Well this post aims at making you understand the benefits of becoming a professional blogger or well a serious blogger. I blogged for more than a year and was an expert at maintaining a mediocre blog and to say the truth it was more of a liability than a blog, a blog where I coildn’t solve the doubts of someone who approached me for help or even earned anything. I was investing a lot of time in useless activities notwithstanding running a mediocre blog like checking stats 16 – 20 times per hour(yes I did that), opening Gmail over 40-45 times day waiting for something to happen. But I did not know what I exactly I was hoping for to happen. In the mean time I was making a lot of pennies following the advice of other penny seekers. when I look at my activities and the activities of pro bloggers who were earning thousands of dollars each month the nature of the job was pretty much the same in both cases but their work made them rich and my work made me desperate for results. Below I’ll explain my fiascos one by one.
Making money with youtube
Or so I thought. I had obeyed the strategies of people who were making thousands of dollars each month through YouTube and applied them and successfully got my account banned. So what did I do? The method is called the youtube + adf.ly method. Steal the newly released music videos of popular artists, upload them on youtube and in the description section add their download links shortened with adf.ly. For those who don’t know what adf.ly is it is a site which pays you extremely low amounts when someone clicks your links. But if lot of people click your links then you all the pennies add up and you get something. Whenever someone clicks the adf.ly shortened links they are led to an advertisemant for 5 seconds.
For one thing Youtube deleted those videos as soon as I uploaded them and secondly when I copied others who were only uploading the audio with a static image nobody gave my videos a second a look. Next I uploaded parts of newly released movies and gave links to the full movie in the description. The links led to a blogspot blog with an adf.ly entry script which means that anyone who clicked on those links had to view a 5 second duration advertisement. For a while the idea worked , my videos got 1000 views per day. But I realised that people interested in the video may not be not necessarily interested in the links in description. For every thousand views I got a hundred clicks. Then one morning I get an email form youtube saying that my video was removed for copyright infringement and my account could be banned. I uploaded a different video from another movie this time and my account was banned. Luckily I had the horse sense of not using my main account for this purpose. I had made a penny!
So you might be thinking what’s the similarity story. There’s a blogger who makes around $30000 per month from his network of blogs and I happened to go to his youtube channel by mistake. I saw one of his older videos about why he moved from hostgator to knownhost. It had only 86 views and then I had a glance at many of his videos and none of them had more than 300 views. But it was the time when I was thinking of buying a hosting for this blog and was thinking of hostgator as my option. But then I saw the obvious disadvantage with hostgator and decided to go for knownhost later when my blog expands. I then would buy the hosting from his affiliate link. Got any ideas???? One video 86 views and his profit lets say is $65. In my case it was one video around 3000 views in 3 days and a banned account with earnings $.04.
Lots of other internet marketers too upload videos of themselves talking about SEO, hosing and things like that and provide their affiliate links in the description. While I am not sure that they get a hell lot of views like I did but they are getting the right kind of traffic targeted traffic, the kind of traffic which makes sales. YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and has much less competition than what we have on Google.
While I made pennies he and many others were making thousands of dollars. This made me realise where I was going wrong. Years back in school we had a subject called Moral Science where we read the stories of Abraham Lincoln, Hellen Keller(who went out to the woods with her friend blessed with perfect eyes, ears and mouth but learnt more about it than her), Mahatma Gandhi and many others and then I read a quote which changed my life. It’s as follows-“ You have exactly the same 24 hours each day that Hellen Keller, Lincoln and Mother Teresa had”. I wasn’t now going to steal other’s videos for making pennies anymore.
Displaying ad units in each post
In order to get more referrals for the paid to click programs(another efficient penny maker) I was part of I used to display ad units of those programs in every post. It served me two advantages first thing was that a great part of my traffic came through mobile and those guys could neither see the whole site or advertisements therein but my strategy made it sure that everyone saw the ad and secondly whenever people have seen an advertisement for too long they finally respond to it. I was shocked to find out that this same strategy is being adopted by John Chow on his blog. He advertises binary trading banners which have a huge referral payout. Well I earn 10% if my referrals decide to make some money on the ptc sites advertised. Not many of then even login to the site and of the 2% who login leave the site within a few clicks. Well I’ll not blame them.
There are two things which I learnt from this experience one is that one can make money from ptc sites if you are ready to spend more money than you earn from it to your data provider and spend upto 6 hours per day clicking ads. The second thing I learnt is that I cannot advertise ptc sites on a blog unrelated to it. People inexperienced with ptc sites rarely stay with it long enough. Targeted traffic is what you should look for. And one more thing is that you advertise sites which pay you money for the referrals alone.