Blogs Don't Make Money

Do you agree with me that blogs don't make money? Some of you would say yes. Millions of you would say no (otherwise, why do I see so many advertisements on every other blog?).

Myth about making money
The truth is blogs can make money. But, there is no easy way out. Don't get trapped by the word "make money by blogging". Its not as simple as that. When I started off, I wrote a few posts and inserted Google AdSense ads at all possible locations and waited for people to click. It didn't happen.

On the right path
It took me nearly a year to realize that it is not easy to make money by blogging. For a while, I started to purely concentrate on my blogging and forget about making money with blogs. This is the period I started to get many backlinks and started to build up my reader base. I got good ranks on Google, Technorati and Alexa. My blog was as high as PR4 at one stage.

Never write sponsored reviews, unless you are John Chow
This is when I was swayed by sponsored reviews. I started to make some good money by writing sponsored reviews. There were lot of offers as my blog had a good ranking. Then, Google slapped the penalty for writing sponsored content. So, this blog went down to PR0. The sponsored content companies immediately stopped offering any good review opportunities to me. I realized that Google Page Rank is the king here. Even though everyone tries to play down Google's ranking system, they certainly have the say in your blog's success. I learnt a lesson the hard way.

How to make money?
So, here's my advice to newcomers (who has an intention to make money by blogging):

1. Start off with a good and interesting topic to write about. It can be on car buying, advice on bikes, gardening, diabetes care or even on a celebrity. But, ensure that you write about the topic consistently. No point in writing about everything under the world.


2. Get your blog indexed by Google. Please click here to find out how you can get indexed and rank #1 in Google


3. Get backlinks from blogs with similar content/ from your own niche. Please click here to read why links are important.


4. Once you have few posts, include Google AdSense advertisements. If you are going to use AdSense, do not join in any traffic building networks. It doesn't help. These networks will increase your traffic, but will reduce your Click Through Rate (CTR) and eventually your earnings per click.


5. Concentrate on specific keywords and improve on your Search Engine Page Ranking. Please click here to read how to write your content for search engines.


6. If you are making money already, then it's fine. If not, try to change the location of your ads or change the colour of your links. Experiment and see whether you have any improvement in the clicks


7. If you still don't get clicks and your CTR lies below 2% mark, it's time to consider other modes of advertising. I suggest Project Wonderful at this point of time. Project Wonderful is based on "cost per day" advertisements compared to "cost per click" approach by Adsense. I have started using this recently and looks good so far. If you start using Project Wonderful, then probably you can look at improving your traffic through networks like Entrecard.


8. Sponsored Reviews are good for short term benefits. Do not use them if you have an intention to stay in the blogging world for a longer period

I have touched on few controversial issues above and certainly there will be views that are for and against them. Feel free to share your views. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post