If you want to know more about WordPress and the tech side of blogging, please check out my Blogspinner blog, which I’m casually updating again. If you’re interested in the art of writing (whether blogging, authoring, technical writing, etc.) and learning/ knowledge, stay tuned here on this blog, as it’s one of the topics I’ll be adding.

You’ll notice this theme is more ad-heavy than the last one. I’ve debated this with myself for over a year, talked to numerous other bloggers and read what yet more bloggers have to say on the matter. What I’ve decided is that since I am easing out of online consulting side and back into real life (hopefully soon and hopefully in the USA), I shouldn’t feel bad about try to make a living from my primary website. My plan to make up for this is go back to writing here more frequently like I’ve done in the past, as well to hopefully add screencasts and soon start giving away free ebooks. In other words, to offer quality information in hopes that you, the reader, won’t mind the ads too much.

Topicwise, I’ve decided to broaden back to what I’ve had in the past, not just focus on visual media. So for the meantime, I’ll be covering blogging/ writing, freelancing, productivity, mind mapping, web tech, learning + knowledge, visual media, social media, link building, and other relevant topics. Because I’m a hardcore “generalist,” my intent is to cover several aspects about building a presence online and promoting yourself, as well as the means and methods of producing text and visual content and getting your work done.

Currently I’m writing weekly at FreelanceSwitch and FreelanceFolder, and daily at Performancing, as well as building up a new film site (more on that later). The list below is reverse chronological and covers back to late January (after I’d stopped posting to this site).

1. FreelanceSwitch – How to Save: A Short Guide for Freelancers. This article covers why it’s so important for freelancers to save, and the types of saving to consider.
2. FreelanceFolder – Jump-Starting Freelancing Productivity: Working Smarter. Do you find yourself working long hours at home? Maybe you’re spending too much time on each project. Why not try working smarter by spending less time on something, and taking breaks or working on something else in between.
3. Performancing – How to Podcast Using SplashCast or YouTube. Add some still images to your audio podcast.
4. Performancing – A Beginner’s Podcasting Guide.
5. Performancing – Why I Love WordPress.
6. Performancing – 9 Podcasting Tips.
7. Performancing – Niche Monitoring: A Simple River of News Using Embedded Timelines.
8. Performancing – Better Web Information Presentation: 10 Timeline Tools.
9. Performancing – WordPress Hacks: Moving a Static HTML Site to WordPress.
10. Performancing – Why I Hate WordPress 2.5.
11. Performancing – WordPress Hacks: Using Custom Fields to Auto-Embed YouTube Videos.
12. Performancing – What’s Wrong With the Blogosphere?
13. Performancing – Can Other Bloggers Get Book Deals?
14. Performancing – Research Tools: From River of News to Techmeme Clone – Part 3.
15. Performancing – Jazz Up Your Site: 28 Ways to Use WordPress Custom Fields.
16. Performancing – WordPress Hacks: Techmeme River of News Clone – Part 2.
17. Performancing – WordPress Hacks: Build a Techmeme River of News Clone – Part 1.
18. Performancing – WordPress Hacks: Upgrading Versions.
19. Performancing – WordPress Hacks: Build a Photo or Movie Poster Gallery.
20. Performancing – Problogging Tips: The Value and Structure of Comprehensive Content.
21. Performancing – WordPress Hacks: Build a Web Directory.
22. Performancing – Practical Blogging Tips: Finding Information For Resource Articles.
23. Performancing – WordPress Hacks: Adding TinyMCE Editor to the Prologue Theme. —- buggy
24. Performancing – 11 Skills That a Freelance Blogger Should Have.
25. Performancing – Practical Blogging Tips: Build Comprehensive Content.
26. Performancing – Problogging Tips: Get Smart, Leverage Your Research.
27. Performancing – Problogging Tips: Follow a Budget.
28. Performancing – Should You Blog For Yourself or Freelance?
29. Performancing – 48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress.
30. Performancing – A Short Guide to Writing 4+ Large Resource Articles Each Month.
31. Performancing – Monitoring Multiple Niches With a Personal Dashboard: Joining a Niche Conversation, Pt 7.
32. Performancing – Advanced Feed Mashup: Yahoo Pipes By Example, Pt 2.
33. Performancing – Monitoring Multiple Niches With a Personal Dashboard: Joining a Niche Conversation, Pt 6.
34. Performancing – 8 Tips For Building Multiple Niches: Joining a Niche Conversation, Pt 5.
35. Performancing – Yahoo Pipes By Example, Part 1: Mashing Up Multiple Feeds.
36. Performancing – Yahoo Pipes By Example: Basic Functionality.
37. Performancing – 5 More Tips on Increasing Blogging Productivity.
38. Performancing – Why Should Bloggers Use Yahoo Pipes?
39. Performancing – Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 4: Making Your Blog Stand Out.
40. Performancing – Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 3: Don’t Be Afraid to Edit Archived Blog Posts.
41. Performancing – New Opportunity For Tech-Savvy Bloggers: Remote Digital Coaching.
42. Performancing – Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 2: Idea Generating for Bloggers.
43. Performancing – Joining a Niche Conversation, Part 1: Determining the Top Blogs in Your Niche.

Not many traditional writers manage that (other than copywriters and maybe technical writers). However, some tech bloggers reputedly make $3-5K/mth as a full-timer. Unless you score a full-time gig at a top blog already earning revenue, you have only two ways to earn that kind of money from pure blogging.

Problogging

One is to have your own blog that makes $5K/mth in advertising. But how long is that going to take, if ever? Most bloggers will not earn that kind of money from their blog – at least not yet.

The other way is to be a blogger for hire. But can you make $5000/mth being paid by the post as a freelancer? I’ve been told that the going rate for a relatively experienced blogger is $20-30/post. Do you know anyone getting that kind of rate? Are you at that level? Other estimates suggest that bloggers get between $5-75 for blog posts and feature articles. That does not include linkbaiting, which can pay more if you have the skills, the clients, and the network to promote the content.

Back to the for-hire option. Let’s use $25 for a quick calculation, but let’s work backwards. If you want to earn $5000/mth with 20 days of work (so that you’re not slaving 7 days per week), then you need to earn $250/day.

At $25/post, if you can get it, you would have to write 10 posts per day of at least 400 words each, maybe more.

Believe me, you simply cannot keep up such a pace. I used to write up to 25 posts/day in 2006, but it was gruelling, and my quality slipped. You have to factor in research, revisions, distractions, low-productivity and low-creativity days and personal tasks. And even then, you really have to know your topic. If you split up those 10 posts/day into 2-3 different topics, you then need to be on top of them. That’s a lot of research.

A Safer Approach

So how then can you earn $5K/mth online? This is merely my advice, but I suggest a mix of strategies:

1. Invest in yourself: build your brand. While you’re still building up your client list, build your own blogs. Focus on no more than two or three. One should be your personal but professional blog – possibly using your name – which highlights your skills and topics of interest. Prove your authority in them by writing at least once per week.

2. Build your money blog. Have a niche blog in a topic that interests you and work on monetizing it. This blog will take time, but could earn you a nice side income in a year or three.
3. Hire yourself out. Check for writing/ blogging gigs at Performancing Jobs, Problogger Jobs, Freelance Writing Gigs, or wherever else you prefer to frequent.
4. Be a guest writer. Build up your profile (and backlinks) by writing guest posts (usually free) for as many high-profile sites as you can manage to find time for. This will be key for the next step.
5. Sell yourself. You should always try for multiple streams of income, not just pure blogging or ad income. As Brian Clark says in his new free Teaching Sells report, you should not rely on earning a living blogging just for Google. Only having AdSense on your “money” blog isn’t enough, nor is blogging for hire. The real money online always has been and probably always will be from teaching something that someone out there wants to learn.
   
   

   If you can build yourself up as an authority on something, this can be the most lucrative facet of your online career. The topic depends on your own skillsets. The format might be ebooks, podcasts, videos, low-circulation e-newsletters, subscription services, CDs/ DVDs, print books, workshops or something else yet to come.

   Read Yaro Starak’s articles The Sales Funnel Explained and Moving the Free Line for some great advice in this regard.

Summary

While there is a concern that small online publishers might bite the dust because of ad blocking, for the present, more blog publishers are paying higher per post rates than in 2006. Some do it because they can, others because they feel they have to. And rates will likely rise.

Some blog publishers are even offering a % of net revenue. You get a low monthly flat rate to tide you over, and you have to take an active, long-term role in a blog or blog network. If you have the time, it can pay off enormously. Some bloggers are earning $4-5K/mth this way. The number of these opportunities might increase over the years. But if you can’t wait to find out,  or can’t afford to invest all your time on the promise of a big return later, the above strategy is my advice.

Blog Action Day and the Environment

I’ve missed out on some important blogosphere events lately. One is Blog Action Day (BAD), where bloggers write about the environment. It’s a very honorable cause about a subject that affects us all: the health of Earth’s ecosystem. But that is not what I’m doing in this post. Not quite.

My favorite BAD post of those I’ve read so far is Brian Clark’s The Butterfly Effect at Copyblogger, and how little changes caused by us can affect the environment. The concept is an application of of Chaos Theory and “strange attractors”.

Brian very succinctly and beautifully covers some concepts that have been dear to me for a long time. I’ve been talking about Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect and Quantum Mechanics since 1989, but most especially in the mid 1990s. My old monthly print magazine, Chaos Review, was an attempt to discuss Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect in a more accessible manner, with a sugar coating of music, film/TV and book reviews thrown in.

Recognizing Your Passion

“Chaos” was not a household word in 1993, and even my good friends and acquaintances laughed at me. As Brian pointed out, the Butterfly Effect concept essentially suggests that small actions upon the environment taken by someone in one locale could have a cumulative or amplified negative impact somewhere else in the world.

This is why I believe that we could be in for some major environmental impacts in the decades to come. I say that from a theoretical math viewpoint, not from a political viewpoint.

But I had a tough time selling this idea to my friends back then. My problem? I made the mistake of discussing it in person, and with people who weren’t really receptive in the first place. That’s something you need to understand fundamentally about blogging: you’re blogging for those who might be interested, not for the readers who think they know everything or don’t care.

While I did write about the Butterfly Effect in my Chaos Review magazine (and other regional papers), one small-circulation monthly rag was not going to make a difference – even though copies of my mag found their way to the USA, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, from Canada.

My missed opportunity was not sticking with the topic, and not recognizing the Internet for what it was: the perfect vehicle for ideas – even supposedly crackpot ones. And the irony was that I’d even been a search engine webmaster and was a web programmer/ consultant. And I still couldn’t see the opportunity, blinded by my emotional reactions and other more personal factors.

Sometimes, the answer is staring you in the face. Nevertheless, by the time I started blogging in 2002, I’d left Chaos Theory behind and gone back to my old study of personal goal achievement, writing about it for my first blog. That didn’t last long because my thought was “who wants to read this stuff online?” My mistake. I’d spent many years helping people set and achieve goals, but missed the opportunity to be an authority online. Look how well Steve Pavlina and others have done with that niche on their blogs.

Realization or Lost Opportunity?

Once again, my big mistake: not recognizing an oportunity with something I was passionate about, and thus not sticking to it.

Are you recognizing a pattern here? Do you suffer from non-stick blogging? Do you flit like a butterfly but not sting like a bee?

I let external influences affect me – other people’s personal reactions. But my passion didn’t dissipate; it went into hiding. And this is something that I very much hope that you do not allow to happen to you.

Out of these lessons, I’ve learned a few things very relevant to blogging:

1. Your friends can disagree with you and you can still be right.
2. Do not let their disagreement put a dent in your passion, even if they’re a good friend. (Unless of course you’re a nut intent on hurting people.)
3. Emotion can blind you to opportunities.
4. Reactions to the same words in print can be drastically different than reaction to those words verbally.
5. If you’re passionate about something, your writing “voice” will reflect it, and those receptive to it will find you.

Conclusion

Those last two points are particularly important. People aren’t always receptive to dense concepts in person. The same information in writing gives them the option to choose time and place. And if you have passion and your “voice” is true, you’ll have supporters – and possibly detractors far nastier than your friends; emotional vampires bent on making others miserable like themselves.

Ignore the vampires; focus on the passion. Share your unique viewpoint on your chosen topic. In a mass of about a billion Internet users, your future supporters will find you and your passion.

Unless of course you tuck your tail, give up your passion, and start yet another blog about X, parroting what everyone is already saying – a blog sin I’ve committed many times.

So would you rather blog about something dear to you or be a copycat blogger? Your passion play is lurking within you. Find it, let it out.

The celebrity gossip niche is super hot. Somewhere online I read that the Lindsay Lohan blogger at b5media earns US$50+K/yr. That implies a massive amount of traffic, and for just a single celebrity.

Approach

Ryan Caldwell’s celebrity blogger job listing (filled) for Celebrity Cowboy states that blogging 15 posts per day about celebrities can really pay off. So if you know your celebrities well, or know how to hunt down information, even start believable rumors, this might be a niche to consider.

Question is, how can you write 15 posts per day. Here’s a secret I discovered over a year ago. Buy yourself a TV capture card – external or internal – and blog while you watch. (Many new computers will have a built-in capture card.)

If you have cable, you can buy a splitter from your fave electronics parts store. Run your coaxial cable into the splitter, then run another length of coax into your TV capture card. Install the software that comes with the card.

Having a large monitor (19″ or more) helps. Run the TV software and your fave blog editor. Type while you watch one of those multitude of celebrity gossip TV shows. Write the content you see on TV in your own words, supplement with photos, and post to your celeblog.

Some elements of celeb blogging

I will tell you straight off that I don’t have a celebrity blog and I’m only speculating here based on what I’ve heard from people who do have them, plus my own general blogging experience.

If you blog while watching TV shows, it’s actually really easy to come up with lots of content every day. You need to learn to type fast with few mistakes, but that comes with practice if you know touch-typing. This works whether you’re celebrity blogging or reality show blogging – both of which can draw big traffic if you’re timely. And big traffic about something very specific can monetize well.

You don’t have to write really long posts, but try to have at least 150 words in each. A few other elements that help:

1. Celeb names.
   Don’t use generic titles without keywords. In this case, your desired keywords are celebrity names. Use them in the article title and first paragraph. A lot of celeb bloggers forget this and wonder why they’re not drawing traffic and monetizing.

2. Pictures.
   I’m not sure exactly what shock performer Marilyn Manson is saying in his song “The Beautiful People” (warning: offensive content), but as a society, we’re obsessed with the “beautiful” people – who as of late do a lot of ugly things in public, like flashing their coochie, driving drunk, and just generally being stupid. And we want to SEE this behavior. We love it. So what’s a celeb blog without pics? However, I have no legit advice for you about obtaining pics. This is an excercise left for you. (You could try Flickr.) But without pics, don’t bother celeb blogging.

3. Juicy details.
   What are you saying about celebs? Anything worthwhile? Normally I wouldn’t suggest this for other blog niches, but rehasing what you see on TV or read in newspapers or the blogosphere is fine. But do try to add some value that readers can’t get elsewhere. Ideas:
   1. Utilize IMDB to get TV and filmography details of some celebs.
   2. Do an indepth of review of every film an actor has ever been in. This could be major linkbait. Then link every actor in each review to their own profiles on your site.
   3. Do the same with musicians. E.g., review every album/CD David Bowie has ever appeared on.
   4. Publish profiles about select celebs, not just gossip.
   5. Apply the concept of Six Degrees of Separation. When you write about someone, mention their degree of connectedness to other celebs you’ve written about.
   6. Draw graph of working relationships between celebs. This extends the six degrees idea into an actual visual.
   7. Is a celeb part of a Hollywood dynasty? Write about their blood relations. This used to be common in print mags, but I don’t see it a lot with blogs.
   8. Dig out unknown facts. Did you know that President Bush likes to go for bike rides? He had one today in Quebec, Canada, while meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. But it wasn’t Harper that accompanied him.
4. Crystal ball/ foresight.
   Found out about a relative unknown actor, singer, musician, athlete? Think they’re going to go big? Write about them now, to build search engine authority for them on your blog. Mention everything you can, shows they’re in, events, tours, signings.

5. Timeliness.
   A new study suggests that offline media channels can drive search queries. So if you’re capable of watching TV and blogging simultaneously, you have a big opportunity. But you have to be timely. You can’t blog tomorrow morning about something on the news at 5 pm today. Blog it immediately, even if you only type 200 words. Add a few external links, and if you’ve written a related article already, link to that. (Deep linking is very important for building authority.)

My concluding advice: be unique with your new celebrity blog and do something not already being done. Give readers what they want, and you can earn a living online.

1. Almanacs,
2. Business and Legal Matters,
3. Citation Styles, Dictionaries,
4. English Language Skills,
5. Genres, News Digests,
6. News Media Resources,
7. Organization,
8. Professional Organizations,
9. Rhetoric,
10. Toolboxes,
11. Writing Services,
12. Writing Skills, and
13. Writing Software.

There are a lot of sites on this list that I use happily everyday, and of course loads that I’ve never heard of. With this many items, I’m assuming that if there’s a writing resource you need, it’s likely on this list.

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Why read them? Well, there are several reasons, inferred by the topics mentioned above. However, they are also examples of “mini” and “medium” sized linkbait articles. Linkbait is one element of link building, as is deep linking. In hindsight, the titles are not necessarily the best, and some are more consistent than others, but if you want a short course on link building and how to write linkbait, study these articles. I apply many of the same techniques as for bigger linkbait articles that have produced as many as 80,000 pageviews in less than a week (thanks to social media promotion).

1. 11 Pros and Cons of Promoting Your Business Online. Doesn’t matter if your business is offline or online. You can promote it online. Here’s the good and bad of online promo.

2. 5 Simple Steps to Building a Company, Identity and Brand. A brief look at building your business brand.
3. 5 Things Not to Do on Your Business Blog. The title says it all.
4. 7 Stages of Setting Up a Business Weblog. A business weblog goes through several stages, from idea to maintenance mode.
5. Improve Your Site’s Look With 15 Easy Tips. Here are some relatively easy tweaks to improve the look of your website or blog.
6. Better Websites: 10 Article Research Sources. Stuck for what to write about? Here are ten idea sources I use regularly.
7. Reasons to Build a Business Online. If you’re thinking about running an online business, here are reasons why you might want to.
8. Worthwhile Free Applications For Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs. Bootstrappers fundamental skill is leveraging minimal startup capital into successful revenue. Here are twelve software applications to help you along your way.
9. Essential Skills For Entrepreneurs. Whether you’re bootstrapping or not, you need certain skills for entrepreneurial success. Here are six of them.
10. Seven Characteristics of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs. In addition to having certain skills, successful entrepreneurs also bear specific characteristics. Here are seven.
11. Being an Expert Online Entrepreneur. Some people say that to be an expert at something, it takes 10,000 hours of involvement and learning. But in the online world, that’s a lifetime. How do you establish yourself as an expert in an online endeavor?
12. 5 Ways To Increase Your Wealth. You’ll know most of these ways to increase wealth, but there may be someone out there who doesn’t. Or maybe you just need a refresher.
13. 5 Reasons To Get Out Of Debt Fast. Besides the obvious, here reasons to get out of debt.
14. Nomadic Entrepreneurs? Even today’s online entrepreneurs travel, whether for pleasure or business. Some people are even alternating work with extended vacations: work a few months, travel a few months, rinse and repeat. Despite the benefits and freedom of such a lifestyle, here are a few things to be aware of.
15. Case Study: Bootstrapping an Online Information Business. There are many legitimate online professions. One such is an information business, which can be bootstrapped from little or no capital using free or inexpensive software.
16. 21 Ways to Promote Your Startup Business. Need to promote your new business? Here are 21 new media and old media ways that you can do so with little or no capital.
17. Benefits and Hazards of Working from Home. Working from home, whether for a salaried job, for freelancing or for a business startup has pros and cons.
18. New Media Ways To Raise Capital. Need cash for a startup? The Internet has become a “great leveller”, providing some enjoyable ways to earn money part- or full-time. Here are seven ways to raise cash for your grand idea.
19. How Entrepreneurs Brainstorm. A brief review of seven options for brainstorming.
20. Should Your Business Website Have a Blog? Not all businesses with a website also need a weblog. Here are some issues to consider.
21. Moving a Business Online. So you have a bricks and mortar business and you feel you might replace or supplement it with an online ecommerce site. Here are a few suggestions to ease the transition.
22. 7 Motivations to Start Your Own Business. You’re thinking of starting your own business but you’re not sure if it’s the right thing to do. Here are seven things that motivate others to start a business.
23. 20 Ways to Finance Your Business Startup. Of course, just deciding to start a business isn’t enough. You have to finance the operation, even if you have to bootstrap. Here are a number of ways to come up with financing, some of which you may not have considered.
24. Optimize Your Work-at-Home Time With 22 Simple Schedule Tweaks. If you’re working from home, there might be a lot of distractions. Here are some productivity tips, a few of which are unusual.

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The rule is simple: the more concepts you introduce in a blog post, the more it behooves you to add some visual structure. I have had a lot of experience in the print medium, including newspapers, magazines, and a book, and spent many years researching the elements of typesetting. Many of the ideas are not being carried over to the online world but really should be. Research and personal experience both seem to show that we have less patience for longer articles online than in print. To that end, here are some suggestions for making your blogging more readable.

1. Use bullets.
   Titles offering “X Reasons” or “X Ways”, etc., should have a numbered bullet list. it’s courtesy and helps readers find each item. It also says you care enough about your readers to actually follow through. Even if you simply forgot or were distracted, etc., readers will likely think you’re just too lazy to bother.

2. Deliver on your promises.
   If your article is called “5 Ways To Do Something Or Other”, you had better provide those ways, and clearly. Some bloggers only talk about the “ways” but don’t clearly list any of them. Imagine how few readers will come back again after you do that. You are not delivering what your title promised. Sometimes, all this requires is bolding the appropriate text for each item, even if you do not use a bullet list.

3. Write articles, not just blog posts.
   Just offering blog post summaries of something someone else wrote will not get you regular readers. Web Usability and Design expert Jakob Nielsen of Nielsen Norman Group suggests business websites at the least write indepth articles, not blog posts. While I disagree with him that blog posts have no value, whether summaries or short articles, I do agree that you need original and indepth articles as well, especially if you are running a blog promoting your business.

4. Use headings for articles/ longer posts.
   In HTML, there are hx heading tags from h1 and up to, I believe, h9. Try using h2, h3 or h4 headings to partition longer articles. What you use will depend on your blog theme’s CSS code. For example, on this site, I’ve tweaked my CSS code to display a full-width underline under each h3 heading. It gives an article a bit of visual breathing room, making content less dense-looking. Readers appreciate this, whether consciously or not. On other sites I write for, where I cannot access the templates, I may use h2 instead of h3 because of the way CSS is defined. If you don’t feel like tweaking CSS code, try each of h2-h4 and determine which one is most visually appealing. If that doesn’t work, try bolding your headings. [I'll try to post a brief screencast in the near future on how to tweak your CSS to customize headings.]

5. Make your writing accessible.
   Accessible blog writing entails not just spelling and grammar, but visual factors as well.
   • Is there enough “white space” in your articles? Tweak your CSS to provide enough vertical “leading” space between lines of text and paragraph blocks. If you’ve never written for print, this may be a new concept to you. It’s probably also the reason why so many younger bloggers think it’s okay to use “fluid” blog themes. It’s really not. Not if you want to offer longer articles. The human eye can only easily take in about 4-5 inches of text in width. Beyond that, and you start forcing head movement, causing neck stress and eye fatigue. Typesetters for print are trained in such things. In the blogosphere, your blog platform and theme together are your typesetter, and unfortunately, they sometimes fall short.

   • Do you use bullet lists instead of big blocks (where appropriate)? You can substitute standard circular bullets with a simple custom icon, if you prefer.
   • What about adding visual content such as images, diagrams, charts, and videos? Don’t discount the value of eye candy. We humans are very visual creatures, and adding a suitable though not necessarily complicated diagram, often helps drive home the point. Memory experts say that concepts are remembered more efficiently by either associating music and visual elements simultaneously. Imagine reading a very long article in print with no visual components. Do you think you’d remember everything? Maybe, maybe not.
   • Vary sentence and paragraph length. This offers both visual variety and allows readers to absorb concepts more efficiently.
   • Make sure your screen font isn’t too small, and that the font color contrasts well against the background. There are older eyes out there and while you may want to stick to Curt Cobain’s comment about not trusting anyone over thirty, you’ll be there someday, if you’re not already.
   • Write like you speak. It’s okay to introduce uncommon words, but if you start sounding academic in every sentence, probably only academic types will read you, if that.
6. Link out.
   I am firmly of the blogging school of thought that linking out to other sites is ultimately a good thing. My feeling is that it says you trust your visitors enough to decide whether or not to come back to you for more great information and become regular readers. In a nutshell, it offers them either a different opinion or supplementary information. If they had to find those references on their own, they may not have bothered because there may be thousands or millions of false results to wade through in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You’ve helped them by filtering information. (This is why I disagree with Jakob Nielsen that short blog posts can’t have value. You can offer much value this way.) What’s more, if you are linking to relevant pages on “quality neighborhoods” (i.e., high authority websites/ weblogs), some search engines will reward your page with a higher authority at some point in time.

7. Link in.
   Deep-linking should be a crucial part of your blogging strategy. If you are not linking back to at least two relevant posts in your own archives, in each new post you write, you need to change that ASAP. You provide an opportunity for newer visitors to find further relevant content, and search engines reward your site for doing this. (I’m simplifying; there are other factors such as using suitable anchor text, which I’ll get into in a later post.)

By “following through” and adding a bit of structure to your blog posts, you’ll find that you do not need to write indepth articles all the time. You make the most of your content, offering readers an easy way to absorb the concepts you put forth. Not doing so exhibits laziness, no matter what your “real” reason may be, and turns off readers whether they realize it consciously or not.

Thoughts? Agree? Disagree? Do you have any other suggestions?

Over at Bootstrapper, I have the first of several online business case studies: Bootstrapping an online information business. In that post, I detail how you can set up a video how-to site with little capital – but more from a business perspective, not so much a technical perspective. However, I do list numerous tools you’ll probably need – many of which are free, and others you can purchase when revenue starts to come in. There’s also a reference to Evan Margolin, a dance teacher in San Francisco whose SalsaBootCamp video site membership went up from $9 to $37/month and still pulls in $20,000/m for him. Not bad. Now, if you’re looking for a comfortable living, you need to find something you can present in how-to video and/or article format and then find the right buyers. And you can do it without spending a lot upfront, slowly increasing your toolset as funds allow.

The Potential

In the case of Margolin, he has just over 500 subscribers. Let’s look at some other examples. A number of marketing studies sites offer membership that ranges from $37 and up per month. One, I think, is about $500/yr. Imagine, if you could find just 100 members, that’s $50,000 per year. Several SEO sites offer premium content memberships, one of which is about $39/month. A couple of SEO sites offer access to either private forums or to tools/ scripts at $100/m. Just 50 members generates $5,000/month. However, some of these sites have 100-300 members.

Now, maybe those are out of your skill range, so let’s look at more examples. I’ve come across a few sites that for $97/mth offer access to hundreds of limited-edition, original articles that you can use in any fashion you want. Each release allows only, say, 200 members. If they’re actually selling out membership to the point where they’re offering new phases, then they’re making at least $97 x 200 = $19,400/m. If they’re then selling another round of 200 memberships, well, do the math.

So if you are a skilled writer that can cover a number of topics well, with proper research, and you work fast, you could presumably set up a similar service. You could partner up with other writers, to cover a range of topics. But maybe you want to keep the effort down to keep the quality up, limit the number of memberships and charge $49/month. If your articles are good and cover the topical demands out there, then you can probably find buyers.

However, this still doesn’t address the average person who wants to earn a living online. That brings us back to the how-to. If you can explain how to do something, either in text or video format – preferably the latter, with a bit of text – you can probably find buyers. And if there is enough interest and you can keep producing text and/or video content, you might even gain a few subscribers. If you only want to produce one-time content, then you might consider a single e-book or video set.

Revenue Streams

Or you could mix up your revenue streams:

1. Blog for yourself – earn advertising and affiliate revenue.
2. Blog for others – earn either a flat per post rate or a percentage of their monthly revenues.
3. Write reviews – earn a flat fee per review.
4. Build and flip sites (websites or weblogs).
5. Buy an income-earning site.
6. Buy/ register, hold, and flip domains.
7. Offer free teaser reports as an enticement to visitors to purchase an ebook.
8. Offer free teaser videos for your how-to series.
9. Offer access to tools, reports or reusable content on a monthly subscriber basis.
10. Offer services on a project or monthly retainer basis.

The beauty of working online, besides the obvious, is that you can use tools like PayPal or Google Checkout to handle the payment processing. The integration is relatively easy and allows you to focus on the content or services.

Got a skill or service that can be offered online but not sure how to do that? Feel free to drop me a comment here or use the contact form. With your permission, I’ll try to do a no-cost case study on these pages. If not, then my reponse time increases. I may not always have answers, but I will respond to you as promptly as time permits.