Making money from your blog

I saw a post at Copyblogger about making money from your blog. I commented about the topic in that post. I have copied my comment here so that my users can benefit from it as well:

Hi, I am a developer and have been running my website for last 10 years and generating some revenue from it. I want to share my 2 cents.

This article is spot on when it comes to generating revenue from displaying ads. Lets face it, we hate ads. The more you have them, the more the bounce rate will be for your website. And if you have to put Adsense, then it becomes even worse.

With Adsense, you have to place it, as they call it, above the fold to improve our dismal CTR from say 0.05% to 0.1%. Above the fold means making the visitors see these ads as the first thing on your website. Not only it gives the impression that you are perhaps one of those struggling bloggers trying to make your first $100, it puts off the visitor entirely.

What I advise to users is to please focus on the content of your website. If you are not even getting 100,000 page views a month, you shouldn’t be putting ads on your website at all. Unless of course, you can sell ads directly to advertisers.

Promote yourself! That’s they key thing. I missed the social networking train myself. Your objective should be to get your visitors to come back, at least one more time. Your goals should be to get followers on Twitter, likes on Facebook, get email and RSS feed subscribers.

The thing I liked when I read this blog post was that Copyblogger has placed in the most important visible area on their page, that is, top right corner, a subscription form for their newsletter and a link to their Twitter account. That my friends is what I am talking about! Promote yourself, write good content, and motivate yourself by seeing a constant influx of new followers and subscribers on your social networks.

How to make money? As a developer, I can say that the answer lies in innovation and creativity. It is easy to develop a web application, a piece of software, write a technical article or journal, and contribute in a book if you are a developer. You have got to have something of your own to sell.

Ads are the single worst thing that kills your website repeat visitors. I had the model, but now am changing this to writing my own software and selling it. I develop software and then give it away for free; actually explain how it works step by step in my tutorials. This is all fine and I will continue with that. But I will also develop that piece of code further, that I wrote about in the tutorial, and make it available to be purchased online. Giving users value.

So please don’t worry if you aren’t earning much. Focus on your content, with discipline, keep on adding content to your blog. Try to judge the value of your blog from the growth in terms of visitors, page views, followers on Twitter, likes on Facebook, subscriptions to your newsletter and subscribers to your RSS feed. Keep yourself motivated and keep following the blogs that inspire you. Your persistence and perseverance will reward you.

Besides, if you love blogging and enjoy blogging about what you know and love, there is nothing that is going to stop you from blogging anyway, money or no money, right?

You can follow Faisal Khan on twitter here.