How to Make Money With Your Blog. Blah. SEO. Blah. Monetization. Blah. Boring. Lame. Gay. Gay gay gay gay super gay.
Here’s the only tip that matters: have a blog that doesn’t suck. Then make money as an afterthought. Preferably by supplementing your excellent content with more excellent content, in a form that people might potentially pay for.
Or just do as everyone else does… Have an entire blog entirely about making money with your blog, for other people with blogs about making money (with your blog). Have fun with your little optimization clusterfuck of optimal lameness, and keep your shit off of the rest of the internet. Thank you.
I dunno. Do you really want readers who are lame enough to stick around as regulars to read your PayPerPost BS, anyway? I don’t like lame readers. I don’t have a terrible lot of readers, but the ones I do have are typically not idiots, or at the very least, are smart enough not to make stupid comments. I could never tolerate the kind of reader who might actually believe that I was motivated to try out such and such a software package on my own, or that I’m seriously looking into a vacation at some dumbshit resort. Or worse, to know that it wasn’t the case, and read with interest anyway. You dopes with sites like this might not be lying, but at the same time, you certainly don’t come off as genuine, and reading your textual diarrhea makes me textually vomit (as seen here).
Bleh bleh. Fuck, I can’t wait until the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own stupidosity. Does anyone visit any of those sites with any regularity, other than people trying to do the same shit? Oh, wait. I might be doomed to deal with it a little while longer, until people smarten up (riiiiight). Because while you’re looking for regular readers to visit on a regular basis and comment with regularity (and they will — but only because they want the regular return traffic), what you really want is organic traffic. In other words, hits from people who are probably looking for something other than your dumb shit site, but are too dumb to find it, and miss their target. In which case, your entire website is a giant hunk o’ spam. Shit they weren’t looking for, and don’t want. They might stick around, because like attracts like, but the ones that click your ads are looking for a way out. Hopefully one that leads them to what they were looking for in the first place. Please delete. Your niche-garbage is polluting my internets with stupid. And ugly.
I have one freakin’ block of ads on my site, and I use it to cover the whoooole $5 that my hosting costs (in fact, I’ll probably start taking it down after I reach that point each month), and I really do hope that the majority of you are using an ad-blocker, because really, I only want the people searching for vagina and fucking vagina and penis fucking vagina and gay penis fucking vagina (what?) etc. to see the darn thing. If I knew that any of you regular readers were stupid enough to move their mouse-cursor anywhere near it… (hm, is it against the rules to tell people not to click my ads? I’ll have to check into that…)
I liked the internet better in 1994.
How about we start calling this shit what it is, though. If making money is the first thing on your mind… if you’re picking a “niche” specifically because you think it will earn you cash… if you’re optimizing things for search engines first and regular, intelligent readers second (or as often seems the case — not at all)… You’re not monetizing, you’re blogetizing. And I don’t like you.
Okay, so I’m not a regular commenter, otherwise I’d have to object to your calling my comments not stupid. Case in point: this comment.
I might even become a regular just to prove you wrong. Hah!
Okay, so I’m not a regular commenter, otherwise I’d have to object to your calling my comments not stupid. Case in point: this comment.
I might even become a regular just to prove you wrong. Hah!
Stick it to them! There’s always some asshole trying to make money from something that’s supposed to be interesting – and then writing a f**cking book about how he did it. These people are below contempt. I can’t wait until blogging becomes unpopular and we can all get back to complaining about things. For free.
Stick it to them! There’s always some asshole trying to make money from something that’s supposed to be interesting – and then writing a f**cking book about how he did it. These people are below contempt. I can’t wait until blogging becomes unpopular and we can all get back to complaining about things. For free.
I am not sure I follow you all the way through in what I interpret as a public debate-with-self.
I make my entire living off some of the type of ads you mention, though my attitude about them differs from yours, and my approach has nothing to do with blogging my innermost feelings for cash or any of those “You Can Do It!” type blogs you describe that focus on making money by blogging. I have no quarrel with those sites, though, as they seem to provide information or inspiration for a certain type of netizen. Not me, but I respect that the world does not revolve around me.
Most traffic on the Internet comes from search engines and, as you have noticed, search engines often send people to sites that are at best only remotely relevant to what said people were seeking. Skillful placement of certain types of ads, I have found, helps close the circle and send misdirected people to a potentially more appropriate site, sending a few cents per click to everyone in the advertising food chain who helped with the disambiguation.
It is, simply, disambiguation, implemented for perfectly legitimate reason: a large percentage of internet traffic is somehow misdirected, and over time as you accumulate more content you find that people land on your sites in random ways. I think that that type of ad placement is a valid response to *significant* amounts of that kind of traffic. i.e., Some of my sites started getting more traffic than I could afford, but I didn’t want to close those sites, so I slapped some ads all around for the hell of it and after figuring out how it works I decided it was all good and perfectly legitimate to make a few shekels for the time and energy I poured into these sites over the years, expecially when they were getting more traffic than I could afford onmy own.
But I don’t run the type of sites you complain about, nor do I run or advocate arbitrage and other bogus linkfarm scams.
I did not notice you had those ads until you mentioned it. If you feel queazy or that there is something immoral about making $5 a month for the entertainment and community value you bring to your regulars by providing this point of focus for them, then you should not be using the ads! I’m not yelling or being patronizing, just saying is all… And I question why you even mention it?
A friend of mine discovered that her site — at which she detailed her divorce and custody disputes — struck a chord with a lot of other women. So many that she couldn’t afford to keep the site running without ads or donations. Is it immoral or spammy of her to “sell out” when not doing so meant giving it up and losing the community she built — a community which meant as much (if not more) to the others as to her?
So someone just landed here looking for macaroni & cheese instructions. Maybe that person is 10 years old. Maybe it’s a 20 year old bachelor whose mom made the Mac & Cheese for him all his life. Who the hell knows, but what would you do if you were scoring thousands, even millions of misdirected hits a day from people looking for Mac & Cheese recipes? You might consider that kind of traffic an opportunity, or even a responsibility. Or would you just be annoyed, make fun of it, and go to sleep?
If you set up a Mac & Cheese portal and kept an eye on incoming traffic as you do you could have a lot of fun with it by responding to what people are looking for and providing a legitimate resource of focused and relevant Mac & Cheese information. Yeah! You’ll be the Mac & Cheese Queen! Just what the world needs! Hey, why not?
Blah… sorry if this has gone on too long. I just get kinda piqued when someone calls out people who make their living staring at their web traffic and building their personal web sites and then implies that they are irrelevent, meaningless, worthless assholes for doing it, further implying that there was ever a time of no-money (or $5/month) tranquility when hippie bliss ruled the Internet.
Maybe I don’t get what you are ranting about. But I’m just saying that if you can find a way to work with what is actually happening out here then it is really fun and while you can score a few rupees with even a small amount of web savvy it is more important to have fun with what you do.
Look at what the folks at gamil.com did. Maybe not the best example for this discussion, but a perfect approach, I think, to an avalanche of misdirected traffic.
I do not miss Internet 1994, though I get nostalgic sometimes when I find a live web site saying “This site is optimized for Netscape .87” Mmmmmm, golden times. I still prefer the old telnettable FidoNet type BBSes to any web-based BBS, but what do I know? Not much, as the record clearly shows.
Good bye,
-S
I am not sure I follow you all the way through in what I interpret as a public debate-with-self.
I make my entire living off some of the type of ads you mention, though my attitude about them differs from yours, and my approach has nothing to do with blogging my innermost feelings for cash or any of those “You Can Do It!” type blogs you describe that focus on making money by blogging. I have no quarrel with those sites, though, as they seem to provide information or inspiration for a certain type of netizen. Not me, but I respect that the world does not revolve around me.
Most traffic on the Internet comes from search engines and, as you have noticed, search engines often send people to sites that are at best only remotely relevant to what said people were seeking. Skillful placement of certain types of ads, I have found, helps close the circle and send misdirected people to a potentially more appropriate site, sending a few cents per click to everyone in the advertising food chain who helped with the disambiguation.
It is, simply, disambiguation, implemented for perfectly legitimate reason: a large percentage of internet traffic is somehow misdirected, and over time as you accumulate more content you find that people land on your sites in random ways. I think that that type of ad placement is a valid response to *significant* amounts of that kind of traffic. i.e., Some of my sites started getting more traffic than I could afford, but I didn’t want to close those sites, so I slapped some ads all around for the hell of it and after figuring out how it works I decided it was all good and perfectly legitimate to make a few shekels for the time and energy I poured into these sites over the years, expecially when they were getting more traffic than I could afford onmy own.
But I don’t run the type of sites you complain about, nor do I run or advocate arbitrage and other bogus linkfarm scams.
I did not notice you had those ads until you mentioned it. If you feel queazy or that there is something immoral about making $5 a month for the entertainment and community value you bring to your regulars by providing this point of focus for them, then you should not be using the ads! I’m not yelling or being patronizing, just saying is all… And I question why you even mention it?
A friend of mine discovered that her site — at which she detailed her divorce and custody disputes — struck a chord with a lot of other women. So many that she couldn’t afford to keep the site running without ads or donations. Is it immoral or spammy of her to “sell out” when not doing so meant giving it up and losing the community she built — a community which meant as much (if not more) to the others as to her?
So someone just landed here looking for macaroni & cheese instructions. Maybe that person is 10 years old. Maybe it’s a 20 year old bachelor whose mom made the Mac & Cheese for him all his life. Who the hell knows, but what would you do if you were scoring thousands, even millions of misdirected hits a day from people looking for Mac & Cheese recipes? You might consider that kind of traffic an opportunity, or even a responsibility. Or would you just be annoyed, make fun of it, and go to sleep?
If you set up a Mac & Cheese portal and kept an eye on incoming traffic as you do you could have a lot of fun with it by responding to what people are looking for and providing a legitimate resource of focused and relevant Mac & Cheese information. Yeah! You’ll be the Mac & Cheese Queen! Just what the world needs! Hey, why not?
Blah… sorry if this has gone on too long. I just get kinda piqued when someone calls out people who make their living staring at their web traffic and building their personal web sites and then implies that they are irrelevent, meaningless, worthless assholes for doing it, further implying that there was ever a time of no-money (or $5/month) tranquility when hippie bliss ruled the Internet.
Maybe I don’t get what you are ranting about. But I’m just saying that if you can find a way to work with what is actually happening out here then it is really fun and while you can score a few rupees with even a small amount of web savvy it is more important to have fun with what you do.
Look at what the folks at gamil.com did. Maybe not the best example for this discussion, but a perfect approach, I think, to an avalanche of misdirected traffic.
I do not miss Internet 1994, though I get nostalgic sometimes when I find a live web site saying “This site is optimized for Netscape .87” Mmmmmm, golden times. I still prefer the old telnettable FidoNet type BBSes to any web-based BBS, but what do I know? Not much, as the record clearly shows.
Good bye,
-S
No, you don’t get what I’m ranting about. And I’m not implying anything. I’m directly pointing out that the irrelevant, meaningless, worthless assholes who do the things I described are irrelevant, meaningless, worthless assholes for doing them.
I’m not talking about any of the other people you mentioned, and I didn’t imply that I was queasy about making $5 a month. In any case where the webmaster has implemented ads after the fact, in order to afford the hosting cost… obviously content came first.
The only people I have a problem with are the ones who are in it primarily to make money — and usually only even then, if they’re pretending as if they have some other motive. The worst of them manage to fool themselves. Cognitive dissonance can be nasty.
No, you don’t get what I’m ranting about. And I’m not implying anything. I’m directly pointing out that the irrelevant, meaningless, worthless assholes who do the things I described are irrelevant, meaningless, worthless assholes for doing them.
I’m not talking about any of the other people you mentioned, and I didn’t imply that I was queasy about making $5 a month. In any case where the webmaster has implemented ads after the fact, in order to afford the hosting cost… obviously content came first.
The only people I have a problem with are the ones who are in it primarily to make money — and usually only even then, if they’re pretending as if they have some other motive. The worst of them manage to fool themselves. Cognitive dissonance can be nasty.
Actually I competely disagree with the guy above. If you start something “free” inside a culture of free things (which I think the blog concept started as), and then decide to charge people for it, then you don’t belong in that culture any more. The same thing always happens with commercialization of every domain, and I am sick to the teeth of it.
An ad or two is fine, and hardly noticed, but my blogging takes me an hour per day maximum, on a free site. I don’t intend to start charging for that. And if I ever become a “professional” blogger then you have my permission to shoot me.
Actually I competely disagree with the guy above. If you start something “free” inside a culture of free things (which I think the blog concept started as), and then decide to charge people for it, then you don’t belong in that culture any more. The same thing always happens with commercialization of every domain, and I am sick to the teeth of it.
An ad or two is fine, and hardly noticed, but my blogging takes me an hour per day maximum, on a free site. I don’t intend to start charging for that. And if I ever become a “professional” blogger then you have my permission to shoot me.
As the old saying goes:
If it’s free, take two.
In other words, whenever there’s an apparently (!) easy way to make money, someone’s going to pervert it into a money-making scheme. The thing is, the amount of money you get for having a visitor clicking an ad, or just viewing/loading it, is really not worth the trouble compared to the discomfort that same viewer experiences if you overdo it. The more money you want to make, the bigger the hassle for the visitor in finding any content inbetween your ads. So like the slow-loading websites of the internet anno 1994, any page with too much ads is just going to get closed right away. Especially those intrusive adds that actually prevent you from seeing the content underneath, or the ones with too much motion or flickering.
As the old saying goes:
If it’s free, take two.
In other words, whenever there’s an apparently (!) easy way to make money, someone’s going to pervert it into a money-making scheme. The thing is, the amount of money you get for having a visitor clicking an ad, or just viewing/loading it, is really not worth the trouble compared to the discomfort that same viewer experiences if you overdo it. The more money you want to make, the bigger the hassle for the visitor in finding any content inbetween your ads. So like the slow-loading websites of the internet anno 1994, any page with too much ads is just going to get closed right away. Especially those intrusive adds that actually prevent you from seeing the content underneath, or the ones with too much motion or flickering.
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If you start something “free” inside a culture of free things (which I think the blog concept started as), and then decide to charge people for it, then you don’t belong in that culture any more.
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This does not quite add up for me, at least not in my experience — though maybe I am missing a clue from that fact that you put “free” in quotes.
If a successful web site costs someone hundreds of dollars a month to maintain and keep free for site visitors, then it is not exactly free. Free for you but not for me. So if you “don’t belong in that culture any more” then where do you go? Why should success make you irrelevant? I think if one can rise up from obscurity and still keep their composure and their voice (or whatever, I’m veering into platitudes here for no good reason) then hooray for them. I personally have been happy for people I’ve known who find a way to make either an honest income or a public reputation from their web projects. I was happy for that girl Jenni, of the JenniCam (Jennifer Ringley). I didn’t know her but was happy for her notoriety, and happy to see someone who understood the new medium of the web and found a way to do something that was, at the time, not just unique but uniquely her. (Or so it seemed to me. As I said, I never knew the girl.) I was running home webcams myself in those days, in something of the same spirit as Jenni’s always-on life cam. But she took it to a new level and I thought it was cool. Things change, of course, and a girl (or guy) who gets naked on their webcam is a cliché — though getting naked was never Jenni’s point, but it might as well have been.
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The thing is, the amount of money you get for having a visitor clicking an ad, or just viewing/loading it, is really not worth the trouble compared to the discomfort that same viewer experiences if you overdo it.
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It depends how much traffic you get and how (or if) you value your audience. If you come up with a site that attracts a lot of drive-by traffic (i.e., the mis-directed clicks that are common) then you can probably get away with more obtrusive ads than on a site where you would want repeat visitors. Not that I recommend such an approach. Overdoing it with obnoxious ads is always bad in my book (and I never do it), but I have placed ads across thousands of my pages and never fielded a single complaint. I “blog” in glorious and intentional obscurity, though, and I do not bother with ads on those pages.
It is true that a site drawing 100 pageviews a day will probably never make money from those or any type of ads, nor would it even be worth the effort spent placing them there. But When you start seeing 100,000 hits a day, and then double that, then the reality of keeping things free starts to change.
I think the headline of “blogging” has somehow trivialized things in web land. I think the .plan file and the “finger” command constituted a blogging platform, supporting my belief that the Internet simply repeats itself under some new headline. I still don’t miss the early and mid 1990s, though. ISPs sucked, modems sucked, the few big company web sites of any depth were just corporate wastelands. I do sort of miss the active scene in telnettable places, just because I like that interface better than point-and-click.
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If you start something “free” inside a culture of free things (which I think the blog concept started as), and then decide to charge people for it, then you don’t belong in that culture any more.
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This does not quite add up for me, at least not in my experience — though maybe I am missing a clue from that fact that you put “free” in quotes.
If a successful web site costs someone hundreds of dollars a month to maintain and keep free for site visitors, then it is not exactly free. Free for you but not for me. So if you “don’t belong in that culture any more” then where do you go? Why should success make you irrelevant? I think if one can rise up from obscurity and still keep their composure and their voice (or whatever, I’m veering into platitudes here for no good reason) then hooray for them. I personally have been happy for people I’ve known who find a way to make either an honest income or a public reputation from their web projects. I was happy for that girl Jenni, of the JenniCam (Jennifer Ringley). I didn’t know her but was happy for her notoriety, and happy to see someone who understood the new medium of the web and found a way to do something that was, at the time, not just unique but uniquely her. (Or so it seemed to me. As I said, I never knew the girl.) I was running home webcams myself in those days, in something of the same spirit as Jenni’s always-on life cam. But she took it to a new level and I thought it was cool. Things change, of course, and a girl (or guy) who gets naked on their webcam is a cliché — though getting naked was never Jenni’s point, but it might as well have been.
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The thing is, the amount of money you get for having a visitor clicking an ad, or just viewing/loading it, is really not worth the trouble compared to the discomfort that same viewer experiences if you overdo it.
=====
It depends how much traffic you get and how (or if) you value your audience. If you come up with a site that attracts a lot of drive-by traffic (i.e., the mis-directed clicks that are common) then you can probably get away with more obtrusive ads than on a site where you would want repeat visitors. Not that I recommend such an approach. Overdoing it with obnoxious ads is always bad in my book (and I never do it), but I have placed ads across thousands of my pages and never fielded a single complaint. I “blog” in glorious and intentional obscurity, though, and I do not bother with ads on those pages.
It is true that a site drawing 100 pageviews a day will probably never make money from those or any type of ads, nor would it even be worth the effort spent placing them there. But When you start seeing 100,000 hits a day, and then double that, then the reality of keeping things free starts to change.
I think the headline of “blogging” has somehow trivialized things in web land. I think the .plan file and the “finger” command constituted a blogging platform, supporting my belief that the Internet simply repeats itself under some new headline. I still don’t miss the early and mid 1990s, though. ISPs sucked, modems sucked, the few big company web sites of any depth were just corporate wastelands. I do sort of miss the active scene in telnettable places, just because I like that interface better than point-and-click.
You’re still not talking about the same sites here. Capitalizing on success by offering something of value (i.e. JenniCam)… not at all annoying (and not instantly irrelevant, but no — not part of the same culture of freely exchanged ideas anymore). Adding an ad or two to cover costs and maybe earn a little extra… eh, passable. Starting a website and having making money as your number one priority… slightly more annoying, but not angering in and of itself. But then… starting a website and having making money as your number one priority, and then pretending that you’re offering something of value to the world and that the site has any other purpose… Very damned annoying. There are always exceptions, but in most of these cases, these sites are blights upon the internet. Keyword-heavy, ad-riddled “niche” sites are bad, and PayPerPost type sites are especially bad. You can just feel the writer trying to shoehorn their life into the constraints of the post they’re required to write. They usually have a disclosure statement on their sites, and you can generally pick out which links were sponsored, but it’s painful, painful writing. They writers are definitely stretching — if the posts were really relevant, they wouldn’t stick out like such a sore thumb. And they always do. Who sticks around to read these sites on a regular basis? And how do the bloggers figure that they’re actually contributing something worthwhile?
You’re still not talking about the same sites here. Capitalizing on success by offering something of value (i.e. JenniCam)… not at all annoying (and not instantly irrelevant, but no — not part of the same culture of freely exchanged ideas anymore). Adding an ad or two to cover costs and maybe earn a little extra… eh, passable. Starting a website and having making money as your number one priority… slightly more annoying, but not angering in and of itself. But then… starting a website and having making money as your number one priority, and then pretending that you’re offering something of value to the world and that the site has any other purpose… Very damned annoying. There are always exceptions, but in most of these cases, these sites are blights upon the internet. Keyword-heavy, ad-riddled “niche” sites are bad, and PayPerPost type sites are especially bad. You can just feel the writer trying to shoehorn their life into the constraints of the post they’re required to write. They usually have a disclosure statement on their sites, and you can generally pick out which links were sponsored, but it’s painful, painful writing. They writers are definitely stretching — if the posts were really relevant, they wouldn’t stick out like such a sore thumb. And they always do. Who sticks around to read these sites on a regular basis? And how do the bloggers figure that they’re actually contributing something worthwhile?
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Who sticks around to read these sites on a regular basis?
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Not me! :-D
Now that I think of it, I guess I know the sites you describe, or I know of them. I don’t stick around long enough to care or get bothered by them, but they seem harmless. No one is getting robbed, and the trillion dollar ad industry can endure potholes like this without illegitimizing itself. I have never subscribed to any pay-per-post of paid content site (that stuff washes up on Usenet eventually anyway) but I can understand the mentality of those who do. It feels like you’re getting in on something, like I used to feel I was getting in on something by reading 2600 or subscribing to Fortean Times. I have seen some of the content people pay for, and my reaction is usually ‘ewwww,’ but as long as no one’s getting robbed and if the market can bear it then it’s all good.
The sites that annoy me are these automated link farms leech search results from legitimate search engine, only to spray popups and other ad-only pages at you on your way out: http://jello.big.com/
Then again, these sites make *SHITLOADS* of money, and I guess no one’s getting hurt by them. Hmmm, maybe it’s time to turn to the dark side. ;)
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Who sticks around to read these sites on a regular basis?
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Not me! :-D
Now that I think of it, I guess I know the sites you describe, or I know of them. I don’t stick around long enough to care or get bothered by them, but they seem harmless. No one is getting robbed, and the trillion dollar ad industry can endure potholes like this without illegitimizing itself. I have never subscribed to any pay-per-post of paid content site (that stuff washes up on Usenet eventually anyway) but I can understand the mentality of those who do. It feels like you’re getting in on something, like I used to feel I was getting in on something by reading 2600 or subscribing to Fortean Times. I have seen some of the content people pay for, and my reaction is usually ‘ewwww,’ but as long as no one’s getting robbed and if the market can bear it then it’s all good.
The sites that annoy me are these automated link farms leech search results from legitimate search engine, only to spray popups and other ad-only pages at you on your way out: http://jello.big.com/
Then again, these sites make *SHITLOADS* of money, and I guess no one’s getting hurt by them. Hmmm, maybe it’s time to turn to the dark side. ;)