News Notion

There are a few things to look out for when you start to monetize your blog or website. Primarily, you want ot be sure not to encourage your readers to click on your ppc ads. The metrics for google and other ad providers are very advanced and if you think you can get away with click fraud, think again. You won’t. Look up ‘banned from google adsense’ and see how many horror stories you will find. Typically, Google doesn’t let you know until you’ve reached that coveted $100 minimum payout either, so you pay in time spent and you get no return on your investment, plus you are not eligible to rejoin in many cases ever again. Just don’t do it.

Secondly, if you are using Adwords to advertise your site, you want to make sure that your site is excluded from places your ad appears. Believe it or not, your site is probably optimized towards your ad and unless you tell Google not to run your ad on your site, you might find that your readers are clicking on your ad and costing you money to come back to the same place they already are. For example if you have a great ad that says ‘Earn money online’ and you don’t tell Google to exclude your site, your readers will be reading a post from you, then they come across your ad on your page, they click it, and they come back to your page, but that one click has cost you $6.50- $30 since you are bidding for ads in a very competitive niche. Ouch.

Another thing to worry about is sending your readers away for a very small return. Let’s say you’ve signed up with Kontera and you are getting 2 cents per click through….Is it worth it to you to lose a reader for 2 cents? Maybe they will come back, maybe not.

What about you? Do you have any good tips for people? Why not share them here? And then, be sure to sign up for some of the affiliate programs you see advertised in my sidebar. It’s a great way to get started making money online.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve wasted a lot of time doing things the wrong way on the internet. I’m stubborn and I’ve always felt that I learn best by making mistakes. It’s true, but the downside of that philosophy is that I’ve spent the past five years making the same mistakes that others had already made. I could have spent a month or two doing intensive study as I am doing now and then spent the other 50 or so months actually earning money instead of floundering in the waters of internet blog monetization.

I’d love to save you the same realization. Since you have found your way here, chances are that you are serious about making money through blogging. You are actually taking the time to learn what mistakes others have made. Let me tell you about the first mistake I made in learning how to make money on the web:

Mistake #1:

I thought that if I simply created a blog and started putting cool things on it people would find it and then I would earn money from it.

Sure, sties like Boingboing do that and they make tons of money, but they also have a committed and motivated team that is filled with tech savvy, content savvy, marketing savvy people. Boingboing is not just some guy reading the news and posting what he finds. The truth is the internet is littered with this kind of blog. I come across them all the time, I enjoy them, but not many of them make money. Boingboing is the exception and not the rule.

Mistake #2. Refusing to let go.

In my first blog, I succeeded in creating a cool blog with lots of cool postings. I failed in that it had no focus, most of my content was lifted from news sites, readers didn’t know how to find me, and over the course of five years I ended up making a total of about $3500. Most of that came in the last six months I had the blog. You know why? Because I started paying attention to what works and what doesn’t.

Ultimately, I felt that holding on to my behemoth of a blog was actually going to hold me back from creating something that actually works so I decided to let it go and shift my focus to News Notion and doing things the right way. I’m certain that part of the reason I’ve been floundering over the past couple of years is because I refused to let go of my monster. Now I have.

Building a blog to make money with
And here we are. Possibly you already have a blog. Possibly you are reading this because you are going to build a blog. Either way, I recommend that you learn or refresh yourself with the basics. Before you do anything else, I recommend that you go to Bloggercise.com.

Bloggercise is a free, easy to navigate website that takes you through the ten steps necessary to build a blog the right way. I’ve seen a lot of websites devoted to this information on the web, but this is by far the one that does it best. You can read through the entire site in an hour or less. Bloggercise covers choosing a name, finding hosting, CMS, monetization, and more.

I hope this helps to save you from wasting five years like I did. But don’t worry, the upside of wasting those five years is that I’ve learned enough to make me succeed. And I had fun the whole way.