I guess I went through the normal phases of someone starting off online:
Start a Free Blog
This is still where I’d tell a lot of people to start: its great fun, its easy to get started especially on blogger and its – well free! My first blog is basically an online diary which changes topic as I change direction (about once every 6 months on average). To be fair I didn’t start the blog to make money – which is lucky – because I didn’t make any! The only people who read it were friends and they didn’t want to buy an E-Book on how to make money online!
Build my Dream Website
This one took me months – admittedly I was working full-time. I bought Dreamweaver, developed it all from scratch. It has fantastic content but again it didn’t make me any money. It taught me a bit of html and I had fun writing down a lot of information I’d had in my head for years but at the end it makes me : oh on a good month maybe $1! Well did until I took the ads off – more on that later!
Discovered HubPages
Found an revenue sharing site where the ads on my “hub” articles could make me money! I found HubPages from a post on a forum but in fact there are number of these sites. What I thought at the time was it was great being able to write on a topic without having to commit to an entire blog. What I soon discovered though was that, unlike on my own blog where I never got a comment on HubPages I started to get comments and feedback! I even made money writing on their “flagship program”. My writing improved: I’m proud of most of my content on HubPages but again although they’ve earned me more than my own sites, the hourly rate is still nowhere near $1!
In retrospect though HubPages has been valuable for me:
- Its given my page rank (PR) on both my profile and most of my older hubs. Google loves HubPages: the site has a high standards and relatively little spam, this means that pages on HubPages not only rank high on Google searches but also acknowledges pages with good PR.
- I met a group of people who not only improved my writing but also seemed to be using HubPages for other reasons that I was: which was basically to write on what I wanted. These people were using HubPages to gain authority for their “money making sites” – which didn’t sound anything like the sites I had!
2 replies on “Great content will make you money NOT!”
You’re right, good content alone won’t make you money. Good content and a steady stream of visitors will, though. I’m beginning to see that as I add more and more content to my sites, visitorship has increase, and so has my adsense revenue.
Now, if I could only get somebody to buy something from some of my other affiliates! That’s my next project.
Visitors is the key without a doubt: but its hard to get them and even harder to make money out of them!