Sunday, December 5, 2010

Blogging for Money: Google ads, Googlebot and luring those elusive visitors.

Blogging for money is a lot of fun but making enough money to live off it is as achievable as living off acting or music. Yes, it’s possible and people do it but getting there is as difficult as getting to Eldorado. Here are some tips:

Maintain a single theme on your blog. Obviously, the blog you’re reading now is fantastically violating that rule, and that is why you see ads about Filipina girls looking for rich men. Ads without a specific target group get dumped on blogs without a specific theme. Dump-ads like that bring in very little cash. If you want more expensive ads, focus your blog on a theme that high-rolling advertisers dig (like banking, tourism or the new Volkswagen Nifto).

If you want to know which advertisers pay lots of money for their campaigns, take a walk around town and look at billboards, or switch on the TV and take notes during commercials. Companies that advertise on street-side billboards and television are surely also advertising on line. Themes that have close to nill revenue are themes like philosophy, social injustice and evangelism. Organizations that usually go around asking for money, won’t be giving it away through advertisement on line. If you love to write evangelistic and also would like to make some money, then split these endeavors up. Make money on a blog on the automobile industry and spread the gospel on a blog on evangelism.

New in the history of publishing, bloggers have two distinct audiences to woo: a human audience and the machine audience. And both are to be wooed with care and precision. Machines like Googlebot determine what your blog is about, and tie your blog to advertisers. If your blog is about money making, then Googlebot (or rather Googlebot’s nefarious cousins Mediapartners and Adsbot) will look for Google Adsense advertisers who have indicated to want to publish their ads on blogs about money making.

That means that you may write excellently to human eyes, but produce nothing but nonsense for a machine. The rule is simple: machines don’t read but count words, and look at the position of words relative to other words. This article is not only about blogs and blogging (and the machine goes ‘mark,’ ‘mark’; hey this article is about blogging) but more specifically about making money with blogs (aha, says the machine, again an instance of the word ‘money’ in close vicinity of the word blog).

But a smart use of keywords alone is not enough to lead the bucks to your wallet. Machines also try to estimate how the other audience, the human audience, likes your blog. That they do by looking at how many other publications link to yours. The more links to your blog the machine finds anywhere on line, the more popular your blog must be, and thus the better its quality is. It’s good to have a large amount of visitors, but it’s evenly important to have a large amount of backlinks. The more you have of either, the higher your blog will be in search listings, the more your blog gets clicked on, the more visitors you’ll get, and the more backlinks you’ll gather. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg deal, but there are ways to help the egg. Or the chicken. Or the egg:

Obviously, you’ll tell everybody you know that you’re writing a fabulous blog that they simply must check out, but don’t fall in the trap of asking your friends and family to click on your ads. The machines are very clever at distinguishing organic traffic (honest) from inorganic traffic (dishonest), and your blog will be booted off to cyber Hades.

But what you can do is partake in forums and every time you post something, you also leave a link to your blog. Backlinks are backlinks and it doesn’t matter to the machines who’s putting them out. You can also combine your blog with a YouTube account. YouTube allows you to add URL’s to your submissions and channel and profile, which ads up to yet more backlinks. The working day of a commercial blogger should consist of 70% writing, and 30% promoting, or rather: partaking. Nobody likes remarks on their forums such as Hey, read my blog! But a careful response to a topic that shows that you’ve read the discussion, signed with a link to your blog, will surely draw a few readers off the forum and onto your articles.

If you are a prolific writer, try to avoid posting twenty daily posts on the same blog. A modest following is beneficial to your commercial enterprise, but nobody wants their blog-readers cluttered with only your wisdoms, which will lead to them deleting you. Smarter is to start a few separate blogs. That way you can write about more themes (one theme per blog) and you can also link from one blog to the other(s), which again count as backlinks.

Choose the titles of your blog articles carefully. Make sure they convey the content of your article (for your human audience) but also the keywords (for your machine audience). If you want to blog for money it’s crucially important that you attract new audience. It’s of course wonderfully gratifying to have a steady following, but steady followers are less likely to click on your ads. Adsense advertisers pay a certain amount of money for a certain amount of times that their ad is shown on your blog. Ten thousand faithful followers will gobble up the budget for ten thousand ad views, but of ten thousand new visitors there are bound to be a few that were looking for something else when they clicked on your blog in their search results. With a little luck, your blog is not what they were looking for but the website behind your ad is. Those are the folks that click on your ads and make you the money. This sadly means that the most successful commercial blogs are often the worst in providing the information you hoped to find when you saw the title of their article. But then, those crappy not-saying-anything blogs don’t get a lot of backlinks, and all the other bloggers that are serious about writing will end up higher than they in search results.

The aim of the money-blogger is therefore an almost Buddhist middle of the road approach. Literary quality should be reserved for books and nerdy magazines, but the money-bloggger must show quality enough to be amusing but not so much that keywords hardly get mentioned.

And speaking of tens of thousands of visitors: one click on a Google ad may make you any amount between 1 cent and a few dollars/euro’s. I’m actually suspecting that some ads will make you only a fraction of a cent, and once I threw a party for neighbors, friends and family because I had earned four euro with one single click (because no, this blog is not my only Internet publication… :) I also own http://arie-travels.blogspot.com/ and http://www.abarim-publications.com/ and a few others).

It’s also been my observation that only one in a few hundred visitors will click on an ad. This obviously also depends entirely on the quality of your ads. I’ve had mornings when 300 visitors clicked 13 ads, while on other days I paced around nervously because 2000 visitors hadn’t seen warrant in clicking a single one. But what I’m saying is that it may take a few million visitors per month to make enough money to please your landlord and feed your kids. In other words: don’t sell the bike shop, Orville.

Another pitfall worth mentioning is: don’t get hung up on your statistics. It may take a year before your blog gets noticed by a large human audience, or pushed up the ladder by the machines. But when this happens, you better have a big library of articles to take along for the ride. Success in blogging usually happens with one or two hit-articles. It may be an article that’s been sitting on line for six months that all of a sudden gets noticed by a blogging big shot, who backlinks to it and who shoots you to blogging star dom. It’s highly unlikely that this will happen when there are only three articles on your blog. When you write for joy, the humans will come. When you write with skill, the machines will come.

Happy blogging!

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