I have been thinking a lot about money lately. How to monetize my blog so I can stay home and have enough cash to finish my degree. I am still trying to figure out exactly what to do to make this happen. There are so many different opinions about it. Where do we start?
Of course there are affiliate programs and Google AdSense. I have a few of these but I don’t think they do much good right now. I need more traffic to make them a viable source of income. I also have Kontera and Chitika on my site. I have used sponsored tweets as well. As of today, I have earned a grand total of $.85. I should be excited that I have made any money at all online but it is not enough to be successful.
The good news: I don’t care right now. My blog is still in its infancy and just getting started. I had the most visitors to date yesterday and I am very excited. I have topped 1300 visitors and can count on a few visits every day even before I get something posted. Thanks for that. I amnot keeping hard and fast to the three month mark that seems to be when people give up. I started mid December of 2009 but didn’t start pushing it until January. I consider my blog to be a month and a half old right now. I figure by april I should be cruising along quite well. My exposure has been more than I ever expected to this point. My Alexa raking is rising, and while I am not fixated on this number I do want it to go up and not down.
I know some other bloggers who are working on the monetizing thing too. James over at TheInfoPreneur has a ton of great stuff and is now working on compiling some of it for sale. His experience has got me thinking about my site as well. James is a wealth of information on how to blog and how to be a better person. He posts tons of content and his site has skyrocketed since he started it. He has been a major inspiration for me (no he is NOT paying me to say this. Yet. 😉 ) and getting my blog going.
Now, I am basically a cheapskate. I don’t have money to throw around at the latest make money online scheme. Kidney transplants and dialysis is expensive, even with insurance. So, being a cheapskate, I am extremely picky with what I buy. Like with James, is there stuff I would buy from him? Yes. Will I actually buy stuff from him? At this point I honestly don’t know. If I was making money myself would I? Yes, most definitely.
This brings up another question. How do I go about monetizing without driving people away. I know this is the same struggle that many bloggers get to. I know that it takes selling your own products to make a bunch of cash. I have seen several places that will give you exclusive resell rights to certain products. Can I sell other people’s stuff like this and keep the cash? Sure. Do I want to? I am very lukewarm on the idea. I don’t want to be another one of “those” type blogs. Many of these give you “300 products you can resell” for like $15. How do they make any money for these products? Sure they get the $15 but why are their products so cheap? Are they outdated? Are they just rehashes from other sites? Are they plagiarized from other sites? Too many questions. I may put some ebooks up for sale in the future and some affiliate programs but not right now.
The next thing I am trying to figure out is what do I have to offer that would be either of use, or entertaining enough to entice fellow cheapskates to part with their money. My wife and I have a business that we have been working on selling handmade quilts, table runners and some other crafts at Brenda’s Quilt Shop.com. It has been doing ok in the real world, selling several to friends, neighbors and associates. We have even sold several things on eBay, but we barely broke even with eBay and PayPal fees and postage. I am still going to use eBay over the holidays to sell our stuff but I want to sell with the website as well. On this website I want to focus on selling my writing.
Now, what can I sell of my writing? I am not an authority on WordPress like Dave Doolin, or on blogging or on content production. Anything I wrote on the “how to” front would be rehashes from other places. Is there a market for fiction? I am going to make an ebook of my Saturday fiction serials when they are finished. They will be free for a while at least but would anyone want to spend money on them later? Maybe send them out for free to email subscribers and beg for reviews before selling it. I have other short stories that I am going to run on Saturday’s as well. I am looking at revising some of my old stories that I just love so maybe they can stand on their own as an ebook.
I can write ebooks on simple car repair and maintenence, but that is not something I talk about in more than passing on this site. I can write about kidney failure and taking a 1 year old through 2 years of dialysis and a kidney transplant. I have written tons of blog posts on that as we were going through it while not calling it an actual blog. www.carepages.com page: ameliarosematthews. Would that sell? Maybe. I have seen several things about self publishing on Amazon for both Kindle and .pdf ebooks. That is always in the back of my head.
I just wonder if anyone would buy anything that I can put out like that. Or is my ego just not big enough yet to say screw it and just do it. I figure I have until April and the 3 month wannabe blog hurdle crossed before I have to actually decide and just do it.
For now, I will just write and write and hope like hell people come to read! Don’t forget to check out my Pre-Writing Challenge page that will start on Friday the 19th! That will be more writing! I am also going to work on some guest posts for other sites. All of these things have to be good somewhere right?
Until tomorrow, I have some thinking to do.
Thanks for being here with me.
Justin
