Adsense is really easy money.

I still can’t get over how easy it is to profit from Google’s Adsense program. It’s quite possibly the easiest way I’ve ever made passive income.  All you really need to start is a blog or website, a general theme (helpful, but it’s not totally necessary to have one strict topic), and ads, and you are good to go!

I slapped Adsense on a couple of my sites several months ago, and those ads, without ANY additional work on my part, bring me in a couple hundred dollars monthly right now.  I know it could be a lot more if I had the time to update the sites/blogs with fresh content, submit them to more directories, gain more backlinks, etc.

In 2008, I plan on adding Adsense to all of my upcoming sites. I won’t totally rely on Adsense for my main income (it’s good to spread your income streams out rather than to focus on just one in case something happens to it), but I would like Adsense to account for at least 20% of my online earnings.

Blogging for money

If you can write, you can blog. And if you can blog, you can make money. It is really that simple.

Blogging is nothing more than keeping a web log, or a series of posts on absolutely any topic you like. The majority of bloggers are just personal blogger, writing about their daily life and experiences. These people tend to have a large following among family and friends, but not necessarily anyone else, unless they happen to have a fascinating life.

In order to earn money blogging, you need a topic that interests someone besides your mother. That doesn’t mean choosing a technical or difficult subject, just one that will draw a crowd when you write something interesting about it. This could be anything from natural cosmetics to horror movies and anything in between.

Although some recommend choosing your niche based on things like high quality keywords, I personally believe that you are far better off selecting a subject that interests you. After all, you will have to write about it day in and day out for the next several years if all goes well! You ought to feel some passion for the topic.

Starting a blog is easy enough. Most people have plenty of ideas at the beginning. You can start off with a handful of articles on the basics of your topic and then post every day or every week, as you please, from then on. Keep your blogging posts on topic and full of interesting information to bring people back.

Now, just because you start blogging does not mean people will come flocking to read what you write. In fact, you will probably be dismally disappointed when you see the hits counter hasn’t budged in a week. Once you have a few posts up, it is time to start promoting your blog. That means talking it up to friends and family, MSN contacts and adding your blogging URL to your signature line anywhere you can . . . in your email, forums and assorted message boards. These also count as backlinks which will eventually help you out in the search engines.

Earning with blogging can be done in several ways. For example, you can add ads to your blog. Adsense is a good one to start with, but there are plenty of alternatives. You can also take on a paid review ad from a website like Pay per Post or something similar, where you write a review of a product and post it on your blog and the site will pay you.

Affiliate marketing is another way to earn through blogging. Recommending a product and then offering your own affiliate link for buying it or signing up for a service is a good way to monetize your blog.

You could also try selling your own products. These could be real life products that need to be shipped, print on demand products like from CafePress or Printfection, or information products like e-books. The idea is to turn blogging into a profitable venture.

Even after you start selling on your blogging site, remember to continue offering good solid information on your topic.

5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a blog

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

Working, or at least attempting to.

So far this week, I haven’t gotten much on my To Do list done. My son has been home sick and, of course, there’s this 3 month old bundle of baby that hasn’t went anywhere yet. So between making breakfast and lunch, nursing, perfecting the great “vacant mom stare” (the look I give Dan when I want to dump the baby on his lap for 5 glorious minutes of child-free bathroom time), and watching old Spongebob Episodes, I can’t say I’ve made much progress.

I’m totally psyched that my daughter is still asleep now while I fix my mailing list script issues. I’ve had a pretty frustrating time so far, but I gotta say that even though the script itself is a pain in the ASCII, the script’s developer is super helpful and patient.

I also want to note that I am a little ADD-ish about the theme of this blog, so you may see the layout change six to twelve times in one day. I’ll eventually decide on just one theme and get all of the links (finally) up and running… and I plan on doing this within the next few years, so I thankyouverymuch for your patience.

When outsourcing goes wrong…

What a week!

Ever since I started working online, I’ve always tried to be cautious when selecting people to work with for online projects, mainly because of the high rate of disappearing acts that so easily happens online. So I guess I shouldn’t be totally shocked when a few of the workers I’ve hired to outsource some of my more mundane work have decided to magically disappear upon deadline.

What I am surprised at, though, is that FOUR out of FOUR outsourcers decided to take off at once! Holy hell! Not only is the work I was supposed to have completed by the end of October totally pushed till December (if doing it on my own), but now I’m out a ton of money. I’ve filed a Paypal dispute with one of the outsourcers and hopefully I’ll see a small portion of that $200 payment back someday (but I’m not holding my breath). One of the writers refunded me earlier today with a note of apology, saying that he felt bad but he couldn’t complete the project on time.

As for the other two outsourcers, I’m giving one woman the benefit of the doubt because she is admittedly swamped with work. The other guy I’ve worked with successfully before, and I hate to think he just poofed and vanished because he was one of the best people I’ve used ever. (Not to mention it was a $300 project that I had him running with!)

So lesson learned: don’t outsource all of your work all at once. I totally jumped the gun and figured I’d lessen my workload by 70% this month. Bad idea! I should have outsourced one thing at a time.

Another craptastic work event happening this week is the “breaking” of my mailing list script. I’ve used the same script to host all of my mailing lists for YEARS, without ever running into a problem. All of a sudden, the entire thing decides to go haywire and now I can’t get any emails out to any of my lists. I had a promo email to send out that would have easily netted me $500 this month, that I’ve had to kiss goodbye. I’ve been chatting with the script developer for the past three days, but so far it’s not looking good. I’m hoping to get this script working again and then quickly switch to AWeber’s service. Hopefully most of my 6000 subscribers will follow me over there.

This week, I don’t plan on getting a whole bunch of work done, but I do want to fix my mailing list script issue, get my lists switched over to AWeber, and then get some of my outsourcers working or at least getting refunded. Wish me luck on that.

Update:

Outsourcer #3 (the woman) has contacted me (after IMing her a few times) saying that things are still going as planned.  I’m not totally convinced, but slightly reassured just by hearing from her.

Outsourcer #1: (the one I’ve filed a Paypal dispute against) still no word, but someone else has contacted me privately about his whereabouts, and I think we will be trying to get something from him together. I’d be happy to just get the project going, but I’m doubting it.

Too much on the work plate

Yesterday a neighbor waved me over and wanted to know if I’m still designing websites. I snorted and gestured to the little demon spawn sitting in her carseat. Meaning, NO, I think it’s safe to say I’m not. He then asked if I might be available to work on a website for his new house-flipping business. I would have said no right then and there if he didn’t throw in “so, you’d charge, around $1000 to $2000, right?”.

I suppose I should have controlled myself a bit. I left things up in the air, but with an admitted hint of promise. Probably a bad move on my part, I know. Here I am, trying to get all of my income streams going completely hands-free, and I almost commit myself to a huge chunk of web design. (My neighbor, you see, is a picky guy, and I can sense all of the re-do’s and alters I’ll have to make.) Maybe if I didn’t have such a needy 3 month old….

I’m thinking of outsourcing the web design project to a fellow designer, just so that it gets done in a reasonable amount of time. If not the entire project, at least a good portion of it. Outsourcing happens a lot in the field of web design, and although I’ve completed just about all of my own projects myself, I think now is a good time to think it over. I can look for someone who can do the job for around $600 or $700, charge my neighbor $1000, and keep the difference for weekly site maintenence fees, hosting fees, and small tweaks that he will undoubtedly want done.

Speaking of outsourcing, I’ve also managed to get a few of my projects worked on by ghostwriters. Mainly the projects that I feel I’d never get to myself. So, hopefully, by the end of October, I’ll have a few more completed projects. Now I can concentrate on getting my new passive business plan outlined on paper (or here on the blog) and get it into action. I’ve been farting around this idea for all of 2007. I really gotta get it done already.

New Websites

I have six new websites to upload and get optimized, hopefully within a week.  I plan on adding five new articles to each site (they already have some PLR and reprint articles for content) and then submit the 30 articles to Associated Content.

I suppose if I hired the articles out (i.e. article writer) at $5 per article ($150), I could make a majority of that back by AC’s payment. Assuming $3 per article, I’d be able to recoup $90 back, so the 30 articles would essentially only cost about $60.  Aside from payment from AC, the site would also provide much needed backlinks and traffic to the new sites.

The topics have decent paying Adsense ads, so that will be another small income stream as well.  I also plan on adding Commission Junction and Clickbank affiliate programs where appropriate.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress.