Easy Earning

As you no doubt noticed, I’ve starting adding videos to this blog in a big way. The effect on traffic has been quite positive. Video is where blogging is heading and you should consider adding a video element to your blog if you haven’t already done so.

Videos Boosts Blog Traffic

I have noticed traffic to the blog has gone up by 15% since adding more videos to my posts. In addition, RSS subscription is on the verge of breaking 26,000 for the first time. Readers seem to really like videos. It allows me to express myself in ways words on a blog can never do.

Something I haven’t paid attention to at all was YouTube subscribers. I didn’t know I had any until I checked it. There are nearly 100 people subscribed to my YouTube videos. YouTube could be a nice traffic source if you built up a big enough subscriber base. I found iJustine via YouTube and I’m sure many others found her the same way.

Google Can Spider Video Content

Here’s another reason why you want to start adding videos to your blog. Google now has the technology to spider video content. YouTube videos are showing up more often on Google search results. For example, the YouTube video for the Macbook Air commercial shows up on page 1 when you do a search for MacBook Air. The video has been viewed nearly 2 million times. Imagine how much traffic you would get if you had been the one to post that video with your blog URL watermarked on it.

Videos Are Inexpensive To Add

You don’t need an expensive film studio to add videos to your blog. All my videos are shot with an inexpensive Flip Video digital camcorder. Most digital cameras can take video so you don’t have to buy a separate video recorder.

Editing the videos can be done with the software that came with your computer OS. I used Windows Movie Maker when I had the PC. Now I use iMovie on the Macbook Pro. While neither program is as powerful as Adobe Premier, they’ll get the job done and they’re easier to use. Thanks to services like YouTube, hosting your video is easy and free.

Videos Can Make You Money

I haven’t tried to make money with my videos yet but I can this as a viable income stream down the road. We already have sponsors giving us free stuff for the weekly Dot Com Pho videos and I can see product placement fees in the future.

Another way to make money with the video is by becoming a YouTube partner to get a percentage of the advertising money. YouTube is not the only service to offer partnerships. There are tons of video sharing sites, like Revver, that will give you a cut of the advertising dollars.

Maximizing Your Video Traffic

To get the most out of their videos, many bloggers will upload their videos to a bunch of video sharing sites. However, this can be a long and boring process. To make thing easier, I recommend using a service like Tube Mogul, which distributes your videos to all the major video sharing sites with a single upload.

The service also offers video analytics so you can see how your videos are performing across all the video sharing sites. It’s no harder to use than uploading a single YouTube video so I highly recommend it.

Another thing I recommend to maximize your video traffic is to always embed your blog URL into your videos. If the viewer likes the video, chances are he’ll want to know who made it and see any other videos you may have made. Putting your URL at the beginning or end is also good for branding purposes.

This is part one in a three part piece around making money online and avoiding the scams that are out there.

You and I have common interests. We’re after the same goal: making money online. It sounds simple and John makes it look easy, but if you’ve dedicated any time to trying to turn a profit on the web, you know it’s a lot harder than it looks. Unfortunately for you, as part of those looking to make a living online, you’re one of the most victimized groups on the web today. Don’t believe me? Google ‘make money online’ and just look at the sponsored ads. Nearly every single ad is spam.

What we do at ivetriedthat.com and what we intend to do with these guests posts is to educate as many people as we can about various work at home and make money online scams. Most scams operate under the guise of ‘Look! Everyone is making hundreds of thousands of dollars online and you’re losing money by not acting RIGHT NOW!’ They then show Clickbank or bank accounts with thousands of dollars earned, people holding bags of money, and flashy expensive cars. All the while, you feel like a sucker for not finding out about this website earlier.

In desperation you pull out your wallet and make a purchase before the text-box counter hits 0 and the ’special 30-minute’ sale that’s happening right now ends. Before you know it, you’re out $7 or $27 or $47 or maybe even $197 and you’re left with a crappy outdated book on how to do affiliate marketing. Hell, just reading JohnChow.com is more educational and it’s free!

You were scammed. Swindled out of money that should be rightfully yours, but you were defrauded by a website that made you believe that you’d be given the secret formula to success. Unfortunately, there is no secret. The Internet operates just like real life. If you plan on making a living online, it’s going to take hard work and dedication. Nothing comes quick and easy in life. It sucks. I’m sure many readers can relate to the feeling of getting suckered out of money.

With the growing pressure of falling economies and rising gas prices, more and more people are looking to making money through alternative measures. A lot of people are turning to the Internet to make money, but sadly, Internet crime is on the rise. All hope is not lost however. The next piece will show you the common themes around these make money online scams and what you can look for to avoid future situations like these.

“Is it possible to earn a full-time salary as a part-time blogger? (eg, if you’re student)”

This question has been voted up quite high in my Q&A sidebar widget so I thought I’d attempt an answer today.

It’s one of those questions with two answers:

Yes…. and…. No

Let’s unpack both (and I’d encourage you to read both as they bring balance to the question).

Yes it is POSSIBLE to earn a full-time salary as a part-time blogger

Part of me wants to simply answer this question with a ‘no’ answer and give a long list of answers why it’s not possible (because to answer ‘yes’ will mean some will accuse me of painting an unrealistic picture of blogging for money). However I have met a number of bloggers who make a good living from blogging as part time bloggers (in writing this I don’t have permission to share their stories so I’ll keep this fairly general).

However in every case there are a few observations I’d make about these bloggers. They usually had all of the following characteristics (or at least a few of them):

1. They worked hard - they might not have put full time hours (40 or so hours a week) into their blogging but they certainly did work quite a few hours and worked hard in those hours. Many of them did work full time on their blogs at certain times (summer holidays etc).

2. They were very good at what they did - they had an exceptional knack of being able to write engaging content, build networks and build community on their blogs.

3. They had an element of ‘luck’ to their story - I am thinking of a couple of bloggers particularly who really found themselves in the right place at the right time when they started their blogs.

4. They were able to draw others in to help - one way to overcome an inability to work full time hours is to draw others into your blog to help shoulder some of the load.

5. They made money indirectly ‘because’ of their blog and not just directly ‘from’ their blog - interestingly a number of the bloggers I’m thinking of have developed products (e-books and courses) of their own that they sell from their blog (and other people’s blogs). This means they are not just building a revenue from advertising but have a secondary source of income.

6. They USED to work full time as a blogger - one blogger that I’m thinking about now works about 20 hours a week blogging and make a very good living from his blog - but only because he used to work full time. ie he built up his blog to a point where it really was earning good income which then enabled him to scale back a little and coast a bit (he also hired someone to help him - see point #4).

No it’s not LIKELY that you’ll make a full-time salary from blogging part time

It is possible to make a full time living from blogging part time - but the sad reality is that the bloggers I’m thinking of are not in the majority.

Most bloggers who do get to a level of earning a full time living from their blogs are working full time hours (or above) on their blogs. And even then many that are working full time hours are not able to make a full time living from blogging (time is just one element of many factors that build a successful blog).

When I’m talking to new bloggers wanting to explore blogging as a way of making money I generally encourage them to see it as something to supplement their existing income.

Yes it is possible to make a full time living from the medium but the reality is that most never get to this point. Sure - have it as a goal, but set yourself smaller goals in terms of your earnings and see it as something that progresses over time as you invest more time into blogging.

If you’d like to see a progression of how this unfolded for me I’d encourage you to read my story of becoming a Blogger. It it you’ll see that I gradually stepped up my time put into blogging - but only as the earnings I was receiving allowed me to.

PS: Are You a Part Time Blogger Earning Full Time Income?

If you’re one of those bloggers that I mention in this post that are able to pull in a full time income from blogging part time I’m sure my readers would love to hear from you and learn from some of your wisdom. Feel free to share your own experiences (either with your URL as an example or anonymously if you’re not wanting to go public) - looking forward to your own lessons.

Affiliate programs are a brilliant idea. For the owner of the product, they’re a way of ecruiting a veritable army of salespeople to promote your product without having to pay them a dime unless and until they generate a sale. For the affiliate, they’re a great way of earning extra cash from an existing, high-traffic website with virtually zero additional effort.

Only problem is, most affiliates don’t HAVE an existing, high-traffic website and they’re suckered into thinking that it’s a simple matter of signing up for an affiliate program and “driving traffic” to the product owner’s site using a uniquely-coded URL. Well, it IS that simple. And it isn’t.

If you don’t already have your own high-traffic website, how do you think you’re going to drive traffic to the product owner’s site in the hope of generating a sale? Well, there are a few ways, actually. And all of them are going to cost you either time or money.

First off, you’re going to have to spend money on advertising. How much? Well, consider this. Estimates vary but, roughly, only 2-4% of people who see your ad will actually click on your link. Of that 2-4%, only 1% or so of THEM will go on to buy. In addition, it takes, on average, 7 or 8 exposures to your ad before people will click on it. AND to achieve even these piddly numbers your market must be targeted in the first place. This is, as you can see, nothing but a numbers game. Pure and simple.

So what does all this mean to you, the advertiser without a website? Well, to start with you’re going to want to advertise where a LOT of people are going to see your ad. But not just ANY people. People interested in the product you’re wanting to sell - your target market. So this cuts out the free classifieds and FFAs. And it means you’re going to have to spend advertising dollars.

Where do you go to advertise then? The most effective form of advertising is in ezines. Take mine, for example. At the time of writing, my subscriber database is around 14,000. Each week I run an ad for my own opportunity (in addition to running ads from other paying advertisers). I generally get about 500 click-throughs over the course of the 2 or 3 days following publication. That’s a click-through rate of about 3.6%, about in line with the average. If you were to pay to advertise in my ezine, it would cost you $70 for a single classified based on my $5 CPM ($5 per every 1,000 subscribers) pricing formula. This is not an uncommon formula for pricing ezine advertising. You’re therefore paying around 14 cents per click. That’s not bad. Other than that, what can you do? Well, you can choose to spend time rather than money. An obvious choice considering what I’ve just said is to start your OWN ezine. Build your own list and over time you will have a large subscriber database to put your ad in front of too …and it won’t cost you a dime. But this takes time and it takes work. It’s taken me two and a half years to build a list of 14,000 subscribers. And it takes a few hours of work to put together the ezine itself including writing the feature article. Every week, week in, week out. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

And once you’re publishing your own ezine, it’s a simple enough matter to distribute your articles for other ezine publishers to run in their ezines. That 4 or 5 liner at the end telling readers who you are with a link to your website (or, if you don’t have one, the website of the owner of the product you’re selling) is effectively free advertising for you. Not all publishers accept article submissions though, so be sure to find out whether they do before submitting your articles to them.

But think about this. If you’re doing all this work anyway, doesn’t it make sense to create your OWN website (in addition to your ezine)? Sure it takes time and it takes work and it takes money (but not a lot - hosting fees can be pretty cheap if you know where to go). But once it’s done and you’re just in maintenance mode - adding fresh content every few days, uploading your latest ezine and maintaining your archives - your website does so much of the work for you. Generate a few hundred unique visitors a day and you can be getting the same click-through rate to your affiliate site *for nothing* that you were paying someone else 14 cents a click for.

EVERY SINGLE DAY. 24/7/365.

So, this is the truth about affiliate programs. They’re great if you’re the product owner and they’re great if you can link to your affiliate site from your own high-traffic site.

But if you don’t have your own site, you’re going to have to buy traffic to your affiliate site - either with money, time or both. How many sales are you going to have to generate to earn enough commission to more than cover your time and costs and leave you with a profit?

Bottom line? Setting out to make money with affiliate programs before you have your own site in place is putting the cart before the horse. Yes, you want to make money and you want to do it quickly. But it just doesn’t work that way. Not with affiliate programs, anyway. So adjust your expectations and do first steps first. It will be slow going to start. It will take you weeks to create a worthwhile site and then MONTHS to generate the kind of traffic you need. But if you take a long-term approach to your business and take the time now to lay the proper foundation, you’ll reap the dividends for years to come.