a blog publisher this means you can leave the selling of your advertising inventory to companies like AdBrite while you just work on making the best blog you can. All you have to do is add your site to their system, place some code on your site, then watch the money roll in (theoritically at least!).

Of course factors such as how much traffic you have, what industry your site is in, your site’s PageRank (What is PageRank?) and where you place the add code will determine how much you make, but as I said, anything is better than nothing, so it’s worth a try.

John kindly offered a list of tips for me to publish to help you get the most out of AdBrite as a publisher and an advertiser. I’m posting the tips for AdBrite publishers (those wanting to make money from text links) here. The AdBrite advertiser tips (those wanting to generate traffic from buying links) are posted on my other blog, Small Business Branding.

Tips To Maximize Your AdBrite Income

1. Never start your pricing too high. It is better to error on the low side and get advertisers hooked, because then they will be willing to pay higher prices for your inventory when the pricing increases.
2. Make sure your placement is worth buying, the popular sellers in the marketplace tend to be sites with the most premium inventory.
3. Spend some time tagging your site and giving proper demographic information.
4. In your site description provide ideas of advertisers that you think might convert well. You know your audience best.
5. AdBrite is more successful if you sell a FEW premium placements as opposed to just MANY backfill placements.
6. Hard code all placements because of the concreteness of “your ad here”. Putting AdBrite in rotation doesn’t perform as well.
7. Allow a ramping period. AdBrite is a tool to help sell your own inventory, and think of it as a virtual salesperson for you. Any salesperson needs some time to gain traction. Just like an auction, the beginning price is never the final price.
8. Entice advertisers with specials. You have full control to set pricing so make occasional specials to entice advertisers.
9. Enable AdBrite’s auto pricing which will raise automatically as inventory sells, and lower itself as vacant inventory sits unsold.

You can find more AdBrite publishers tips and AdBrite advertisers tips at AdBriteGuide.com

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