Jane May Blogs

I have received a lot of emails in the past week from beginning bloggers and web site owners saying that they are having a hard time making any money with Adsense so I’d like to write about how you can all make money, and show that there are more ways to make money than just Adsense.  Since starting my personal blog I have gotten a renewed energy to go all out to see how much money I can make online and I saw that pay off yesterday. With very little effort “yesterday”, here is what one of my sites did:

I am not showing this from an egotistical point of view, but instead to try to help you make money too and to have you learn from my mistakes so you can make even more money. Looking back, these Adsense earnings came with very little work “yesterday”. YESTERDAY is the key word here… because it took a ton of work in the months leading up to yesterday.

What Type Of Work Did I Do?

The work I have been doing includes hours and hours of:

• Research - This includes reading and researching everything I can get my hands on.
• Testing - This includes taking hours to test and play with every idea (no matter how stupid sounding) I have.
• Networking - This includes building a close network of online friends with whom I can share ideas and get and give feedback on projects.
• Designing - This includes designing web sites.  I am seriously the least web design and tech savvy person you know so creating a site and tweaking it takes me hours on end but I keep at it. If I can’t figure something out after hours of trying, I am very lucky to have friends who are willing to help out. Nate Whitehill is one friend who has offered a lot of excellent advice on site functionality.

Yesterday was not my biggest earning day but I still consider it a break through day because things seemed to click on a couple of my sites and the adsense numbers added up with little work. That stems from all the hours of hard work and late nights in the past 6 months.  Is $100 worth all the hours of work? No! But $116 from adsense, $100 from affiliate sales, $100 from product sales, and $25 from PPC everyday sure are worth it! That’s over $126k per year.

Let’s All Make Money!

I’d love for nothing more than for all my readers to make money and tell me about it. If you have questions, ask me in the comment section. I’ll try to answer all of them and other readers can also offer answers. Starting right now set a goal for how much you’d like to earn per day and go after it. Start with $10 or $20 in a single day. I’d guess that within a week of building up to that day, we can all do it! I’m here to help so if you’re motivated and have a site don’t hesitate to ask.  Also, be sure to sign up for my newsletter on the sidebar for more tips.

** Update: If you like this post, be sure to read about how to turn $100 per day into $300 per day.

March, the 4th month in business, has been Career Ramblings’ best month.  The growth was spectacular in both traffic and income, in part due to several stories making Netscape front page and staying there for 15+ hours.  In January, total pageviews were 18,265 which was a large increase from the 1,761 pageviews in December.  Final numbers in March were 56,028 pageviews. If I took the time right now to create an excel graph to visually show this growth it would appear even more impressive but I’ve got a ton of other things I’m busy with today. Maybe later tonight. Adsense income in March also hit an all time high bringing in $877.81. 

Private Advertising

At the end of February we began selling private ads which we call Sponsorships for a very cheap price. We only had 1 post about our advertising and we immediate received several offers for text links and a banner placement.  Dax Desai, Pharmboard and ByWild are still on the sidebar of Career Ramblings since they secured multi-month agreements at the very low price of $15 per month.  ByWild also decided to advertise via sponsoring 8 articles in hand picked categories (in addition to the sidebar link), which ended up getting the company many more clicks than anyone thought.  Now that Career Ramblings just received a PageRank of 6, the ads they purchased 2 months ago are really paying off nicely if for nothing else than SEO purposes and many backlinks from a PR6 site.

Total income in March broke well above the $1000 mark and we were able to diversify a little more than having all of our eggs in the adsense basket.

Biggest Adsense Secret On Career Ramblings

The single biggest reason Adsense earnings took off in March (besides the increase in traffic) is that we implemented the top leaderboard ads which quickly jumped to the largest amount of clicks and income. The 250 x 250 square in each post used to be the biggest earner. If you think a leaderboard ad placement can help you monetize your site, be sure to check out the link below and test it. There really aren’t any secrets to adsense besides test, test, and more testing!

The Future

We are now in the process of choosing whether to apply to Text Link Ads or Text Link Brokers, and are also figuring out ways to tweak adsense to see if we can make the ads more profitable.  We are looking to promote a few private banner sales, so if anyone is interested you can take a look at the Career Ramblings sponsorship opportunities.  There are many more monetization ideas John and I have and I will write about them here later.

I am always open to hearing your feedback on the useful-ness of the posts on this blog. If you’d like me to address any issues or questions you have regarding learning to blog, monetizing a blog or earning money through a blog don’t hesitate to contact me or leave your comments below.  I am going to launch several new case studies so you can follow along step-by-step vary soon. I’ll keep you posted.

As some of you might already know, Google is making their official PageRank updates as we write. They began updating their 72 datacenters yesterday and will last through the weekend.  This is a good site to check your page rank which I found on Nate Whitehill’s site. 

I have been writing a little about the process of how one of my sites, Career Ramblings, has gotten to over 50,000 page views per month as well as how Career Ramblings was able to earn money through various monetization strategies. I was very happy to find that Google rewarded Career Ramblings with a PR 6.  John Anthony and I started the web site in January right after the last PR update so we just missed the cut off and were a PR 0 for the last 4 months.

How Did We Get A PR 6?

No one knows exactly since most of Google’s algorithms are kept secret, but we have a few ideas:

1. Consistently updated with quality content. We average 1 post per day with original and unique content.
2. Backlinks. Through the network of fellow bloggers as well as other career resources, we have managed to get 7,540 backlinks according to Yahoo.
3. Social Bookmarking. Creating unique and timely content that social bookmarking sites vote on such as Netscape, Fark and Stumble Upon.
4. Carnivals. This is a little known secret in the web site world. We have found carnivals in related topics to Career Ramblings and have entered as many as we could. We have won a few of them and have finished in the top 3 in others but overall, since carnivals tend to attract high traffic levels, this has helped us with our backlinks and rankings.

How Will We Monetize This?

Advertising Revenue. John and I have been waiting for the PR update before going to Text Link Ads to attract advertisers. Now that the rank is almost official, we will pursue Text Link Ads and Text Link Brokers (thanks Matt). If any of you would like to advertise on a PageRank 6 site that gets over 50k page views per month, please contact me.

Review Career Ramblings for a free backlink.  Taking a card from John Chow’s deck of magic cards, we may hold a similar promotion allowing others with an opportunity to review Career Ramblings for a backlink from a PR 6 site.

January was a month of transition for Career Ramblings because we made the domain name switch from Rich Dad Says dot com to Career Ramblings dot com and also switched host companies from Powweb to Dreamhost.  There was nothing wrong with Powweb but we were advised that in order to handle a digg or heavy netscape traffic, we would have to have a powerful engine like Dreamhost to handle it.  Boy were we wrong.  Dreamhost couldn’t handle anything over 3000 uniques per day! Needless to say, it’s very frustrating when you take time promoting your site and writing quality content, only to have your server not allow visitors to see it.  Given the transitions we went through in January, we were pleased with the spike in traffic from December.  We experienced a 937% increase in traffic.

January Statistics 

Since you guys are here for the good stuff, let me get to our January stats, which are not exact due to the domain switch, new host company, and new stat system but these are our best estimates from adding up all our sources:

. 

We tested a few tweeks with Adsense and also read John Chow’s advice on blending techniques which lowered our overall eCPC but helped us retain more returning visitors because they could now actually see our content and not only our ads.  By getting more loyal, return visitors our adsense earnings naturally rose due to the increase in daily traffic.

Investing In Yourself and Your Site

Our expenses by the end of January were $379.03.  Being that John and I are firm believers in investing in your own personal development and knowledge, we bought the SEO Book and read it cover to cover.  (I’ll do a review on it in the next week.)  The rest of the expenses were for pre-paid hosting with Powweb and Dreamhost.  Be sure to check back tomorrow for my February update - Career Ramblings keeps pace in February and things really heat up in March so be sure to come back!

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Career Ramblings was an idea my partner John Anthony and I came up with toward the end of last summer.  We wanted to combine our expertise and create a site that would be a helpful resource to young professionals to assist them in their professional and personal development.  By the time we did all our research and were ready to launch the site, it was the end of November.

The Launch - December 2006

We originally got the domain name Rich Dad Says dot com for the website because of the familiarity so many people have with the “Rich Dad” concept started by Robert Kiyosaki.  Our December stats were:

• Pageviews: 1,761 / biggest single day: 157 uniques
• Adsense Income: $71.82
• Advertising Costs: $0
• Time spent planning and marketing CR: a lot!

We thought that was not bad for our first month but our plans were to grow the site to a much larger level. We stayed realistic about what it would take to grow the site and were willing to work hard at it. We also made the difficult decision of switching names for our site because “Rich Dad Says” was not very brandable and we would always be in the shadow of the real Rich Dad.  We did not want to piggy back on anyone else’s brand so we knew we had to make the switch sooner rather than later (even thought it would cost us some of our current traffic).  Check back for our January 2007 update coming up in the next couple days.

• Be sure to sign up for our newsletter on the sidebar. It will have valuable monetization information you don’t want to miss! Thanks.

The real value I’d like to bring to you from this blog are the real life case studies I’m going to have. All the advice you read about is worthless if you never implement it, and there are tons of sites that provide advice but do not follow their own teachings.  One site that does a good job on integrating a case study is Net Business Blog.

What Will The Case Studies Entail?

I will implement all the advice I provide on this blog into web sites and monetization strategies and report back to you step-by-step on the progress. This way you can see the successes or failures of the advice and decide if you want to follow it yourself. Of course in order to be successful, you MUST employ your own creative and outside-the-box thinking, and often times you MUST step out on a limb and try things you’ve never seen anyone else try.  Everyone making tons of money in this industry has creative campaigns they are running that most other people do not know about and that they created on their own with some creativity. So as you follow along with my campaigns, I really hope you will also be testing your own ideas. You are always welcome to leave comments about your progress or message me in private.

How Will I Implement These Ideas?

I have started by building a very small team for my first 2 campaigns and they will help me in their maintenance.  Since I work a regular 9 - 5 in addition to my sites, I had to bring in a couple people to help me and they will periodically guest blog to give updates on their experiences in building these sites.

What is Career Ramblings?

CareerRamblings is a site I started and maintain with a business associate and friend, John Anthony. I will include Career Ramblings’ stats and secrets that have worked in the rise of the site. I am in the process of deciding on my next site launch/case study and will have an update for you within the next few days.  Please check back frequently and be sure to sign up for my free newsletter on the top of the sidebar.