BLOGGING FOR PROFIT - RV-Dreams Community Forum

REX OR MARY · RV-Dreams Community Member

BLOGGING FOR PROFIT

Howard · Host

First of all, I am hardly qualified to answer this question. There are lots of others "a search and a couple clicks away" that have much more knowledge on this Topic.

But here is what I've learned. Most of us RVing bloggers do it because we enjoy it. It becomes more like "work" when the focus changes to profits.

There is nothing wrong with trying to pick up a few dollars if we are going to be blogging anyway, but it's certainly not easy to generate income solely as a blogger. In order to generate enough income, you have to drive LOTS AND LOTS of traffic to your site. I'll come back to that.

Okay, what are the methods for picking up cash via a blog? The easiest is Google Adsense and other similar programs. With Google Adsense you place some code into your blog to set the format of your ads and the location. Google scans your pages and THEY place ads that are relevant to the content on each page. Companies pay Google to place their ads on relevant pages in this manner. Every time one of your visitors clicks on an ad that interests them, you earn a few cents. That's it. You earn a few cents just because of the click. Your visitor doesn't have to buy anything, just click.

Now, Google keeps an eye out for abuses and they will terminate your account if they find them. You are not allowed to click on your own ads - they somehow know it. You also cannot place anything on your site such as "Please click on our ads to support this site." Google's advertisers are paying for clicks, and they demand that the clicks be as valid as possible.

There are other "Content sensitive" ad programs like Google and more are popping up every day. But Google is far and away the leader right now.

Another way to earn money is to establish "Affiliate" relationships with other websites that sell stuff. Many, many sites will pay you a commission if your visitor clicks through your website to theirs and purchases something. Some affiliate programs don't even require a purchase and will pay you for just the click or the "lead". But most require a purchase of their product. The good news is that these programs are pretty sophisticated. If your visitor clicks through your website to another, the other company's website captures your visitor's "cookies". So if your visitor goes back in later and buys, you can still get a commission. These windows may last a month, three months, six months, etc.

Almost all affiliate programs have a relationship with an Affiliate Management company that manages the program, signs up the affiliates (you), calculates and pays the commissions, and handles all the accounting and reporting. If you have a company with a website you like doing business with, you can look for something on their website that says "affiliates", "associates", "partners", "earn commissions", etc. Chances are they will send you to their affiliate program manager (Commission Junction, LinkShare, etc.) to establish an account. Once you have established an account, you can search for text links, banner links, etc. to place on your site. These are the links necessary for the affiliate company to know a click came from your site and a commission might be due.

Sounds like a lot of trouble, right? Yes, it is. But once you do it a couple of times, it's pretty easy and you don't have to mess with it again.

On our blog, we use a combination of these methods. We use Google Adsense, we have several affiliate relationships, and we have links to products and companies we recommend for which we get absolutely nothing - we just think highly of them.

All these links and ads are on our sidebar. But we will not just link to anyone. Our affiliate ads have to be relevant to our visitors and they have to be links to companies or products we are comfortable promoting. We won't risk our reputation on something we know nothing about for a few dollars.

Now, we also place text links within the body of some posts that are actually to affiliate companies (however 95% of our text links are just links with no affiliate relationship involved). That is the most common method of using affiliate advertising IN BLOGS. That's because you are able to develop a trust with your readers and they will click on text links within the context of your posts. Also, the body of your posts is fairly unrestricted no matter which blogging software you are using.

Blogger, for example, allows you to place Google Adsense ads in their basic free blogging package in areas outside the body of your posts. However, you have no control over the format of the ad or the placement. MyTripJournal does not allow ads at all outside the body of the posts. That's why we left MyTripJournal - we couldn't put any ads other than the text links we snuck into the posts. With TypePad we have lots more flexibility, but I have to pay more for it. If I knew anything about programming I could do even more with TypePads customization features.

You know what's funny? I'm still an affiliate for MyTripJournal and we still recommend them as an easy blogging tool. We could get paid a commission for each person we refer and we have referred a lot. However, I've been lazy about putting in the proper links and have missed out on quite a bit of commissions.

Okay, those are the basic methods for earning cash as a blogger. At least those are the basic methods unless you have something else to sell. More and more people with products to sell, are using blogging as a method to develop trust whereby those loyal blog readers can later be converted to paying customers.

But back to the "Traffic" issue. It's really, really hard to generate enough traffic to your blog to justify the time setting up Google Adsense and various affiliate relationships. The percentage of visitors to your site that actually click on ads is sooooo small. And the percentage of visitors that click on an ad or link and actually "buy" something is even smaller.

For example, we have lots of Google ads on multiple pages in our Journal, on the Forum, and on the main RV-Dreams website. In January 2007, we generated 74,000 page views for one month. How many clicks did we have on Google ads? 420. That's barely more than one half of one percent! And it's taken me two years to get to that point.

Can I do better? Sure if I spend many, many more hours than I already do studying and tinkering with all this. But the point is you have to be patient and you have to drive traffic. The percentages are just not in your favor otherwise.

How do you drive traffic to your blog? Well, you have to have a writing style that makes people want to come back. Also, people that read our types of blogs want lots of pictures.

And they want consistency. One of the reasons we write every single day, beside the fact that I just enjoy it, is because people know they can rely on it and they are rarely disappointed. If no one else has updated their blog, readers know that Howard & Linda have. Another reason is that each day we write creates a new page and another channel for ads.

I'm not saying it is necessary to write every day - there are very few of us that have the discipline (or lack of brain cells) to do that. But consistency does count whether it is the same time each week or every other week or whatever. But daily postings do create less fallout of readers and they create more pages with more ads and more potential clicks.

You can also keep your readers involved by allowing them to sign up for email notifications of your postings or for automatic emails of your positngs or for automatic "feeds" of your postings. The problems with automatic emails and "feeds" is that people are not coming to your site. If they don't come to your site, they can't click on any ads. So there is a fine balance between giving your readers what they want and giving up potential ad clicks.

How do you get people to find you in the first place? Well, you participate in all the RV Forums and you include your website link in your forum "signature".

There are many forums, like this one, that actually provide a place for you to blatantly post your website. Why do we allow you to do that here? We do it for a couple of reasons. First, we love to give all our readers as much information as possible and so many like to read about others' experiences. Second, we understand that the Search Engines love websites with lots of "Content" and "Links" to other sites with relevant content. The more we help you, the more you help us get discovered on the world wide web. So we hope that each person that puts a link to their website in our Forum also links to us in their blog or website. We ultimately help each other as our cross-linking helps us move up in the search rankings.

How else do you get people to your blog? Get listed on HitchItch.com and other websites that list or link to RV blog sites. Make comments on other RV blogs and leave your web address. Learn how to include "captions or tags" of your photos that you include in your blog. You'd be surprised how many people find our RV-Dreams.com site just because they were searching Google Images for Ford F-450.

Whew! I'm sure I've forgotten something, but those are the basics from my standpoint. I needed to write all this down anyway and include it in the main website. Actually, I have answered this question for a few people in emails, so now I at least have it saved in writing and can just link here.

My intent here is not to discourage you. Once you throw up a few Google ads, you don't have to do anything else and your earnings, though tiny, are gravy. But if you are not careful, you can get sucked into an awful lot of work for very little return.

Hope that helps and good luck!

Putput · RV-Dreams Community Member

I am so glad you type in big letters! Your info was great for some one who know nothing about all this new-fangled stuff! I just might check this out. Thanks for taking the time to explain it.

REX OR MARY · RV-Dreams Community Member

THANK-YOU HOWARD FOR TAKING THE TIME TO ANSWER MY QUESTION. YOU'VE GIVEN ME SEVERAL NEW GOOD IDEAS WHICH I WILL BE IMPLEMENTING. I AM REALLY IMPRESSED WITH YOUR 74,000 PAGE VIEWS IN JANUARY, I HAD 950, SO I HAVE A LONG WAYS TO GO. ALTHOUGH THE HAPPY CAMPERS IS NEW TO BLOGGER, WE DID PRACTICE FOR 8 MONTHS ON ANOTHER SITE TO SEE IF THE THE TWO OF US COULD REACH OUR GOAL OF WRITING ALMOST DAILY. GLAD TO READ YOU'VE GOT LINDA BACK ON THE "UP" SIDE!!!

SoCalToolGuy · RV-Dreams Family Member

Howard, I don't know if this is the right place to ask this but I think maybe it is. I was just wondering what the costs of putting up a website like yours would run. I started to build a business related site through Yahoo that was $11.95 a month. That seemed pretty reasonable to me so I wondered what it costs you for what you have created. I hope this isn't too personal of a question. Thanks for a great site. I look forward to reading it daily.

Ray

bjoyce · RV-Dreams Family Member

(I am sure Howard will move the discussion about hosting costs.)
I am not Howard but we have our own domain and hosting through godaddy.com, which has a good set of plans. GoDaddy.com will give you a small hosting account with blog just for registering the domain name, which is $7 to $9 a year (.info is on sale at $1/year right now). The free hosting account does have small ads. The real Godaddy.com hosting plans start at $4/month and you get a 10% discount paying by the year so it is $3.59/month or $52.03/year for the cheapest hosting plan and the domain name. Most of us would have a hard time going past the limits of Godaddy.com's cheapest plan and they are all business plans.
Different hosting services and plans will cost different amounts. My brother-in-law is paying $30/month but the service designed his website and handles many business details for him so he feels it is worth it.

RVDude · RV-Dreams Family Member

GoDaddy.com and Site Build It
Don't let the name fool you. GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar on the entire net and probably one of the very largest hosting services. Superb tech support answers the real phone in seconds and 24/7 to boot. Positively the cheapest full fledged hosting (domain and web site) anywhere. I use them for all of my domains (a couple dozen of them). They do offer easy publishing tools like WebSite Tonight and of course full powered web tools - most free if you don't mind ads at the top otherwise just a couple bucks a month each to get rid of the ads.

Howard publishes through Site Build-It which provides an even more simplified method of publishing a fully featured and commerce producing web site - just look at his rv-dreams.com. These folks offer a means to totally insulate you from html if you want and still have much of the power of the web. GEICO thinks Cavemen can do it, well just look at what a lawyer (Howard) has done with SiteBuild It (rv-dreams.com)! (Sorry Howard, I couldn’t resist!)

The most simplistic method to publish is to use a blog utility like blogspot or blogger or many many more.

Howard · Host

Ray,

Well, RVDude & bjoyce are much more technologically saavy than yours truly. smile

If you have website construction skills, then you can get by on simple domain hosting fees which they have laid out.

Since I know nothing I use "Site Build It" to help me construct RV-Dreams.com. It cost me $399 up front and is now $299 a year. For me it is worth it as Site Build It helped me construct a website with no knowledge. They renew my registration. They submit my site to all the search engines. They constantly update me with tips and techniques to drive more traffic to the site. They have an extensive user forum. It is truly a great commercial solution for a web novice.

But it is not great for blogging or hosting photos or forums.

Therefore I use TypePad.com for our Journal and cross-link it. I have the Pro Level at $149.50 a year in order to get the most flexibility with income-producing options.

For our photos, we use SmugMug.com. We have the middle level - Power User - at $59.95. Of course we get a discount off that price whenever one of our referrals signs up using our coupon code: MAZOatjTCwIoY

There are numerous free photo hosting sites. But I love the way SmugMug does things and I am confident in their back-up plans. We do not keep our photos on our hard drive or in hardcopy, so we are relying completely on SmugMug and their three backup sytems.

Rather than uploading photos to Site Build It or TypePad or the Forum, we just link our photos in from SmugMug. That way we can easily use photos for multiple purposes without having to upload them numerous times.

For the RV-Dreams Community Forum, I use ActiveBoard.com. I use it because it's easy, other Site Build It users had successfully incorporated it, and even I can run it. smile

The cost of ActiveBoard is free if you let them post ads, or $4.95 a month for the Gold level which gets you up to 10,000 page views a month and you control any ads. We pay $21.95 a month for up to 100,000 page views (we started out at the 10,000 level, but that quickly became inadequate). smile

So we are paying between $700 & $800 a year for all the linked together websites. It's probably a lot more than is necessary, but I'm happy with the simplicity and the fact that I am in total control as a complete web novice. smile

Hope that answers your question. It all comes back to what you are trying to do with a site, how much ability you have, how much traffic you want to or need to generate, and how much time you want to put in.

darbyjudy · RV-Dreams Community Member

Howard I just got finished reading Blogging for Profit and I tell you man you are certainly wasting time. I wish I could tell it like you do. You could be making the big bucks for some large corporation and making a lot of money. You are one smart dude. I really mean this.
But then again you could not be enjoying yourself as you and Linda seem to be doing. I guess you tried the other life and this one must be a lot more fun.

-- Edited by darbyjudy at 14:27, 2009-02-10

pierreandcolleen · RV-Dreams Family Member

Another affiliate program that has a variety of products is Amazon's associate program. They only pay 4% commission to start with, but you don't get paid until you've made at least $50. I tend to use them for books I recommend and some other products.

-Colleen

vetrncwby · RV-Dreams Community Member

Howard,

Thanks for sending me the E Mail with this link in it. I have read through all your suggestions and actually do most all of them on my site except a daily blog. Since I am not yet a fulltimer I don't have much to write about. I guess I need to get more traffic to my site and writing interesting stuff would probably help. Just like when you started I too have started to look for ways to generate income once we're on the road. The only difference is I am starting way in advance but already have the rig. Well thanks again!

Steve, Jena, Aubrie & Jake
2009 Everest 330B
2007 F-350 4x4 6.0 Power Stroke - SRW
CPO USN RETIRED
www.familyfunrving.com