Da Vinci Planet » blog

Making Money From Blogging

Da Vinci — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 04:15:57 +0000

John Chow has a fascinating post (and blog for that matter) on how he is making money from blogging. He decided to monetize his blog as an experiment to see if he could make money for himself from the Internet. John, like most Web professionals, has experience in telling others how to run their Web sites, but he wondered if he could make money himself… like most Web professionals do! Turns out he is doing very well – good enough to make it a full time job, but he also shows that it takes dedication and hard work.

Here’s how he’s been doing:
September $352.94 (first month as a moneymaking blog) October $1,361.64 November $2,139.93 December $2,790.05 January $3,440.66 February $7,011.05 March $8,545.25

He’s also kind enough to show the breakdown of his income for March – all from smart marketing tools:
ReviewMe: $2,400.00 Affiliate Sales: $1,962.20 Text Links Ads: $1,308.06 Google AdSense: $1,129.60 Direct Ad Sales: $625.00 Vibrant Media: $357.08 Kontera: $296.12 TTZ Media: $278.92 FeedBurner Ads: $188.27 Grand Total: $8,545.25

(I noticed that he also has Adsense-like ads by ActionAds.)

The traffic didn’t come for free, but it was relatively cheap at $480.75 for March (mostly AdWords). Now, $480/month is a lot of money for an amateur blogger, but it goes to show that a little money can go a long way.

An interesting expense that he incurred is what he calls Google IM ads to other blogs. “Google IM ads” could be a way of spreading the love (“who knows who”) or it could be a form of AdSense arbitrage, or – most likely – it’s a combination: spreading the love and making money. The perfect mix. Huge hooray for corporate marketers that are on board.

He may have been lucky, but he proves that one can make a decent income from blogging. Can he keep it up? I bet he can because, like any other job, it takes time and passion to do it well and he seems to have both.

Why do I do it..? Passion! I am a Web professional and I love this stuff and so it has become a hobby. The Adsense income was a “why not?”, but now it justifies the hobby . I also do it to encourage other people to blog about their passions because it is such an amazing forum to spread knowledge.

Make Money On The Internet – johnchow.com

WordPress 2.1

Da Vinci — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 03:32:46 +0000

I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 today, mostly motivated by the editor updates. The upgrade itself was painless and all of the plugins seem to be working fine. The only problem was that embedded YouTube videos didn’t work. This was a good opportunity to test the new editor and I was able to fix the videos by getting the embed code from YouTube and replacing the code in the posts using the new “code” view of the editor. The new editor is a bit better than the old one, but I like the improved image handling. The autosave is also great. Here are some of the key features

Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.

New tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.

Completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.

You can set any â€œpageâ€? to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.

Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.

More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.

The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.

A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

Have fun upgrading!

Which blog application is right for you?

Da Vinci — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 22:02:43 +0000

Over the last couple of months many people I know, mostly non-technical, have shown an interest in creating their own blogs. It is very easy to set up a free blog, but it gets a little more confusing when you are more serious like wanting your own domain name. So based on level of seriousness, here’s my recommendation to find a blog solution that works for you.

Not serious
If you want to simply create a blog for free and do not care too much about domain names and getting email accounts for your domain, then sign up with one of the many free services, e.g:

Maybe serious
If you think that you are serious enough that you would purchase a domain name and pay a few dollars a month for hosting, but want to test the waters first then I suggest that you first sign up with wordpress.com. You will get a free blog that will live under myname.wordpress.com, where the “myname” part will be replaced by the username you choose. Then choose a theme, create some posts and play around with it to get familiar. The reason I suggest using WordPress is because I recommend WordPress for the “Serious” users and so it will give you chance to familiarize yourself with WordPress Administration.

Serious
Primarily if you want to use your own domain name and add custom features like Web analytics code and sell adds. To set up a blog of this nature requires the use of several services and will cost about $50/year. Google will become your best friend. Here’s what you need to do:

Happy Blogging!

Add Google AdSense to your WordPress blog

Da Vinci — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 20:54:17 +0000

One of the motives behind blogs is earning some extra cash from ads. To add Google AdSense to a WordPress blog is a breeze. First sign up for a an account with AdSense. It may take a few days for the account to get opened. In the mean time you can download the AdSense-Deluxe WordPress plug-in. I have not tested it, but I am sure that the plug-in should work for most affiliate programs.