Lasting Thoughts

With this post, I end my guest blogging tenure on Casey’s wonderful site. It’s been a fun ride! Thanks to all of you who have commented on my posts and my apologies for most of your comments still hanging in moderation limbo. (#)Make Friends Online
A friendly word can go along way. Even though you may be “in it” to make money, don’t forget that (for most of you) you’re still in the blogosphere. It’s a world not built around computers and ads, but people and thoughts. Take the time to introduce yourself to others and always welcome in people new to web development and site monetization. From a business sense, you never know who is going to turn you on to the one little thing you need to know that’s going to revolutionize your world. From a worldly sense, the Internet makes the world a bit smaller. It would be a shame if you didn’t take advantage of this to meet people you wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

Keep Experimenting
If you want to get anywhere with your monetization efforts, you need to experiment. And on everything. Ad placement, colors, programs, ppc, cpm, affiliate marketing…You just don’t know what’s going to work until you try it. And in this same vein, make sure you are really testing things properly. If you’re talking about ads, first make sure you have enough traffic (search and direct) that you can draw ACCURATE conclusions. Secondly, make sure you can accurately tag and track different types of ads and positions. If you don’t at least follow these two little rules, you’re really not getting anywhere and instead just wasting your time.

Stick With It
Success in this field isn’t going to come over night. When you first get into it, you’re going to be reading lots of books, forums, comments, blogs, or whatever. And then (after that you get your hands dirty), hopefully you’ll learn a thing or two, and hopefully not lose a bunch of money in the process. But let’s be serious, that will probably happen and can feel like a bunch right in the stomach. Losing money, and maybe even worse TIME can be debilitating. The important thing is that you don’t give up. Keep talking to people, keep learning, and then update or start over on your endeavors.

You can do this if you try, but you’re not going to get there by quitting.