Could You Be A Professional Blogger?

Recently, I pointed out that blogging can be an excellent way for people to start earning with AdSense. It takes no effort at all to get a blog up and running on Blogger and you pretty much start with one ad well blended at the top of the page.

But there’s a difference between starting with AdSense and making a good income from it, and that’s really the goal, right? I’m sure that most bloggers who put ads on their sites would really like to see their entries making so much money that they can kick the day job and make their living as a professional blogger. They’d be getting paid to talk about their favorite topics, and what could be better than that?

There are some people online who do exactly that. But you’ve got to do a lot more than put one ad at the top of your Blogger site -- however well-blended it might be -- to become a professional blogger.

First, most professional bloggers run more than one blog. They often run several. They also talk about a lot more than their families and their points of view. They give valuable information that people can use in their own lives or their businesses, and best of all, they become the center of a community in which other people swap tips and ideas. So if they’re travel agents, they can write blogs that reveal how to find bargains. If they’re accountants, they can warn about hidden tax liabilities.

That’s valuable content aimed at a market that wants it.

And then there are the ads.

You could tell readers how to choose next week’s winning lottery numbers but if you don’t have ad units in the best places on the page and showing the sorts of ads your users will want to click, you won’t get a penny from the winnings. You’ll have to know how to make sure AdSense is serving the ads you want to receive. You’ll have to know how to make those ads stand out while still blending in. And you’ll have to know how to follow your stats so that you can leap on a drop in earnings as soon as it happens.

It’s a combination of creating valuable content, smart AdSense strategy and a good knowledge of Internet marketing too. Just get that -- and it’s really not too hard -- and you can be a professional blogger too.

Great Content - The Secret Of High AdSense Revenues

by Joel Comm

There are two ways to think about AdSense: you can think of it as a way to use your website to make money; and you can think of it as a way to make money with a website.

What's the difference?

The difference is in the content. In the first case, you already have a website and you simply put AdSense on the page to turn it into cash. You might change the content a little to influence the ads and you could make sure that you include the best keywords to bring you the highest revenues. You should certainly play with the way the ads look on the page to make them attractive and unobtrusive - and there's a huge range of different strategies you can use to do that.

Ultimately though, the content is there already. You're just using AdSense to turn the content you're going to create anyway into money - and you're going to use AdSense secrets to make those revenues as high as possible.

But lots of people also want to build a website from scratch for the sole purpose of cashing in on all the money available through AdSense. There's nothing wrong with that - provided the content is high quality.

This is crucial. Google doesn't take kindly to sites packed with keywords and all sorts of other garbage just to provide a space to put up an AdSense unit. There's a good chance they won't approve the site, and little chance, even if they did, that you'd get any click-throughs.

But that doesn't mean you have to really bust a gut to create the sort of website that brings you a small fortune in AdSense revenues. In my book, Google AdSense Secrets, I discuss in detail a number of different methods that you can use to create great content quickly and easily. Some of these methods cost a little money; some are completely free and still give you outstanding content. Whichever method you use though the important to remember is that your site has to have real content that people will genuinely enjoy reading. There's no point in trying to cut corners in creating content - and absolutely no revenue to gain.

Is It Time To Grow Your Publishing Business?

As an AdSense publisher, you're going to be generating revenue in two different ways. On the one hand, you'll be looking to maximize your CTR by increasing your traffic and blending your ads. On the other hand, you’re going to be writing like the blazes to fill your site with valuable content.

Both of those elements can require a lot of work, and time spent marketing your site is time not spent adding the quality content that keeps users coming back and clicking on your ads.

When you've been around for a while and built up a good network of sites, there's a good chance that you're going to find regular content writing a struggle. And even if you don't find it a struggle, you'll find adding new sites a struggle.

Maybe that's not a problem for you. If you're happy to put up just one or two sites covering your favorite topics and use AdSense to make money writing about them, that's fine. But if you're serious about building a good-sized online publishing business, then at some point, you're going to have to call in professional writing help.

There are a few things you have to bear in mind when you do that.

First, in general, it's likely that you're going to have a few key sites with which you're personally identified. You'll probably want to keep writing for those yourself. That will help you to keep your users loyal and let you stay in touch with your users' biggest concerns. It should also be a lot of fun!

But if you're expanding into new areas in which you have only slight expertise -- if you have a website about digital cameras, for example, and you want to put up pages to capture ads for photo printers -- there's nothing wrong with asking someone else to help you out with the writing on those topics. Provided the pages on which you're placing the content earn you more in ad revenues than you're paying the writer, it can be a great way to expand your capabilities. You'll soon find that you're growing a real online publishing business and earning much more than you could possibly make alone.

A little bit of help at the right time and in the right places can be the difference between a one-man band and a successful large-scale publishing operation. Are you ready to step up?