Photo by Jacob Bøtter

In the last weeks I have received a big quantity of emails from people who is wondered about How to make money through blogging. I was analizing the content of this and similar blogs about this matter and I think the information is not arriving very well to that people who is starting in this lifestyle.

Making money by blogging is not so easy as many people say. In fact, it could be a hard task, and also it depends of the niche. First of all, it is very important to understand that the more people you have, the more money you earn – that’s a fact. Money is on masses, and if you want to earn big sums of money you should have many people following you, otherwise how do you expect to earn money from?. Tip 1: Traffic is key

The first thing many newbies think about making money with their blogs is Google Adsense. I must to say that you won’t earn a penny if your website doesn’t get enough traffic. So no matter how relevant the ads could be, if you don’t drive enough people to your website you will be wasting your time. Tip 2: Advertising does not work without people clicking on it

Another way to make monney with your blog is to sell ad spaces on it, i.e. 125x125px banners or textlinks. You can earn money by exposing other people’s services/products… Wait a minute! did I say services/products? Tip 3: You can make money by selling your own stuff: services, products, resources

There are other ways to make money online but you need to realize the idea of this post.

Is it possible to make money blogging?

Well, the answer to that question is quite simple, IT IS NOT. It is not possible to make money by blogging simply because Blogging cannot generate money by itself! Blogging is a medium, a path between you and an audience who is mainly looking for information and probably for products or services.

You need to devise something to generate money with: it could be a software, a service, a book, a clip of audio… And after then, you could use your blog in order to promote and inform the people about what you offer.

So why people say that they make money Blogging? I think they are not expressing the idea so well, they should be referring that they make money through blogging, or with the help of, using a blog.

Conclusion

Photo by jenn_jenn

To make money “blogging”, you need to have something to sell. It could be whatever you want, in my case i’m involved with web design services, private sales (advertising), text link ads, SEO consulting and affiliate marketing.

When you have something to sell, you need to attract customers by driving traffic to your blog. To learn more about this topic, you can take a look into my Boost Traffic category.

One more thing, and probably the most important lesson of this topic. You need to be patient! It’s very difficult to see good results in a week, so you should have the patience to wait a couple of time until being successful!

What about you? How you do make money through your blog?

There are many ways to boost your blog that you can use to increase your subscribers, visits/month, pageviews, etc. In this contest, I will make a study of what I did in my last contest, how I do it and what were the results of applying different techniques…

Promote Something

It’s good to do giveaways without a reason, but it’s even better if you have a reason to do it. If you have a product or service that you want to promote, do it! I recommend you to offer free samples of them, this way you will attract many people, making them stick to your site just because of the product/service. In my case, I was promoting my ebook The Affiliate StartGuide, which the people could get for free by signing up for my newsletter.

Remember something, people love to get things for free. So if you offer them something without charging a penny, you will attract masses…

Find Sponsors

The major of the blog contests on internet are based on Entrecard Credits. That’s not bad, but there are so common and at least that you give away a big amoung of credits, 50k or even more, people won’t pay attention to you.

How can you make them think something different than “bah! It’s just another entrecard contest…” ? Giving uncommon prizes. The first thing you need to do before launching a contest, is to find sponsors for it. Contact companies and bloggers related with your niche asking them for sponsorship.

How I did it? I contacted them by using the following email:

Hi Company/name of the blogger,

First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Javier and I manage a blog on http://mrjavo.com, which is related to blogging and internet marketing tips.

Recently, I launched Mr Javo dot Com 2.0, which have some new features, including an ebook and a newsletter.

In order to promote the new features, I’m holding a contest which has over $XXX in prizes, sponsored by companies like XXXX,YYYY,ZZZZ among others…

How does it work? To take part in the contest is simple, the users will need to sign up for my newsletter. Once they signed up and verified their mails, they will receive a copy of my new ebook. As you see, is very simple. I will pick 10 lucky winners through a drawing using the service provided by random.org.

What do you get? By sponsoring this contest your website, product or service will be exposed in front of thousand of users, making it a win-win situation for us. This is something big, and I will sponsor it through many ways, including social media networks, forums and blogs, among others…

Let me know if you want to sponsor something, a service, product or anything else is very well welcome!

Best Regards,

Mr Javo.

In this email, there are some important aspects that you need to clarify:

• Brief introduction of yourself, how you are and which’s your blog.
• Why are you asking for sponsorship?
• If you count with other sponsorships, mention them.
• How the contest will work?
• What will a sponsor get by sponsoring your contest?

If one of these aspects are not especified in your email, you have the risk of being ignored, and even more when you deal with big companies… You can use that email format or improve it even more.

Something is sure, the bigger your prizes the more the BOOM that will cause your contest…

Spread The Word

You have different ways to spread the word about your contest. Adding the post of the contest to social media networks (such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, etc…) is a great way to do it, because of the infinite users that you can contact over there. If your contest is good enough, your friends will share it and the other people too, being a big chain read by several people.

By talking of your contest in forums like Digital Point can help you a lot, because there are many users that are looking for an opportunity to get something for free. But something that I highly recommend you is not to ask to your readers to share your contest. Why? When you do something good enough, you don’t need to ask to, and also, it will be more legitimate.

Invite People… directly

Another way to get more participants is contacting the people directly. As the email that I wrote before, I also wrote a letter of invitation, which I spread through the contact forms of the blogs. I invite directly some bloggers, who replied me with an affirmative answer…

Have Fun

Don’t take it so serious. Don’t stress or feel bad if you don’t get great sponsors, it could be a difficult task. In my past experience I contacted many people, getting rejected or ignored by some of them. So, don’t feel bad and keep contacting another people, hopefully you will get great prizes for your contest…

Analyzing My Results

Everything I told you in this post seems to be great, but how was the performance of it? Well, first of all, let’s review the changes in the RSS counter:

When I started the contest, I had an average of 240 subscribers. As you can see, in the first 3 days the number of subscribers jumped over 300! Getting a big peak of 500 in a week (the 7th day). At the present time, I’m handling 450 subscribers, which means that I increased over 100% the number of subscribers!

If we talk about the number of followers on twitter, mybloglog and other social sites, I can’t give you an exact number but I can tell you that I have had a good reaction too.

At the end of the month, I ended with over 100 subscribers listed in my newsletter, which means that I increased that number over 100% again!

To conclude, I can say that I boosted my blog more than 100%, increasing my followers by RSS, newsletter and social media networks. That’s a great thing, it means that I expanded my brand and now, I’m being read by more people than before, helping me in my future actions, contests and projects.

So do you have doubts of my success? I don’t think so… If you need help to hold your own blog contest, don’t doubt on asking me, I will be glad to help you .

How long should be a post? This is a great question which someone asked me by email. This is somewhat relative, because every blogger has a different way to think and write their thoughts. Some of them like to keep the post relatively short, and other ones likes to write as crazies, writing a post with 1000 words or even more.

Remember that it’s better quality than quantity. Is better to write a short post with quality than to write a long post without quality. With a good post, being this one short or long, you can attract many people who could comment in your post and subscribe to your RSS feed. Aside this, by writing a poor post you won’t get anything from the readers, instead, you will frighten them.

The length of a post depends of how informative will it be, for example If you are going to announce a contest, it can take you 200 words, being good for everybody. Instead, if you are going to write about a very discussed topic, you should write a good amount of content with some interesting points, if you don’t, your readers won’t have any content to discuss!.

Another important thing you need to remember, is to be accurate. If the post is about Marketing, don’t end talking about Fishing. You should stick into the main topic, and its relatives… People could get bored if you write about an information that they were not expecting to read about. This usually happens when the blogger is not clear about the topic he wants to write about. May be he can be clear, but sometimes, while you are writing a post, many ideas can cross your mind. If you don’t know how to differentiate them, you can mixx all those ideas and get a twister of thoughts on your post.

Conclusion

Before to start writing, you should organize your ideas. I recommend you to set priorities, tags or keywords, which you could clear your mind and this way, you will be writing a good post. The post length is not too important, as long as you write good content and keep your thoughts focused in a point. You can mixx all your ideas, which is normal because that’s the point of blogging, but if your ideas are not ordered with certain sense, no matter if your post is long or short, it will suck!

Remember, it’s up to you

As human beings, sometimes we have not ideas, until the point that we could think for an hour, and nothing would cross our minds… When I started blogging, I thought that I could not do something useful beside writing. The experience has taught me that you can do several useful things beside writing, changing my mind and making me the blogger I am now.

So in this kind of days, you have many alternatives beside writing, which you can do as blogger. The following one is a list of things that you can do when you have nothing to write:

• Make New Friendships: This is a very important thing that you should do always, but even more when you have nothing to write. There are people in my profiles who added me and we have not exchanged more than a welcome message. So I can imagine that you have this kind of people too, so you could talk with them by email, instant messenger or by phone, and attempt to make a good friendship. This way, you will get more people coming to your blog.
• Monetize Your Blog: You can optimize your blog to make more money than you usually do. Searching another programs beside you use, you can try and test another alternatives to make money online. After a time, you can choose these ones which are more productive for you. I usually do this by visiting blogs like ZacJohnson dot Com, usually Zac is trying different programs to monetize his blog.
• Check Your Blog’s Statistics: This is a good one, though many bloggers get obsessed with that. Is nice to see all those statistics that SiteMeter or Google Analytics can provide, such inbound links, outbound links or daily traffic…
• Answer Your Emails/Comments: This is something that you need to do everyday, but sometimes you have some pending comments that you never replied, and probably these people are waiting for you. So you can take this kind of days when you have nothing to do, to reply the comments on your blog, to reply your emails, invitations or requests. Is very important to make your readers feel important for you, otherwise they will not come back for more content, or at least, not often than they usually do. Another thing you can do related to the comments, is reread them! You can learn something new by doing this…
• Visit Other Blogs: Again, this is something that you need to do regularly, but specially if you are on stand by. It is very fun for me to visit another blogs, I really enjoy reading and sharing my opinion about the infinite topics that you can find in other blogs. Also, you can visit another blogs to get the inspiration that you need to write something, like writing a post in response to another one…

In addition of this, there are many miscellaneous things that you can do, such dropping entrecards, reading your subscriptions, redistribute your widgets in your blog to get a freshest look…. Whatever, there are several alternatives, you just need to find something that you like to do! I would be glad to read your experiences related to this topic, don’t doubt on commenting!

Happy Rambling

Blogging, what a wonderful activity made by many people around the world. Many of them write on their blogs for fun, others for money, and others simply to make another activity in their days.

The truth is that for everybody, blogging represent the same thing, a life’s style. If you love/like to blog, once you have started it, is too difficult to get rid of it. When you neglect it, you feel that you need something else to complete your routine, and that’s to write something in your blog .

As you noticed, I was away the last month. I was very busy with many things, but now I have a little more free time for blogging, socializing and all those activities I regularly made . My schedule was full everyday, and I had not time to do anything related to my blog. In fact, I have many ideas to blog about which I could not write in the past, but I will be publishing in them the next days.

I don’t know if you already got the point of this post. If you didn’t yet, don’t feel bad, I was not enough clear. I want to say that Blogging is a road that you never stop crossing it. Why I say that? Well because in the last month, thought I didn’t post anything, I received hundred of invitations, friendship requests and emails!! So I could stay away of my blog, but all those mentioned things called me everyday to keep blogging and doing my job .

If you like blogging, eventually you will take your blog back, of course, if you left it for a time . The great of take a break, is that you will return reloaded, and you will write and participate with more passion than ever!! I speak from experience .

So my fellow readers, tomorrow I will post about the suggestion in my Skribit’s widget, so stay tuned this week to get more reloaded tips from me!

Bye bye, have a nice blogging!

Hello my fellow bloggers, first at all I want to say sorry because the last week I wrote 2 or 3 articles, vs my usual daily writing. Also, these articles were not too informative, but you need to understand I have being very busy with my studies, robotics and other things I do, parallel to blogging.

I had this topic about 2 weeks ago, but I had not the opportunity to post it before . The big question of this post is what motivate you to blog? That is a good question that many people don’t have a clear idea.

The last month, I saw how my subscribers increased daily, and that was something I liked very much. But as well as my subscribers increased, decreased my daily visits. In addition of this, I stopped to blog for a week and I saw my visit’s chart with a negative slope, and I have to say that I felt bad.

In addition of that, many of my readers sent me an e-mail, asking me why I stopped to blog. I received like 20 emails, and I thank you to everybody who wrote me, because that gave me the force to keep doing what I do here.

About two weeks ago, I was invited to use SocialSpark in its alpha phase (now beta), which made me feel important in the blogging community . However, I joined to the new IZEA’s program, and I have to say I found it very cool. I have took a couple of opportunities, being approved quickly.

But although I could not write daily, I kept checking my statistics, rankings and comments in every community. When I saw my rankings after the week I stopped to blog, Mr. Javo dot Com dropped some positions. That, combined with the other factors I mentioned above, motivated me to write again .

I thought on what I have being doing here, and how I was progressing with the pass of the months. I thought I was dropping all my work through the window, and immediately I start to write again . I talked with fellow bloggers, and they told me that happens, so I took it easy.

Do you have experimented something like that? Feel free to share your story with everybody in this community.