Million Dollar Portfolio

Blogging, A Career?

Originally, I didn’t set out to make money with this blog. When it started, which had a different URL, I was just another of the rambling masses. I would wax philosophical about life, art, movies or whatever I felt like talking about. It wasn’t until I realized the kind of outlet I had that it made sense to monetize it. Even then, I didn’t think I would make more than a few bucks doing it.

In college, my professors would always say, “Do what you love and the money will follow”. So far, I have done that. I work full time as a web developer for Wells Fargo bank now and the money is good. I really do love my job. But that’s the problem too. It’s a job. I get up at 5 am every day and I get home at 7 pm every night. It starts to wear thin, especially after 4 years doing this. Not all days are bad and I do enjoy some of the “alone time” I get on the train with my iPod, but quality time with the family suffers.

This is the primary reason I work so hard on this blog, figuring out which monetization strategies work and which ones don’t but I’ll talk about that later.

Multiple Streams of Income

I’ve talked before about this but let me just touch on it for a second. If you really want to be successful you have to work on creating multiple sources of income. For a blogger, this might mean finding more ways to monetize a blog, but it doesn’t have to. For example, one of the ways I make some extra money is with a cafepress shop. I have some t-shirt designs there that bring in about $400 a year. It’s not a lot, but it could be. If you create something desirable, who knows how popular it could get. Most great ideas start out small, or fill a need and gain momentum.

Look at Apple, they looked at the growing MP3 market and came up with a better version of a player…a few years later they have the number 1 device on the market and now the iPhone.

With the internet, you can make money anywhere, anytime and all it takes is a little creativity.

Monetizing Your Blog

There are literally hundreds of ways you can make money with your blog, but not all of them will work for you and you don’t need a hundred of them to be effective. With just a few you can start making money almost immediately. Google Adsense is where I first started but it doesn’t bring in much anymore. Part of the reason is what’s called “ad blindness”. People are used to seeing ads and for the most part ignore them, unless it is something they are looking for. The key to successful ads, and making money from those ads is to have desirable products or services that relate to your blog and the topics you discuss on your blog.

I’ve tried several different ad systems over the past year for this and my other blogs and only a few of them are performing well enough to keep them going. You should give any new system enough time to test it out and “earn its place” on your blog. If you only put a new ad system in place for a few days or a week, it really isn’t enough time to determine if it is effective. I give each new one just about 30 days depending on how I like the interface and the representatives I work with. So far, the people at Text Link Ads have been really helpful. Sign up for TLA by clicking that link, and you can make money referring others. TLA pays $25 cash for each referral you bring in. Do you know any other affiliate network that does that?

I think they actually go out of their way to find me advertisers and those advertisers consistently re-up with me, which is great because it means residual income month to month without me doing any extra work.

Ideally you want the ad system to work for you, not the other way around. I don’t want to be spending the bulk of my time trying to figure out which affiliate programs are going to work really well on my blog. I look for ones that are relevant and test them out. Not all affiliate programs are created equal and not all are relevant or necessary for your blog. Find the ones that work and stick with them.

Wrapping It All Up

The most important thing to keep in mind is that you aren’t going to get rich over night. You might not even make money for months or years. Building a successful blog is the same as building a successful business. You have to keep working at it and keep trying to make it better. If it means getting a new wordpress template, so be it. You shouldn’t be attached to any specific template with a blog.

I’ve changed my template several times over the past year because I’ve found better ways to display the information I am conveying or I simply get tired of the look and feel. Whenever possible you want to create a brand and that can mean a logo or site design that you’ll have to pay for. Getting things for free is nice…but not always practical.

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