Money Making Blog Secrets
Last month I mentioned that I was leaning towards the idea of using this blog as a case study for making money through blogging. While I’ve been getting some great ideas on what I would like to do to monetize the blog, I feel it would be in my best interest to wait yet another month. Reason being, I am still waiting for the first Google PageRank update since the blog went live. For what it’s worth, iWebTool predicts this blog to go from "0" to "4" on the next update. I really would not want to try and sell advertising space on this blog, just based off traffic, but also with the incentive of pushing off some pagerank to my sponsors as well. So look forward to seeing some changes made to the blog during August.
While on the topic of money making blogs, I recently came across an article that was featured on ShoeMoney. In short, the full article is about how "Ken was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, and in an effort to learn more information about the disease, and share that information with others, Ken launched the BattleDiabetes.com blog." In addition to running a helpful information based blog, he is also cashing in at the rate of $40k a year, mainly through programs such as Google AdSense, AuctionAds and Text Link Ads. Ken also goes into detail on his web site promotion and blog traffic, which is very helpful in learning where and how the money is made.
Before I even looked at the comments left on the main article and on ShoeMoney’s post, I quickly glanced through Ken’s blog to see how it was monetized. The site looks great and I have no reason to believe that it’s making money… the only question is, how much? After looking at the site a bit more, I noticed he only had 20 RSS readers (keep in mind, most regular web users aren’t using rss yet… or even know what it is!) and his Alexa rank is around 287,859. These both seemed very low for making such a large amount of money… though I also have some 200,000+ Alexa ranked sites that still pull in $50+ a day, with much less than the 7-9k pageviews a day Ken says his diabetes blog receives. When you work out $40,000 a year, it’s really only $109 a day… this can easily be attained, almost no matter the niche. Making money online is so much different than working an hourly job or on salary, your web site is running and making you money every second of the day.
I then went back to read the comments left on the ShoeMoney post and the full article at Search Engine Journal. In addition to some praise, it was really interesting to see the vast majority of comments that were made in reference to how this was a lie, not possible and even a few pointing it as a hidden AuctionAds promotion! I personally have run Google Adsense on many sites and know it can make a real money, it all depends on your targeted content. Same rings true for AuctionAds. I am hearing from a lot of people that they are making nothing with AuctionAds, but off a general audience web site, I was able to generate over $1,500 in earnings with them last month. Imagine the earnings and cpc rates you would see on a targeting keywords and products for "diabetes". I bet they are quite high!
Not only did I feel this article would be a good way to start the month of July off, but I also found it very motivational as I will soon monetize this blog for a case study. I have already sent an email off to Ken and invited him to leave any comments or advice he may have in regard to this post. I highly recommend you read through his story and get motivated to start making even more money!
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Zac, thanks alot for the words. Glad to see another person affirming that you can monetize something as low traffic as I get and not have 1000’s of RSS subscribers.
I think most of my traffic I get are people searching for specific products and when they dont see they can buy them on my blog they clicks ads and make me my change. Although I’m not writing for the clicks necessarily. My wife and I write these articles only after hours of reading and researching what we’re writing. I have type2 diabetes and we’re trying to learn as much as we can as I feel different symptoms. We’ve learned alot just by reading other great diabetes blogs.
I decided to monetize my diabetes blog after I started receiving somewhere around 1000 page views a day. I threw up the ol adsense code on the sidebar and that’s it. After a few weeks I made a custom channel and saw that I was receiving a few dozen clicks a day and making like $20/day.
Figuring that the diabetes clicks were worth more than the plain ol blog and PSA ads on my personal site, I made them stick out a bit more and gave them their own custom channel. I’ve played around with a few different positions and sizes and seem to do best with the current one. Also I added TLA and AutionAds recently. With some increase in traffic from natural search engine listings, that pushed me over the $100/day a few months back.
I’m glad we’re doing it cause my wife stay home with our son and she’s able to read and blog on a few sites of our’s while being able to stay home and raise our son.
Me? I still work a 9-5 but I’m hoping with this and our other sites I can push us over $300/day and I can stay home full-time and work our own sites.
Not too far off now but it’s a scarey jump.
Maybe Zac has some advice for us when to leave a job and go at it on your own?
Ken:
Congrats on your success
If you can make money and stay at home, good for you. If it lower your stress level even better. It's better for your glucose anyway 😉
Zac:
Do you find iWebTool good? I'm supposed to go from 3 to 5(4.8)
Hi Zac,
wow it is ppl like you who keeps us newbie motivated.
Lets roll out the blog study.
Vijay
Good luck with you site. No go make 10 more and make 400k year.
If only it was that easy. Although you didn't read the article. It wasn't about making money as much as blogging about something important to me.
so the money is in diabetes?
interesting lol
I have no idea if the blog mentioned makes what thye claim it does, but I also would never doubt it.
Hanging out in the "blogosphere" with the "link trains" and 'favor my blog" gimmicks and such is a great ay to waste time, but it does nothing to bring eyeballs attached to credit cards to a web site … a blog is just a format for a web site, folks, it's nothing new.
Millions of people have diseases like diabetes, diseases cost money to treat/control, and drug and medical supply companies have money to spend on adverting. Park Davis and other drug companies probably don't know what an RSS feed is an could care less.
I'd love the idea of cases studies of real money making blogs/sites.
I hope the best with his campaign towards diabetes!!
I also checked what my future pagerank will be and it's predicted a (4.6) and would be rounded up to a PR 5.
-Gregg