Fleeing The Social Scene

Ok, I’ll say it. This past month may have possibly been the most important month of my life. This is in terms of my education in regards to learning how to earn money online, to date. That may not make much sense, but I’m pretty sure this post can back that claim up. Here I go:

The 4-Hour Workweek
This goes first. I started reading the book by Tim Ferriss after reading Darren Rowse’s review of it. Without a doubt the book made me think about how I plan my post-college life. Can I stand to work a 40 hour workweek? I’m not sure. I’m pretty darn sure though, that I’d love to have alternative money making methods other than working in a cube-city. Thumbs down, to cubicles. I know I started reading the book in May, but I’ll add it to the recap because I finished it during the bus ride home from FOOA and the concepts are just now starting to make sense.

Future of Online Advertising
Once again, thank you Kumiko for allowing me to get a ticket to go to this event. I’ve already blogged about the event to a great extent so I think what I’ve got to say about it now on the fact that the networking was great. But networking aside, going to the event allowed me to see where all these people see online advertising going. Darn, i’ll say I think the majority of them were too much in it for the money than they knew. Darren Rowse’s talk, coming from the point of view of the publisher made so much more sense. I think that uneven mix of marketer vs. publisher content made me realize how important it is not only to make myself marketable to companies possibly looking for a publisher, but for me to find the right company for me to want to align myself with.

Adsense Buys my Daily Coffee…
Darren’s talk really hit home and made sense. Why? Simply because it was the truth about marketers and their relationship with bloggers. Or as many bloggers wanted to know, how do I make money?

The chart above was from Darren’s presentation (which is available here) illustrating how much money problogger.net readers make from blogging. He made the point that 30% of his readers can’t pay for their daily coffee from the amount of money they make from their blogs. I think that may have been my wake up call.

Monetizing Websites
I think that this past month was the first time I took earning money online seriously. I purchased one site, and am working at growing a few more. My total earnings this month wont get me a paycheck from Adsense or YPN just yet, but I can tell from my trends in impressions and earnings that things are going well and I’ve definitly got an upward trend going in earnings. Also I think I’ve learned that diversifying my monetization options are the way to go. So far I’ve got 4 monetized sites useing two different avenues of earning. This blog isn’t monetized yet, but may be in the near future. I like that I don’t have ads here, but also I like to earn money. I’m currently on the fence about monetizing this blog so we’ll wait and see.

So what have I gained?�? Oh among great contacts, also a new sense of understanding what goes into automating my income. And by automating my income I mean setting up my websites I run as a network of sites which I can work on both with some urgency (my blogs) and also others with little to no upkeep. As I’m new to this, and the sites are also relatively young, my income is still rising, and I’m not even at a point of seeing it level off. Yes, I’m new to this. However, I can only see good things in my future of online earnings if current trends continue.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

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So I just got a friend request on Facebook from none other than Gapingvoid’s Hugh MacLeod. After adding Hugh as a friend I noticed no mutual friends listed. Hmm, makes me wonder how Hugh got around to finding me on Facebook. I guess it’s good to know the guys who run the big blogs do try to get in touch with their readers and fans.

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Contests:

Everyone loves the chance to win at something. Blog contests have been the latest in a series of crazes to sweep the blogosphere lately. BlueFur.com even made a post about the trend of contests as a way to gain traffic not too long ago. While contests allow a reader a chance to win something, they also offer the writer(s) of the blog a chance to get a large amount of promotion for their blog, oh and also backlinks!

Derrich from Derrich.com did a few “blogger tournaments” during the month of March to parallel the March Madness NCAA Basketball Tournament. Somehow I was lucky enough to be chosen to take part. While I did end up coming in second, I know I made a few plugs for myself, and Derrich.com likewise. Now I may have been promoting people to vote for me, but everyone I wanted to vote for me also headed over to Derrich’s site.

So even if I didn’t end up winning, and the traffic may have not stayed around, but it still give Derrich quite the boost in traffic. Now Derrich’s first tournament helped him so much that he held a second tournament. I haven’t asked for numbers, but I think these tournaments helped solidify Derrich’s position as a credible and entertaining blogger.

Aside from Derrich, several other bloggers such as Darren Rowse, and John Chow also employ the use of the contest as a means for drawing traffic. (Not like the pros need to “draw traffic”.)

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Segmented Posts:

Look at my title, see the “Part 2″? That’s what this post is all about. Splitting topics and posts up into segmented parts to keep those readers coming back. Well this tactic can be used for a few reasons, most notably, either making posts smaller in length to break up a longer talk, or to group posts of the same or similar topics.

A while back while I was researching how to create a proxy site I literally StumbledUpon Dave Turnbull’s “Making A Successful Proxy” series. While the series had already been posted in length, I could easily go from one post to the next and follow the ideas. Adversely the individual posts allowed me to easily follow subtopics. Before you just look at my blog and say “Duh!” realize that the post would be quite long and time consuming to read if you were to try to take in all that information at once.

Matt Coddington also utilized the tactic of segmented posting on NetBusinessBlog.com when he covered the topic of “minisites.” While Matt’s use only covered the two posts, it easily linked the posts and continued the same idea, which he had broken up into 10 easy to follow steps. These posts for some reason reminded me of an episode of This Old House, in the way things were explained, but unlike This Old House, the concept of minisites is something which I was interested in and may potentially use while creating sites.

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So you start your new blog. You’ve got your theme, your plugins, and you start posting. I’ll say that a few weeks go by and you’ve got yourself a small cache of loyal readers. Some more time goes by and that cache has grown. Assuming that you’ve not lost anyone, has your readership grown by only a few numbers, or by leaps and bounds?

Now we all want to be able to say that our blogs have grown immensely since point in time “x”. I’ve done some thinking and a bit of research, and then a bit more thinking… and I think the following are a few ways that you can get a reader coming back. Hopefully that occasional reader will become a hooked loyal, and RSS subscribed reader.

• Segmented Posts - Come back tomorrow for Part 2, Part 3… etc.
• Contests - You don’t always need to win a prize to want to go back to that blog!
• Content alone - Wow that guy’s a great writer!

Over the next few days i’ll go over these tactics and hopefully show you how to get a few more readers, and how to keep your readers wanting to come back to your blog. Also maybe I can snag a few more returning browsers to this blog

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