How to monetize a blog

Blogs are essentially one of the hardest thing to monetise.  In this article, I will look at some popular ways to make money with a blog and why they are not suitable for aaronchua.com. Hopefully, this analysis will help you to understand how monetisation works and why you might be making more money if you choose the right option.

Just to be clear. A blog means it is personal and it has to be updated regularly. It is not to be confused with a niche site where the owner of the site typically is unknown and there are no real engagement being done.

Ads

Blogs typically don't work well with ads unless your blog has a large source of search traffic. Even so, a blog is normally configured to attract long term readers and not to send them off via the ads. As a result, they are not optimised to earn ad revenue via clicks.

I did an experiment using a new ad network called intentclick from Kontera. Below is my earning for May. 

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I make a miserable USD0.22 for the month of May. You can see why ads is not an option here. Of course, I can earn more by using a better ad programme such as adsense but the point here is there a blog is not designed to push people away through ads so they are never the best monetization option

Affiliate offers

Using affiliate offers yields a much better result. The below is the earnings from clickbank. I made about USD100 in about 7 months, which comes to about USD13 per month. Still not going to be rich.

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Promoting something to your readers or search traffic coming to your blog or selling something that is not value adding makes me feels dirty. Unlike other marketers, I can't really promote something unless it really gives you a positive ROI. This is why I only recommended keyword researcher as I believe it has helped me save lots of time doing research about long tail keywords. 

Selling ebooks

I am thinking of writing a book about business. However, I don't like a general business book. What I did was to look through the table of content for some of my favorite business or startup books and see what is the process of building a business. This is what I found:

• Finding your niche
• Test your assumptions
• Build the product
• Get your first customers
• Scale and optmise your customer acquisition

The above is essentially the steps in starting your own online business. Among them, I have the most difficulty with Step 1 and 4. So, if I am going to write a book, it will be about these 2 sub topics.

If I am to do this, I would want to create something like an ideas book where I list out 100 niche ideas for the future. You guys remember I always get traffic by targeting emerging niches? Instead of keeping all the goodies for myself, maybe somebody will be to pay to read these new emerging areas.

Beside each idea, there will be suggestions on how to create a value adding niche site around these ideas. A good example of this format is what I did on this post here on how to build quality sites. Look at how I analyze the peer to peer loan market and you will get a glimpse into what this new book will be all about.

The downside of doing a ebook is that you might spend lots of time without getting any significant results.  Of course, I can always do some market validation tests but the risk is definitely higher when it comes to creating and selling your own product.

In conclusion

So, I am throwing this challenge out there to my readers: if you owned aaronchua.com, how would you monetise it?

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My take on Singtel buying HungryGoWhere for 12 million dollars

The biggest news for today is that HungryGoWhere is bought by SingTel for 12 million dollars. For readers who are not familar with these companies, HungryGoWhere is the biggest food review site in Singapore while Singtel is our predominant Telco. From a blogger point of view, does this signfy that Singapore companies are starting to take content seriously and there is a chance that our blogs might be bought for a good sum of money?

I think there is.

In my post on creating financial blogs for Singapore, I already mentioned that the local business environment typically lags US for a few years. In the next few years, we will start to see more aggresive SEO plays and content marketing by Singapore companies. When that happens, the possibility of either engaging these companies as advertisers or potential buyers is very real. However, you need to stake your claim now and the good thing about Singapore is that there is so many wide open areas. 

In the directory business alone, I am seeing portals developed for properties, food, cars etc. How about directories for the rest of the industry? Spa, pets stores, bike shops, cosmetic surgeries etc. All these industries are now ripe for some directory sites to come and organise them so that consumers in Singapore find it easier to get information and reviews on the products or services that they desired.

I hope this news can created awaresness for what is truly possible online.  If you don't leverage it now, you might never get another chance in your lifetime.

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Funny keywords about making money with adsense and keywords

I know my readers came here to learn about new ways to make money or to know something useful. Today's post has nothing useful so don't bother reading. This is a light hearted post meant to show you why you cannot predict keywords based on keywords tools alone. Learn about how the conversation really happens in your niche and you will have a nice and never ending stream of keywords to write about.

Here is some of the most amusing keywords that have brought traffic to aaronchua.com.

1. I am banned from adsense and I want to die

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Who ever type this in, take it easy man! Adsense is not the end all or be all of how to make money online. As long as you know how to gather traffic, it doesn't matter whether you lose your adsense account or your site disappeared from the SERPs. You have acquired a skill that nobody can take away from you. What you need to do is to skip all the shortcuts and start fine tuning whatever you have learned. I have lost many adsense accounts (plus amazon too!) and I can still make money. I am living proof that life doesn't end after adsense.

2. Will I lose my serps after 2012

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Every traffic source has its downside. Instead of worring about losing your serps, do what is necessary to ensure that your traffic sources are diversified so that your business doesn't end when you lose your search rankings. Personallly, I never practiced what I preach. I am still a search traffic guy but I devote 100% of my attention on how to do advanced SEO.

After the penguin update, tonnes of internet marketers swore off Google, saying that they will explore social media for traffic. I took the opposite direction. I studied Google more and more to understand what is the value they are looking for. In the end, it is relatively simple. Seek value first and search traffic willl follow. Every successful site I saw that endured through Penguin had this common deominator. They cared more about the value than about keywords. The end result is that they do get search traffic and mostly for the terms that they never intentionally target.

As a person who practices SEO, my sites should be better than them. I should be able to provide value and practice some form of SEO to see faster and better results. At least that is where I am going.

So, don't worry about will you lose your serps after 2012 or whether your website disappeared from Google. Algorithms will always change but as long as you keep to the fundamentals of being a good webmaster, you have nothing to worry about. In the worse case scenario, you can always rebuild another site with new insights.

3. Key competition tips and difficult to find low competition keywords

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The people searching for these terms obviously haven't read my master pieces of how to find low competition keywords. In that case, I better provide you some references to these articles:

• Low competition keywords: my guide on what do we really mean by competitive keywords. Read this first!
• Why you should do keyword optimisation and not keyword ranking: learn to combine what I said above with this article and you will start to see how advanced SEO worry about the amount of search traffic but not individual keywords.
• How to find low competition keywords: talks about using market segments to dig out keywords that cannot be found in google adwords tool.
• Trend keywords: uses the penguin update as an example to show you how to pull traffic for new keywords that emerge whenever there are changes announced in your niche.
• Keyword competition tips for amazon products: discusses how to judge the difficult of a product based keyword

4. Passion for nature online income

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I have absolutely no idea what does this mean. I know I have passion for online income but what is nature online income. Is the searcher referring to nature based site or natural online income?

5. I earn 30k a month and am not satisified

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I loved this one. How can anyone make 30k a month and am not satisified? Unless you are earning tat 30k from a corporate company that eats away your human soul the minute you step into office. If that is the case, 30k is not a lot to compensate for the loss of your humanity : ).

Seriously speaking though. If you are already earning 30k, expanding your online business is super easy. Investing 30k to buy websites and you can easily double your income by the end of the year. Perhaps you should read my new blog on how to make money by investing in websites? (to readers: url of this new site will not be revealed yet).

I have lots more keywords to mine but I think that is enough for today.

Important make money lesson

I hope this fun exercise shows you how to mine your keywords and create ideas for generating new content. Every query is a question and if you do your best to answer them, you might be on your way to building a useful and relevant site.

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How to backlink after the penguin update

Finally, an update from me on a blog that nobody reads, LOL.

Anyway, lots of things going on so I kind have to leave this blog for a while. Today will be talking about how to backlink your website after the penguin update. Frankly speaking, the best way is not to do too much backlinking. Learn to pick emerging topics that you have an interest in. Write interesting content to solve problems in that niche. Round up a couple of links from your own blogs or from your friends to 'prime' the website. That is all the backlinking you need to do.

However, a common question you might have is the use of anchor text. Do you still use anchor text or just your website url? The answer is both but you need to be smart about where to use what. In the past, we all used anchor text for maybe 80-100% of our backlinks. That is what got many people into trouble with the penguin update. After the update, does it make sense to continue to use anchor text? Well, there was a mention by Google about eliminating one of the linking algorithm. Here is a good summary of what link alogorithm might be changed. Based on the article, it seems the use of anchor text might still be relevant.

Hence, since we don't really know how important anchor text is going forward, here is my suggestion. Use brand and nonsense links such as website url, aaron's blog, click here etc but for the links on authority sites, use anchor text. This means your anchor text usage might only be in the 10% or less region but they will come from the most powerful sites. For the rest of the links, just use other types of anchors.

Does this make sense to you? So far, I have been doing this before the penguin updates and none of the sites got hit. The ones that do are those that rely on the old and updated method of endless anchor text backlinks. If you are still insisting on building backlinks for your SEO effort, then do consider what I have said as an suggestion. For the rest of you who wants to get out of the backlink game, I suggest you reread my second paragraph again. That is all you need to build a real online business that doesn't come and go as Google changes its algorithm.

An update on our early retirement blog. I managed to squeeze about 14 articles for that site. Traffic is dismal of course and I am still finding my way in terms of identifying the key problems faced in this niche. The only good thing is that I have started to have a drip of search traffic and this is quite encouraging at this early stage of the project. I do hope you guys have started your own authority or passion site. You need prime virtual real estate going forward if you want to make serious money online.

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Financial aspect of buying cars

Buying a car is not something that is easily affordable. Many people would love to have a car that that can call their own but unfortunately finances tend to be a major hindrance for them.   You need to have this in mind when you approach nissan dealers. You need to be well prepared when it comes to financing your car.  This is what has made the financial institutions introduce some auto loans so as to make the process and the financial burden lighter for anyone who desires to have a car. 

There are so many options where you can get such services that will help you in getting a good car. Unfortunately, most of these financing agents have set the interest rates so high which still makes it quite unrealistic for those who need the loans. You cannot blame them since they are also in business and need to make some profit at the end of the day. Therefore, when you consider getting a loan to finance your motor vehicle purchase you need to look for a financial institution that does not charge very high interest rates.  

If you are one of those who have a bad credit score and a negative credit history, this may narrow your chances of securing an auto loan. If you have a bad credit, you should make every possible effort to make it appealing before approaching anyone to finance you car purchase. There are also some financial organisations that are said to be in the business of taking advantage of their clients. You should be very careful when dealing with such and be sure of the company that you deal with. There are also some that have partnered with nissan los angeles dealers which will save you all the hassle of having to find a financing company by yourself.

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How to create a passion site

With all the turmoil in recent days, people are finally willing to listen. When a person is making good money from creating 'not spam' niche sites, it is pretty hard to tell them to do anything else. With most of those income gone now, I am sure people are searching on how to make money after the penguin update.

This is not going be a full blown post on how to create a passion site. Rather, it is a journey. One that I am starting now and one that you can follow on with a real example. Before all these algorithm changes that Google has introduced, I was already thinking about creating passion sites that can last. After considering deeply on who I am and what I really like to write about, I finally created a couple of authority sites. This case study is one of them.

Let me introduce to you: http://earlyretirementdiary.com/

This is a blog about a topic that is very dear to my heart: early retirement. After all, what is the point of making money online? It is to retire early and enjoy a life of financial freedom. So, if that is your dream, I welcome you to the new passion blog.  However, to make this case study real, please don't link to it as it will skew the results.

Why create a passion site and why not to do it

Creating a passion site has its pros and cons. I am not here to tell you what you should do. It is my personal choice and I am laying out all the stuff I was thinking about before deciding to embark on this journey.

Pros of creating a passion site:

• Promote your site openly: In niche sites, we need to hide our keywords because that are usually our only defense. If other folks knew about our niches and what kind of money they made, you can bet that they will come after it with a vengeance. This severely restricted our marketing choices as we need to hide their tracks. 

• Explore other sources of traffic and diversify away from Google: Passion sites are driven by interests. You are genuinely interacting with others within your community to discuss issues, interests, news etc with regards to your common topic. You means you can openly market your site through all the social media channels and other relational marketing.
   
• Content creation is much easier: You are writing about something that you either have some expertise or interest in. It is so much easier to write interesting content when you are passionate about it.  

• Stronger motivation: Maintaining a passion site is not as easy as watching TV but it is a hell lot easier than having to write for something that you don't care about. 

Cons of creating a passion site

• Niche restriction: With a passion site, you choose what you are really interested about, not by keyword traffic and how much money you can make. 

• Crowded: Whether you believe it but most of us have similar interests. This is why there are so many blogs that talked about fashion, finance, parenting etc but very little blogs really talked about crime scene, industrial repair etc. So, choosing a niche means you are entering into a crowded field. 

• No obvious monetisation: some passions are very easy to monetise. Space is an great example. Only with huge traffic can a site such as universetoday.com make any form of significant income if your passion is not commercial by nature.  

How to overcome the cons of a passion site

Weighing the pros and cons, I still decided to go with a passion site. Despite the problem of limited niche selection, crowded  marketplace and no immediate money making route, there are two ways that I THINK can make a passion site viable:

Method 1: learn to spot where the problems are in your passion niche.

Every niche has its own set of problems and issues that are not obvious to people outside the industry. Take early retirement as an example. On the surface, it seems that every possible topic has been covered but upon reading and learning all the different retirement blogs, I realise there are a couple of things that existing blogs are not addressing.

You see, a common early retirement method is to reduce your spending to around 30k per year and start aggressively saving 50-75% of your salary.  Using such an approach, a normal middle class person should be able to save enough money and retire early. This money should be able to yield  5-7% interest and be sufficient to cover the 30k living expenses.

There are two problems:

• 5-7% is not that easy to achieve consistently if you want a low risk investment
• what if your wife or family doesn't want to live on 30k per year budget?

These issues represents opportunities for my early retirement blog to make a headway. Of course, there will be other issues that need to be addresses as  I continue to work on the site. However, the main point of this whole rambling is this:


Knowing the problems in a market means you can overcome the cons of a passion site:

• Niche restriction: The niche is not as limited as you think as there are always new problems (just like there are always new keywords) due to a changing environment bought on by technological, economical, political and social changes.

• Crowded: By identifying the problems in your passion niche, you are already differentiating yourself as you will be writing about something that is missing in your niche. This becomes your unique selling point and is something that you can market to other folks within the community. 

• No obvious monetisation: The problems you identified become a monetisation path because people always pay for solutions to their problems. Whether that solution can be solved by content is problem specific but at least you know that is a pain there waiting for some smart guy to remedy and profit from it. 

Method 2: Attack emerging niches

This has become a recurring theme for my blog but a new niche represents lots of untouched areas where good information is needed. I already mentioned a couple of such ideas in my post on how to build quality niche sites. The basic point, however, is that a new niche means unlimited sub niches and a non crowded marketplace. There might still be problems with monetisation but it is not a insurmountable issue as revenue models can be copied from existing niches.

How to know your passion

This is the hardest part but unfortunately it is also the first step. Think about it. If you are passionate about something, you will already be doing it. The fact that most of us are not pursuing anything in our lives means that there isn't anything that we feel strongly about. We are just living from day to day with no passion.

I though about mine for a long long time. After much soul searching, I realise this is what I am passionate about:


Creating online income so that my wife and I can retire early, and I want to enable others to do the same.

The above captures what my passion is. In that statement, there are a couple of niches that fit well into who I am.

• Making money online: already doing it with aaronchua.com and I love the results so far.
• Retire early: click that one off as well with my new blog
• Enable others: still thinking about that one but I might start a new blog that attempts to give readers 1000 blog topics that are emerging and have income potential. Aaronchua.com does this to some extend.

Anyway, you should think hard about what you really want and who you really are. 

I hope you guys reading this really start a passion site. One where you can continue to work on after 5 or even 10 years.

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Penguin update affected your site? Time to consider the alternatives

Ever since writing the 2 posts about why my sites are not ranking after April 25 and how to recover sites that disappeared from the SERPs, it is time to rethink how you have been getting your traffic. The drop you have experienced should serve as a fine warning that no real money making ventures should ever rely on one traffic source, especially one that has no real challengers.

By the way, this latest algorithm change has been termed the penguin update by most folks so I will call it as such from now onwards.

You see, ever since the Panda 2.6 update that caused my adsense earnings to drop from 5k to USD600, I have leaned that there are more than 1 search engine. My sites that got affected by Panda never recovered from Google but most have gotten their traffic back. How? By optimising for other search engines.

I know Google is the biggest search engine. However, Bing and Yahoo (despite the smaller share) still command more than 300 million users. That is still a very very large number. While every IM and his dog is going after Google, I learn to optimise for other search engines that are happy to give my sites the traffic that they need for my earnings to increase again.

How to optimise for Bing and Yahoo

Almost everyone I talked draws a blank face when I mentioned that they should learn how to do SEO for Bing, Yahoo and other search engines you never heard of. Everyone seems to forget that we are doing search engine optimisation, not google search optimisation. A good SEO will learn to get traffic from all search based engines and not just from Google.

So, how do you actually optimise for Bing and others? Well, it is the same process:

• Keyword research
• Content
• Promotion
• Feedback

The main difference lies in which data set you pay attention to. When you are optimising for Google, I bet you only used Google tools such as Google keyword tool, Google trends etc. Now, you need to know what keywords are being searched by users of Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. There are a couple of ways to do it but definitely not using Google's tool to estimate other search engines' keyword volume. That is just plain stupid.

While Bing and others doesn't have an equivalent of a keyword tool, they do offer things such as auto complete, related searches and trending topics (See Yahoo trending tool as an example). Learn to dig out sources of how people search on these other engines and you are on your way.

Feedback is a problem as google analytics and other Java script based analytics programme don't offer a complete view of your traffic sources. These make it hard for you to know which search engines are really sending you traffic and how you can create more content to draw similar traffic. Server logs are the best but you need to know how to retrieve the keywords from there and used it.

I have still lots to say about optimising for Bing and other search engines but the key takeaway here is that you should never reply on one traffic source alone. Learn to optimise for other search engines and you are already miles ahead of other SEOs and Internet marketeers.

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