Making Money Online

Making money online means you have to be diversified. Although some money making programs are better than others, there doesn't seem to be one single program that is the answer to earning money from a blog or website.

Sure, it's true, you are making money writing, particularly if you have a blog, but you are really being paid by your advertisers and affiliate programs. In most blogging situations you are not being paid to write.....well...I suppose you are indirectly.

However, if you have a passion for writing there are lots of business opportunities for making money online, your writing being used to invite potential customers to take advantage of the business opportunity or product that you are selling.

What blogging isn't, is a way to make money quick. It's a slow process, particularly if you are only able to work at it part of your time. Unless you are superhuman or are getting your articles from other writers you need time to write enough posts to get lots of attention from the search engines. It takes time to decide on a niche, research keywords, design and build a blog, and then an audience, and get a decent search engine ranking. As I said, even with all the preliminary work done, in order to develop traffic you need quite a few posts, in fact a lot of posts, with the various keywords and other SEO techniques needed to bring in the readers. Plus, to keep your ranking, you need to continue to post regularly. Especially in the beginning when you cannot rely on search engine traffic.

You also need to keep your content fresh. This seems to be particularly important with a blog, but I don't see a lot of difference with websites either. Search engines love fresh content, and that is what gets your pages crawled and indexed regularly. A fairly static website that doesn't change much, doesn't have that advantage. That's why a lot of companies, in business on the internet, or who have websites as promotional or additional sales outlets for their products, are now turning to blogs.

Blogs that are regularly updated, provide the fresh content that the search engines love and they in turn can link to the website sending potential customers. I use this philosophy with my Amazon Stores, which, on their own, are not particularly attractive to the search engines. But, with the addition of the blog, linking to the stores, my readers, (some of my readers) visit the stores and occasionally buy something.

That's what I mean when I say making money online means you have to be diversified. It's not enough to put up a website and forget it. You need to capitalize on every available opportunity to make money, be that contextual ads, affiliate sales, e-books or selling products directly from an online line store or your own store.

After a couple of years in this business, I have found that money comes in small amounts, especially at first, but it comes from diverse places. In other words, I make a little from Adsense, a little from Amazon, and a little from my t-shirt sales as well as the money I make from the FriendFinder programs. So far, none of them have been the definitive answer to making money online, but collectively, it is starting to add up.

To be fair though, I have come from a long way back. I started blogging when it was a fairly new thing, not well known about and a lot of the science had let to be discovered. Many were still using website science, which, although similar is not the same thing. Blogs have regular audiences, repeat readers, not all websites have that. Blogs require fresh content, lots of it and regularly, and blogs come in lots of shapes and sizes...There are personal blogs, money making blogs, business blogs, sex blogs, writer's blogs, girly blogs, family blogs, photo blogs and more. Not all of them make money, nor do the bloggers want to make money from them. But some do, and some bloggers have that in mind.

These days, the science of blogging is better understood, the blog providers like Blogger are more refined, and there are more of them. Advertisers are realizing the benefits of running ads on blogs, and affiliate marketers are realizing the sales potential of promoting products through blogs as a way to increase the money made from websites and online stores.

There is still lots of opportunity for enterprising, inventive people who think out of the box, to come up with ways to make money either from their blogs, or from others. I think there is something to be said for advertising that pays flat fees based on the size and readership of a blog, much like newspaper and television advertising. There are some who do that now, although, more and more advertising companies are pitching the cost per click method or cost per action. Both of those make it harder for us to make money, and to some degree, put most of the responsibilty on the blogger. No clicks, no money. But in many cases, the company is receiving free billboard style advertising.

So what set website and blog advertising apart from the more conventional forms, may actually be hurting it in the long run. We may have to explore this further in another post.

I'm not sure I was much help to you tonight, more of a blogging philosphy lesson than anything, but it's stuff that you need to consider and stuff that I like to remind myself of from time to time. I find it helps to keep me motivated.