Monthly Archives: November 2011

Blogging

Making Money By Blogging – Let’s Talk

20 Comments

I tend to violate some rules that those who say they make a lot of money from blogging believe are essential. This is one of those times, but I’ll get back to the main subject in a minute. First, the latest progress from my offer on being available for doing an interview has led to two new posts elsewhere. The first is an interview I did with Olawale Daniel on his blog TechAtLast blog. The second is a guest post I wrote for Mitchell Allen of Morpho Designs titled “70’s Music – The Last Days Of Innocence“. I hope you check them out and thanks to both of you.


via Flickr

In previous interviews I’ve done, I’ve been asked this question about making money by blogging a few times. I used to always say that it was never really my intention to try to make money by blogging, and lived by that, even though, before this year, I always popped in an affiliate ad, just in case someone saw something they liked and decided to check it out. I can easy say that was NOT been successful, which is why I dropped it. I still run some banner ads here, but I’m sure they’re being missed by almost everyone as well.

I now have to modify my statements from back then a little bit. I still don’t try to make money off “all” my blogs, but I do try to make money specifically off one blog, and encourage others to help my income on others. It’s time for a breakdown because I’m going to be the one to tell you an amazing truth about making money online, but especially with blogging; it’s not going to happen the way you think it will.

I have earned a few dollars here and there from this blog over the years, but very little. I’ve sold a couple of affiliate programs, know I sold one of my books (up there to the top left) from this blog, and made, I believe, a whopping $1.35 from Adsense before it was pulled from this blog. That’s it; almost nothing. I’ve made nothing whatsoever from two of my blogs, those being my Syracuse blog and my SEO blog. The first has no advertising on it so far, and the second is just past 3 months old.

My main business blog, Mitch’s Blog has made more money than the other 3 blogs, but not how you’d think. What it’s done is helped me get a speaking engagement and a presentation to a company that both paid fairly well. I have also sold a couple of books on management and one of my CD series from that blog, but the first two things I mentioned makes it my biggest money maker by far, if not my most consistent. See, the purpose of the business blog is to show authority in my fields of business, and it worked well enough to get me two projects that paid nicely. So, I can say I made money online, even if it was for offline projects.

My finance blog, Top Finance Blog, is my most consistent money maker, and in some ways more in line with how some people might think of making money online; sort of. I make almost all of my money on that blog through paid advertising. Companies pay me to put banner ads on the site. They pay me to add their links to previous posts, and some pay me to put a post on there that they wrote. Some even pay me to write a special post for them, knowing it’s going to cost them more because y’all know me, I’m going to write what I want to write about when I want to write it unless I’m getting paid. Even though I have a couple of products on that page and my own banner ads, they don’t generate anything close to the advertising.

That’s not how I saw it coming when I started that blog. I always believed that if I wrote in that niche that I would sell all sorts of products and information geared towards it. That’s how it all began with me as well, having all kinds of sales stuff on there. What happened instead is people with business interest in the financial niche wanted to be a part of it as its rankings and position increased. If there was ever anything to be said for the power of finding a niche and sticking within it, this is it for me. I didn’t manifest income in the way I thought I would, but I’ve manifested it all the same. Now, before you run off trying to do the same thing, let me make this point clear; I’m not “yet” making enough to live off on that blog, and unless I totally write only that blog I don’t think I ever will. But it’s a nice income, and though the last 7 days are kind of a fluke, I did make close to $500; I’ll take that for now. 🙂

Can you make money blogging? Yes you can. Do I recommend trying it? Can’t hurt, as long as you know what the realities are. My finance blog will be 3 years old in December, and it’s taken that long to generate enough interest so that it can make money. If you’re looking for a quick hitter it’s rare that it will happen, so don’t hurt yourself trying. If you have the time, you’ll make something.

And now it’ll probably be another 7 to 9 months before I touch this topic again. lol
 

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2011-2019 Mitch Mitchell
Blogging

Too Many Tags And Categories?

35 Comments

A couple of days ago I was reading a guest post by a guy who wrote on the topic of bounce rates. He started that he only had a 2% bounce rate; every person that commented, including yours truly, found that hard to believe. Goodness, the best bounce rate I have on any of my blogs is around 66%. That may have been the most controversial point, but there was something else in that post that got my attention.

top tags on I'm Just Sharing

It was his mentioning tags and tag clouds and how, by keeping them relatively low, they can help shape what your blog is all about in a better fashion, as well as help reduce your bounce rate. That one caught my attention because I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. And, by extension, categories as well, which sometimes mirror the tags.

For the uninitiated, categories help people find content they care about quicker. If you look to the right sidebar of mine you’ll see it just before my product pages listing. I have 35 article categories on this blog; in a way that’s a bunch, and I know that some of these can be merged. Not all of them, but some of them; then again, I talk about a wide variety of things on this blog, so maybe that’s not so bad.

However, I also have 1,899 tags and counting on this blog; that might be a bit of overkill. The idea behind tags is to refine what you’re talking about in your blog posts. So, I might be talking SEO in general as a category, but on one day I might be talking about keywords, on another I could be talking about linking, etc. Therefore, one might tend to have more tags than categories.

But how many tags and categories are too many in general? I tend to believe it depends on what it is you’re writing about. Let’s compare this blog to 3 of my other blogs. The first business blog, which I’ve had the longest, has 19 categories and 919 tags. The second business blog, which I’ve only had just under 4 months by now, only has 6 categories and 50 tags. And my finance blog has 45 categories and 901 tags.

Do two of those above look excessive to you? On the surface they do, but in reality I tend to think not. Tags help you zero in on a topic, and search engines seem to take more credence in your tags than they do in categories anyway. I’ve noticed that categories seem to show up in blog readers more often, as they do in my Feedreader program. True, it might help if you could find ways to use similar tags over and over, but sometimes I think it’s imperative that you drill down further, be a bit more specific with your topic.

For instance, my last post was on video blogging. I could have just put “blogging” but that wouldn’t have really been sufficient. So I added “video blogging” to the mix as well as “vlog”, a term a lot of people use. I then decided to toss in a keyword phrase, “future of blogging”; after all, there might be people that search for that phrase, and with all the other keywords it might help make the post prominent enough to be found for that term by some people.

By the way, I will say that it’s possible that either tags or categories will help reduce your bounce rate. If people want to learn more or see more of what you’ve said in the past they might decide to click on your categories or, if you have them somewhere, your tags; I’ve taken mine down but I’m thinking about putting it back up somewhere, probably on the right sidebar again.

What’s your take on tags and categories? I know some people haven’t used them; why not? And while we’re at it, do you pay attention to tag clouds on blogs you visit?
 

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Blogging

Where Is Blogging Going?

26 Comments

This is interesting. I’ve done 2 interviews so far and was asked the question above in both of them. I decided to do a little video on it; let’s see what my powers of prognostication are:

Here’s the interview I did with Brian Hawkins of Hot Blog Tips. Now, I’m not sure if this is the second shortest post I’ve ever written but it’s close to it; enjoy!
 

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Networking

Interviews – What Prompted Yesterday’s Post

10 Comments

Yesterday I wrote a post telling people that I was available for both interviews and questions. It may have seemed like a strange post to some, and I mentioned in that post that I was looking to increase my influence and find more topics to make videos about. But that’s not all, and I thought I’d talk about the rest of it in a secondary post.

I’ve done a lot of interviews with other people. I’ve posted them on this blog, my Syracuse blog, and my business blog, Mitch’s Blog. The thing is that I’ve actually put out way more requests than that, and it’s that point where things have been a bit irksome for me.

As I write this I have 6 interview requests out there. Actually that’s not quite accurate. I have one interview requests and I’m waiting for 5 people with whom I’ve requested interviews from to respond to the questions so I can put them, well, somewhere. These are people that agreed to be interviewed, people I’ve already sent the questions to.

Now, I know people get busy, and I know I didn’t specify a time frame. However, when I sent the interview questions, I actually figured I’d get responses back in 1 to 2 weeks. This isn’t the case, though. Three of the interview requests are more than 3 months old at this stage, and I’ve sent them all followups. I figure it’s not going to happen, and that’s too bad because I think it would have been as good for them as it would have been for my blogs.

People are funny. They have these businesses and they say “I don’t know how to increase my sales or get people to know more about me”, and then an opportunity arises, it’s free, and they disappear. Months ago I put out a call to interview people for my business blog. In general it has a format that everyone has to adhere to, only 5 questions, and folks have to be independent or a small business for participation. I had one person who responded; now that’s a shame. I put it out on Twitter and I repeated it twice, and only one person? This from, at the time, almost 3,000 people who supposedly follow my stream? Even people I know didn’t pony up for it.

What does this say? To me it says people have no idea what an opportunity looks like. Sure, this blog might not have an Alexa rating under 10,000, but it is under 100,000 and that’s a pretty good accomplishment. According to Feedburner there are more than 250 people subscribed to this blog, and that probably means there’s at least that many people coming to the blog in other ways on a daily basis. Many of those people are consumers in some fashion, or looking for ideas, or are just interested in learning more about something or someone. And let’s face it, you never know when someone might reach out to you to ask for your services or products if they get to know you better, right?

This was on my mind when I wrote yesterday’s post. If others don’t want to jump on opportunities to get their name out there, to increase their influence and possibly affect their income, I’ll take their place. Strangely enough, a couple of days ago I was listening to an interview I did with someone 4 years ago talking about SEO and websites, and the good thing is that interview is still out there affecting someone’s life; okay, maybe not but I can dream. lol One just never knows.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled reading. 😉
 

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Networking

Go Ahead, Interview Me

16 Comments

Well now, this is a different kind of post. The title kind of says it all, but I figure I should add a little bit of something extra.


My friend Kelvin
hates this picture

In August of last year I wrote a post about influence and social media. I talked about how I wanted to work on growing my influence and I talked about a few things I was going to try to do to achieve that goal. I talked about how I was going to work through Twitter and Facebook. I’ve gone that route, and I’ve actually had a little bit of success with it. I even talked about this blog and, at that time, my business blog and the number of links I supposedly had between the two. Now that Yahoo Site Explorer is gone I’ll have to check somewhere else to see the numbers again.

I’m also done with Klout, as you know, although using that to measure influence was really ridiculous. There really isn’t a true tool to measure clout that way. But I still want to increase my influence, and thus I’m asking for help while offering help; how’s that sound?

Here’s the deal. I’m putting myself out there to do interviews. You’ve seen examples of how I do interviews on this site and you’ve probably seen me being interviewed on other sites. This post on influence listed a bunch of interviews I’ve done with other people on this blog. This page to interviews are some I’ve done with other people; I think it needs to be updated.

Anyway, part one is putting myself out there to be interviewed. It can be through questions you send me by email (look at my contact page for my email address), or I’ll do your podcast, or even video interview. I’d like to do a lot of them, but any interviews would work nicely. I can speak on a variety of topics, but I’m not going to tell you what they are just yet.

That’s because I have part two. Last December I wrote a post asking how I could be useful to you. I got enough comments on that post and people were very nice, but no one really asked me for help on anything. I’m going a different route here. I need to create some more videos and what I thought I could do was see what people might be interested in asking me so I could answer those questions or address those topics by video. This time, instead of asking people to write their questions on the blog, I’ll ask you to go through the email route to send me your question. I started wondering if folks didn’t want to put questions in comments so everyone else could see them; by going the email route, maybe folks will feel more free in asking questions.

And now the topics. Y’all know I can talk about a bunch of different subjects, so maybe these will fit your qualifications for an interview, or give you an idea of things to ask me questions on that I might be able to answer. This certainly isn’t a comprehensive list, and frankly I know if I actually get questions that there might be some I can’t answer. Let’s see how all of this goes; if nothing else I got another unique blog post out of it. The subjects are:

Leadership/management; racial diversity; customer service; medical billing; health care finance/revenue cycle; SEO; social media; writing; budgeting; blogging; 70’s music (odd one, eh?); and speaking.

That’s what I know I know, but I’ve talked about all sorts of things on this blog over almost 1,200 posts so I know something about other topics as well that one might find intriguing. I’m game to try almost anything; almost, that is. 😎

Consider this a social experiment; at the very least you know you’ll end up with a link back to this blog if you interview me, since I always mention when I’ve been interviewed; let’s see how we can benefit each other. Thanks; enjoy your weekend.
 

Digiprove sealCopyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell