Catharsis of the Bogue

Oddities, Profundities, Profanities and Dad Stuff

Tag: blog (Page 3 of 13)

Can MY blog make money too?

May 27, 2014 / / 17 Comments

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

Ahh Crap! I have to get the floor wet!

May 27, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Yesterday I wrote about perseverance.  How sticking to your plan despite obstacles and time will finally yield results.  Today I have a thought about how sometimes you just have to do what you need to do.

Have you ever finished taking a shower and realized that you forgot to get a towel?  And the linen closet is across the bathroom?  And there is just a small twinkling in the back of your mind that looks at the toilet paper and weighs the option and dismisses it because it would be too messy?

I have.  I have more than once.  I did yesterday morning.  In fact the title of this post is scrawled in the margin of an Outdoor Life magazine in the bathroom.  Luckily there was a pencil in the drawer.  I wonder if I autographed that page if it would ever be worth any money????

Anyway, I forgot to grab a towel.  The first thing that ran through my head when I discovered this was the title of this post.  So what did I do?  I walked to the linen closet and got a towel, getting water on the floor that I had to clean up later.  My initial “Oh crap, I have to get the floor wet” exclamation began to take root in my head as a blog post idea about then.

Here is the metaphor: how many times do we in the blogging world encounter something that may be unpleasant or undesireable?  Whether it is backing up your blog so you don’t get hacked like my friend Heather did, or by writing that post or comment that is going to make people mad, or even just deciding to be yourself on your blog and who the hell cares what anyone else thinks.

In any of those situations you will have those “Oh Crap!” moments that you will realize there is something that may not be the best thing at the time i.e. getting the floor wet, but will be a good thing overall i.e. not standing there and waiting to air dry.  There are things you may have to do while you build your site and your brand that will make people mad.

Your spouse will be pissed off at times, “You spend more time with that damn computer….” but in the end, when the cash is rolling in, it will all have been worth it.  So as the great Naval officer David Farragut so eloquently is paraphrased, “Damn the torpedoes!  Full Speed Ahead!”  And so it shall be with my blog.  Full speed ahead and while there will be things in the way, I will run right over them.

There will be bumps in the road, axles break but can be repaired, things overheat but can be cooled down, and tires pop, so always carry a spare (hence backup your site).  You can overcome anything that is thrown at you if you

  1. Have sight of your future as a blogger and where your business should be.
  2. Never give up your dream no matter the odds
  3. Realize that you will have to make some messes and either walk away from the deposit, or clean it up later.
  4. The ends will justify those means

That is all.

Discuss freely in the comments, or kindly digg, retweet, stumbleupon, or amplify! Thank you!

-Justin

My Blog Is Calling And I Must Go!

May 27, 2014 / / 5 Comments

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about the mountains.  How the mountains were calling me and John Muir. During the course of that post I said that my blog is calling and I must go, paraphrasing John Muir of course.  I had said that it would be a great t-shirt.  It still would be.

Today I wanted to write about commitments.  I know there are posts all over Blogistan about how to divide your time and do everything that you want to.  This is only partially about that.  We all have our commitments to our families, wives, husbands, kids etc.  We have work commitments.  We have housework commitments.  There are church and community commitments.  And, if we want a piece of this wonderful internet pie, there are commitments to our websites and blogs.

My blog is my second mistress.  My laptop is my first mistress and I dearly love the internet.  It is hard to budget the time to sit down and write and read blogs and comment on blogs and take care of the kids and cook dinner and do laundry and mop the floor, and entertain the wife, and on and on and on.  So where do you dig out the time to write?

The answer is wherever you can.  Forgo TV for a night, or a couple of hours.  Forgo watching the kids go to sleep.  Go to bed a bit later or get up earlier.  Ben over at 6aliens.com and James at the infopreneur both talk about this.  Carve out the time for your blog and your website.  There is a lot of time devoted to growing your blog and sometimes the web design gets pushed back.  Hard to read, cluttered sites do not bring back traffic.  Work on your site as well.

Tell your friends, “I can’t.  My Blog is calling and I must go.”  Tell your wife (only once in a while), “My Blog is calling and I must go.”  (Flowers smooth that over if you do it too much).  You can tell your kids the same thing, once in a while.

The hard part is figuring out when it is actually beneficial to just shut the laptop and let your blog call.  Devote everything you possibly can to your site so that it will make you money.  Throw everything you can at it so that you can have more time with your family when it is keeping its own head up.  It will still call to you, but not as loud.

When you are at that point, you can take off and go on fabulous vacations because you will be one of the pros like David Risley, or Darren Rowse, or John Chow even.  Your blog will still be calling, you will still go, but you can go from around the world.  John Chow likes to have all of his stuff online so he can access it from anywhere.  WordPress is like that as well.

My blog is calling and I must go, for I want to be a Pro.  I need the cash.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below:

-Justin

Break out the bubbly! COB is one year old!

May 27, 2014 / / 1 Comment
Monkeys Blogging
Image via Wikipedia

hello all of you wonderful readers!  I ahve hit a milestone here at Catharsis of the Bogue.  It was 1 year ago today that I put up my first ever blog post on the internet!  That blog was on WordPress.com at the time and frustrated me because I couldn’t modify it enough and put ads so right after the first of the year I migrated to justinsbrainpan.com.

There have been so many good things to happen over this year.  I have met many many good people and learned so much about Blogging as a whole.  Sometimes I still feel like I am coming in at the tail end of the Blogging thing but other times I am right in the thick of it.

Things have changed around here since those first posts.  Now, there is not so much of a dear diary feeling, and I actually want people to read my stuff.  I think my writing has improved greatly.

I have received much help and suggestions from people who have come and gone during this past year.  I remember when I was celebrating 3 months, and then 6 months and a lot of my friends were only wraiths on twitter and no longer Blogging.

There are people who I have respected and learned a lot from who have decided that Blogging is not what they want to do anymore.  Yes, it is Nathan Hangen but I can only thank him for giving me so much drive and desire to create.  It was his…influence that started me on the podcasting thing.  Thanks Nathan, just one more thing to do.  I still want to blog though.

So what is in store for the future of this site?  For now, business as usual.  There will be some changes coming but they will be a while before implementing.   I never dreamed when I wrote that first “diary entry” that I would be here now, with 3 blogs, 3 partners and all of you readers.  This post will be number 200 on this site.  One of those is a guest post, the rest are mine.  There are also nearly 102,000 words written here, that is a decent sized novel.  And that doesn’t include the podcasts.  There will be more of those, as well as some fiction audio.  I think I am getting myself figured out now.

So, for all of you that have been here from the beginning, Thank You so very much for sticking with me.  For those who have recently come here, or even those who are visiting for the first time today, Thank You very much for being here.  I hope that you all stick with me for the next few years, ’cause I ain’t goin’ no where.

Thanks so much yet again, Poetry will resume next week!

-Justin

PS the comic up there means “There is nothing about Blogging!”

PPS. I dunno what the bbbwwwoggginngg crap is all about, that showed up on the site but it looks ok in edit mode….Blogging has been replaced..I will have to figure it out later I am taking my daughter to kidney clinic today and that takes a while…sorry for the wierdness

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