Over the past couple of years I have been trying to make money with blogging. This has sometimes been a pretty serious effort, sometimes pretty passive. I have blogged about events of the day and hit the keywords pretty heavy, so that many of my posts pop up in Google searches in the top ten. This effort has not made me rich, but it has make me some money with Adsense.
Adsense’s evil twin is Adwords-while Adsense makes you money-sometimes even enough to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, Adwords spends your money. And while the nice thing about Adsense is that it makes you money while you sleep, Adwords spends your money while you sleep. You have pretty good control over how much is spent, but it is a bit like gambling. There is this tick in the back of the mind saying, pay more for that keyword and get more hits and then when you start selling, it will all work out.
Sadly my on again, off again attempts at selling with Affiliate programs continues to show no progress. Adsense I can sort of figure out. Write a post about Watches and ads for Watches show up pretty soon. Bada bing, bada boom. But Affiliate marketing requires that dreaded four letter word-work. You can’t just slap a banner ad here and there and make money with it. Well, at least I haven’t been able to. It seems that you need to write a post and then put a link to whatever your trying to sell in the post. I have read a couple of books and numerous blog post about making money blogging, but I am not retiring to the south of France just yet.
I read one blogger whose goal was to make a hundred dollars a month from Adsense, and I have come pretty close to that the past couple of months. The idea here being, I guess, if you can make a hundred, you can repeat what you did ten times and make a thousand. Then repeat it again until you make as much money as you want blogging. Living on Adsense seems a bit beyond my understanding at the moment.
Buying Traffic should be easy, and if you have unlimited money, it is. I am shocked however, by how many bloggers seem obsessed with ‘buying traffic’ from Entrecard. This is not buying traffic, this buying bloggers looking for your Entrecard button. I like playing around with Entrecard, but it is not real traffic. Adwords can bring a lot of traffic, and it traffic that is looking for something you advertised. The problem is what to do with them once they are here.
