Blog Income Report – September 2008

This month’s Income Report is going to be a little bit different from the previous ones. Firstly, I can’t believe it has already been a year since I’ve launched this Blog. It feels like I just registered the domain yesterday. It has definitely been a fun journey the last 12 months.

Before I go any further, I want to thank everyone who has helped to make this Blog a success over the last year. That includes anyone and everyone who reads my Blog, comments, offers feedback, links to the Blog and clicks on my ads from time to time. I also want to thank all the people who have purchased reviews, ads, sponsored my contests and bought things through my affiliate links. I want you to know that I appreciate every single one of you guys and gals. You rock.

Now, I want to talk about two different things in this income report. If you’re just here to grab the total dollar figure I earned this month so you can update some spreadsheet somewhere, I’ll save you the hassle of reading any further and tell you right off the bat that my total earnings for this month from this Blog were $469.98. If that’s all you came for, there it is. See you next month.

If you’re reading this income report because you’re interested in learning how Bloggers make money from Blogging, then you might want to keep reading. I’m going to share some of my personal insights into what I’ve learned from Blogging over the last 12 months and I’ll reveal why I purposely lowered my Blog earnings from about $2,800 two months ago down to just under $470 this month.

Strategies and Philosophies for Making Money with a Blog

First of all, I want to be really up front here. I’m not going to talk about monetizing a Blog. That topic has been beaten to death on so many Blogs already, and really the concepts of how to monetize a Blog are not that difficult. If you didn’t catch my video from the Blog World Expo in Vegas, the panel of experts in that video does a really good job explaining how to monetize a Blog.

What I do want to talk about is not monetization techniques, but rather the strategy and philosophy behind making money with a Blog.

Over the last 12 months, and especially over the last 6 months since I really got serious about making money from Blogging, I’ve learned a lot about the different ways people are using Blogs to make money. If you study the big income earners in Blogging, on the surface they all seem to make money the same ways. Selling advertising, affiliate marketing, paid reviews etc.

However, beneath the surface is where the secrets lie.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Example #1 – John Chow

I’ll start with John Chow in my first example. Let me share my point of view of how John Chow really makes money from his Blog. John Chow makes money from his Blog because he successfully pulled off creating a public image of a “dot com mogul”. He convinced everyone that he is John Chow, a “dot com mogul” who rambles about whatever the hell he wants on his Blog, makes a pile of money doing it, and not even Google can stop him.

Someone once asked me this question: “How the hell does John Chow make so much money, when I write much better content on my Blog and I don’t make any money. I don’t get it.”

Let me give you a hint. Let’s say I meet up with a friend I haven’t seen for a while and I tell him one of these two stories:

Story 1 = “Hey, have you heard of Billy the Blogger? He’s this dude that started a Blog on tax tips and he’s got some amazing tax savings information on the Blog.  There is a pile of good info there and he’s making $500/month from advertising.”

Vs

Story 2 = “Hey, have you heard of John Chow the Blogger? He’s this dude that started a Blog, proclaimed himself a dot com mogul, starting writing a bunch of random ramblings from his life, posts video’s of himself and his friends eating noodles every Saturday and makes $40,000 / month doing it. He also tells people that he is the root of all evil.”

Which one of those two stories is more likely to spread? Which Blog are people more likely to check out? John Chow makes money because people come to his Blog to try to figure out how the hell he’s making money, and most of them don’t realize that the way he makes money is by them being there trying to figure out how he makes money.

He doesn’t even try to hide it or deny it. He says it himself on his Blog. “I make money by telling people how much money I make online”. That’s the title of his Blog. Read that again a few times.

The fact that he makes more money per month than more people do in a year is unusual enough. The fact that he does it without seemingly providing any value is what truly makes him unique. It’s what Seth Godin calls a “Purple Cow”. It’s so unusual people can’t help but to tell everyone else about it, and when they do John makes even more money. I have personally told at least a few dozen people about John myself because it’s such a cool story. Everyone else does the same thing. Everytime John posts an income report on his Blog, people gasp and can’t believe how much he’s making. So what do they do? They talk about it. What happens then? More people come and he makes more money.

Notice above I said “without seemingly providing value”. This is very important. John is actually a genius in my books. He provides a LOT of value in the Blogosphere, and to online entrepreneurs everywhere. He’s is a walking example that anyone out there can succeed. You don’t need superhuman strength or Michael Jordan’s basketball abilities. You just need to go for it. Nobody appointed John a “dot com mogul”. He appointed himself.

Anyways, I think you get the point. John has grown his Blog into a huge success and he’s attracted a lot of advertisers, and reviews and he’s run a lot of contests and brought a lot of exposure to the Blogging community. He’s also inspired a lot of people, and that above all is how he builds value.

I think it’s important to realize that THIS is how John makes money. By being that inspiring example of what’s possible in the Blogosphere. It has nothing to do with which WordPress plugins he uses to manage his advertising.

The John Chow Way of Making Money Blogging

To make money Blogging utilizing the John Chow method, you would need to sit down and craft a character for yourself. Basically a public persona that you carefully engineer, which is interesting enough to spread like wildfire across the Internet. When I used to study magic a bit a few years ago I read a book about this. To be a professional magician, one of the things you have to do is to actually sit down and to create a character for yourself, no different than a movie character like Batman or the Joker.

Once you create that character, you have to define all his attributes and stay congruent to that character like John does. As a magician, you don’t do a magic trick where you poke a nail through your arm one minute, swallow razor blades the next minute and then run off and do a kids party the next day as that same character! If you’re a pyro magician who sets things on fire, don’t do kids parties. If you’re a kid’s clown magician, don’t saw off your leg as your final illusion at a kid’s party. It’s incongruent with your character, it scares kids and it might be hard to get referrals.

Who you define yourself as in the Blogosphere is important and you have to stay congruent with it. You can’t proclaim yourself as a “dot com mogul” and then run off to your day job at McDonald’s the next day. It’s not about lying to people, it’s about finding out what makes you unique and then building a story around it.

If you want to make money Blogging using this method, firstly you have to accept and understand that there is nothing wrong with it. If you feel that there is anything inherently wrong with this way of making money, you won’t succeed. Your guilt will stop you way before you make a dime.

How one goes about building a story and crafting a whole character around themselves like this is beyond the scope of this article, but I might go into it in more detail if people are interested in future posts.

Example #2 – Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net

Although on the surface they may seem similar, Darren makes money totally differently from John Chow. Darren’s focus is on teaching new and seasoned Bloggers how to improve their Blogs, one minor detail at a time. Essentially he Blogs about how to Blog.

So why do I say they are different? Well, it’s simple. The only people I have told about Darren’s Blog are people I know who are getting into Blogging. Meaning, if I’m talking to someone and I want to tell them an incredible, almost unbelievable story about making money from Blogging, I would typically tell them to subscribe to John’s Blog.

Once most people read John’s blog they typically realize that Blogging doesn’t require superhuman abilities and they get inspired to start their own Blog. Once they start a Blog, I typically tell them to subscribe to Darren’s Blog so that they can learn all the detailed ins and outs of how to Blog. Not to say that John doesn’t cover that topic as well, but I would say that the value in John’s blog is more in providing an amazing example and inspiration of the “Blogger Lifestyle”, more than the detailed step by step how-to’s of Blogging. That’s Darren’s specialty.

To run a Blog like Darren’s, the most important thing would be to pick a niche market where you can completely dominate by teaching anything and everything related to that market in small, bite-size snippets that anyone can learn. For example, lets say a person started a Blog related to Photoshop techniques. Using the Darren Rowse approach, they would write 2-5 daily posts, all related to improving your Photoshop skills.

Example #3 – Steve Pavlina of StevePavlina.com

Steve Pavlina provides us with yet another way to make money from Blogging. Steve simply uses his Blog as a medium to deliver his message. Steve is basically a personal development author, who chose to use the Blogging medium to deliver his message to a huge number of people.

Steve doesn’t make money from his Blog because he publishes monthly earnings reports which inspire people to start Blogging. Steve makes money from his Blog because he has built a massive archive of amazing content related to all kinds of personal development topics and he gives it away for free.

Also, unlike Darren Rowse, Steve hardly ever even talks about how to make money from Blogging. He’s not there to try to get people to become Bloggers. His goal is to help people grow consciously.

What We Can Learn from these Examples

In these examples I’ve covered, each one of these guys is making well above the six-figure mark in income from Blogging, but they’ve each done it in a slightly different way. The difference is all in how they provide value and to whom.

That should be your primary concern when figuring out how to monetize your Blog. Which plugins to use on WordPress is nowhere near as important as figuring out how you’re going to deliver value to people, how you’re going to attract traffic to your Blog and how you’re going to keep people coming back.

Let’s say you built a Blog like John Chow’s or Darren’s or Steve’s and you had the traffic they’re getting and the following, but you had no monetization process built into the Blog because you didn’t know which plugins to use or whether Kontera is better than AdSense. If you already had all that built, I could show you how to make +$25k/m from your Blog in 15 minutes.  Building value and an audience is the hard part, not installing plugins.

So What Does This All Have to Do With My Income Report?

Well, I wanted to talk about all this because for the last 12 months I’ve been using this Blog as a case study and experiment for me to learn and test out the different things that make a Blog tick. I’ve tested different advertising methods such as direct advertising compared to contextual advertising. I’ve tested affiliate marketing methods, email list building methods, RSS Subscriber list building methods, Blog Carnivals and contests. I’ve tested to see how a custom blog design affects a Blog and what a mascot will do as well. I’ve met a lot of Bloggers online and met quite a few of the top bloggers in person. I even managed to piss off Google and get booted by them and Technorati for something I did along the way. ( We’ve made up and they both seem to love me again by the way.)

I’ve also met a lot of cool people along the way and made some really good friends.

Most importantly, I’ve proven to myself that it is not only possible to make a full time income from Blogging and Affiliate Marketing, but it is also a shitload of fun! And, what most people don’t even know is that I’ve done all this in my spare time, mostly in the wee-hours of the morning between midnight and 2am, while at the same time running the full time operations of a multi-million dollar corporation at my “day job”, and completing an advanced nutrition diploma program on the side.

It is now time for me to take the next step and leave my “career” in the business world behind and step into Blogging and Affiliate Marketing full time and see how I can fair in this industry when I’m focusing on it full time without the distractions and time constraints of a “day job”. I still have a transition period to go through with my current employer, training my replacement so it won’t be an instant transition but it’s going to be a lot of fun having a lot more time in my schedule to devote to this project.

Why Did My Blogging Income Drop This Month?

Above I talked about three examples of successful, professional Bloggers who make a pile of money Blogging for a living. In my monetization experiments I was simply trying out different ways to make money and seeing the “good” and the “bad” of each method. Some things I tried out produced instant results and put a lot of cash in my pocket, but I really didn’t enjoy doing them. Other things like coaching/consulting were more fun, and made me some money, but I quickly realized that they were totally not scalable so I had to limit myself to how many clients I could take on.

All in all, the most important thing for me right now is to really establish and define Inspired Money Maker in the marketplace as its own unique type of Blog with its own unique brand of value and then look for the best combination of monetization methods which will fit in with the Blog long term. This is why I’ve purposely stopped focusing so much on monetizing the Blog in the last month, because I want to take a few steps back to look at the bigger picture and to make some decisions on how I want to evolve and grow this Blog into the future and THEN find monetization strategies that fit in with that vision of the Blog.

I may even decide not to monetize this Blog at all in the future and just focus on writing content, or I may decide to really push the envelope with a “John Chow” type of approach and let my success act as an inspiration for people.  I honestly haven’t decided what my approach will be, but I do know that whatever it is, the primary goal of this Blog is and has always been to help people to make money doing what they love.

Share

Save