What I've Discovered About Blogging For Income
Looking at my page on Natural Networkers, I realized it needed serious updating. For the past six months, I've been building blogs with the hopes of creating some income streams. This idea hasn't panned out as I'd hoped and my 4 blogs make a sum total of about $5 a month between them - lol. I've now come to a time of re-evaluating.
My husband and I have decided at last on "what we're going to be when we grow up." Right now we are looking for some land in east Texas with the idea of starting an alpaca ranch to supplement our retirement income. To that end, I started a blog that's mostly for fun called Spinning Alpaca Yarns which is about knitting, weaving and alpacas.What has surprised me is that I get more response from this blog than I do from my others - which were built more as a business.
My other blogs are about baby boomers, cooking and health. One thing I discovered about blogs, as I've been reading many the past few months, is that the blogs which seem the most personal, and in many ways the most amateur, receive the most comments. With the exception of blogs about network marketing, blogging itself, computers and the like, the blogs I've read with the most interaction with readers are blogs that someone puts up about their passion for some topic - usually with no regard for making money with it. Many of the most well-read blogs I've found don't even have ads on them at all.
I built some of my blogs along with a program called The Niche Blogger. It was a great program as far as how to build a blog technically and get it read by the search engines. However, what discouraged me was that my health blog - a free blog on blogspot - was earning as much as these other blogs. In other words, if I kept adding to my free health blog, it earned about $3 a month, the same as the others which had a lot more thought put into them.
The Niche Blogger also taught how to research a topic for traffic and earnings potential. At that time, though, I had no idea how many hundreds of cooking blogs there were out there to compete with. Baby boomers I think may be a good topic as time goes along and I get lots of traffic to that site, just not many people spending money.
I know for myself I have to look at the larger picture of blogging. My cooking blog I built mostly to promote my Watkins business and it's working well for that purpose, although I do have some google ads on the site as well. My alpaca blog I am building to someday attach to our alpaca ranch website. At that time, we'll be selling alpacas, fiber and other alpaca related products and I hope to have built an audience and connected with other fiber artists and alpaca owners.
One bright spot in the financial picture of online business building is that my health & wellness website is earning twice with it did last year (through google adsense) and shows no sign of slacking off for the summer. A friend told me over a year ago that I should focus on adding new pages to my website and forget blogging and maybe she was right about that.
After putting so much time and effort into earning through blogging, however, I've started to think my time and effort might be better spent on other projects - like cleaning my house!
My husband and I have decided at last on "what we're going to be when we grow up." Right now we are looking for some land in east Texas with the idea of starting an alpaca ranch to supplement our retirement income. To that end, I started a blog that's mostly for fun called Spinning Alpaca Yarns which is about knitting, weaving and alpacas.What has surprised me is that I get more response from this blog than I do from my others - which were built more as a business.
My other blogs are about baby boomers, cooking and health. One thing I discovered about blogs, as I've been reading many the past few months, is that the blogs which seem the most personal, and in many ways the most amateur, receive the most comments. With the exception of blogs about network marketing, blogging itself, computers and the like, the blogs I've read with the most interaction with readers are blogs that someone puts up about their passion for some topic - usually with no regard for making money with it. Many of the most well-read blogs I've found don't even have ads on them at all.
I built some of my blogs along with a program called The Niche Blogger. It was a great program as far as how to build a blog technically and get it read by the search engines. However, what discouraged me was that my health blog - a free blog on blogspot - was earning as much as these other blogs. In other words, if I kept adding to my free health blog, it earned about $3 a month, the same as the others which had a lot more thought put into them.
The Niche Blogger also taught how to research a topic for traffic and earnings potential. At that time, though, I had no idea how many hundreds of cooking blogs there were out there to compete with. Baby boomers I think may be a good topic as time goes along and I get lots of traffic to that site, just not many people spending money.
I know for myself I have to look at the larger picture of blogging. My cooking blog I built mostly to promote my Watkins business and it's working well for that purpose, although I do have some google ads on the site as well. My alpaca blog I am building to someday attach to our alpaca ranch website. At that time, we'll be selling alpacas, fiber and other alpaca related products and I hope to have built an audience and connected with other fiber artists and alpaca owners.
One bright spot in the financial picture of online business building is that my health & wellness website is earning twice with it did last year (through google adsense) and shows no sign of slacking off for the summer. A friend told me over a year ago that I should focus on adding new pages to my website and forget blogging and maybe she was right about that.
After putting so much time and effort into earning through blogging, however, I've started to think my time and effort might be better spent on other projects - like cleaning my house!
Comment
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Comment by Andrea Goodsaid on May 22, 2009 at 9:05am -
Ooh see I love the idea of blogging to build a list for future networking purposes.
An alpaca farm sounds like fun - congratulations Joan!
Andrea
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