Is every blog a potential moneymaker?
May 25th, 2006Is every blog that’s out there on the Internet a potential pot of gold waiting for the owner to realize it and slap some ads on it?
No. If only it were that simple!
The truth is that there’s a huge gulf between a blog that’s got the potential of making a few bucks a month and a blog that’s capable of earning some serious cash. The trick is to be able to tell the difference between these three types and come up with a blog that’s better positioned for generating revenue. In this post I am going to look at how to tell the difference between topics that have little hope of making money and those that stand a chance.
The key factor to running is successful blog is to have high levels of traffic. If you’re looking for the magic bullet, the golden key, the genie in the lamp, then this is it. It’s so simple that people overlook it and get caught up looking for some gimmicky trick that will substitute for having lots and lots of people visiting the site.
High traffic means lot of eyes on the page. Lots of eyes on the page translates into more clicks on ads. More clicks on ads means more money in your pocket. It really is that simple.
Starting from the principle that it’s high traffic that dictates whether a blog will be suited to making money or not, let’s look at what separates a blog that has good potential from one that has very little.
If a blog needs a lot of visitors to make money then the main question that you should have is “where do these visitors come from?” It is safe to say that, unless you have money to spend on an ad campaign or you already have a high traffic website you can leverage, then most of your visitors are going to have to come to your site from a search engine. This means your visitors will have sat in front of their computers, fired up a web browser and carried out a search using their favorite search engine (which, statistically, is probably going to be Google, Yahoo! or MSN) and clicked on a link to your site.
What you need to do is:
- To work on getting the keywords that people search for into your site (by discussing these topics)
- Appear at, or close to, the top of the list of pages returned by the search engine
In this article I’m not going to look at ways that you can do either of the steps above (that’s for future articles) but thinking along these lines will help you to figure out why some blogs are better suited to having high traffic levels than others.
Let’s take two examples:
- A personal journal blog
- A blog about kites
Are people more likely to search on keywords that appear in a personal journal or a blog about kites? Well, straight away, it’s apparent that the kite blog is going to be rich in keywords relating to kites, while the personal blog is going to be unfocused in its scope.
Which topic are people most likely to search on? Well, I don’t know how big the market for kites it but I bet that its a lot bigger than the pool of people interested in reading other people’s journals. Even if there was a huge demand for new personal journals to read, the web is so loaded with this kind of blog that the chances someone would find your blog over another is small. There are fewer sites that discuss kites so you have to do less work (note that I said less work, not no work!) to get noticed.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some personal journals that receive a lot of attention, but unless you have a very unique angle (for example, you’re an astronaut) then I’d say that it’s near impossible to make any real money from journal blogs.
There’s another key difference between the kite blog and the journal blog. People who search for kite related keywords are likely to be looking for something to buy than are people who want to read someone else’s journal. You have to do less work to get people to click on ads if they have money burning a hole in their pocket and are already looking to spend it!
If you are searching for a niche market then a good place to start is to think about the sorts of things you search for on the Internet. Pay close attention to searches where you are looking for help in buying something or to look for choices - any one of these might harbor a niche that’s waiting to be exploited! If you’ve searched for something, then chances are other people are going to be interested in that topic too.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 11:03 am and is filed under Make money with Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
