Stephen Phillips Personal Blog
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2011-02-26

Come On, Blog, Pay for Yourself

I decided to try my hand at my own website, and I moved my WordPress blog to my own personal website hosted by Lunarpages.  I have really liked the service so far, and everything has been pretty easy to setup.

The problem is that I was counting on the website paying for itself.  I need at least $6 – $8 per month for it to pay the hosting fees charged by Lunar pages.  I was reading articles like this that claim that AdSense can easily cover those costs.  My thought was to create ads in a similar format to the GMail interface.  They have small ads on the top and a few text ads on the right.  That interface isn’t too intrusive and sometimes provides interesting ads.

Then, I read this article about Displaced Guy’s experiences.  I like the tip about being active in the community and sharing the love.  I have already found that to be true as far as building traffic on my WordPress blog.  That is how I attribute the 200 – 300 per day traffic to my PSST0101 blog — just commenting on other’s blogs and sharing the love as far as information.

From reading this article, I am begining to learn that technical topics are not the best for making money.  He mentioned the statistic of $2.14 per 1,000 visits.  If that is the case, I am looking at needing about 4,000 visits per month.  That would be about 133 visits a day.  I don’t have more than 2 months of data yet, but I am currently looking at 1300 hits and $8 of revenue.

Then, I read an article from Chase Sagum that addressed the ad blindness of technical readers.  That article suggested that Amazon ads tend to do better with technical readers.  So, I might try that.

Veera Sundar writes another article about technical readers.  I agree with his thoughts regarding placing ads only around the edges.  I really hope I don’t have to place them in the posts because I want it to look professional.  He also talks about good content and page rank.  I need to do some research to see if I can learn what my page rank is.  (I am going to try this plugin.)  Reading a little further, I found a good tip about Adsense Section Targeting.

Next, I stumbled upon an interesting series of discussions relating to Guy Kawasaki, first at Blog Republic.  That article mentions switching from a technical topic, but I want to blog about what I enjoy.  It doesn’t make sense for me to change my topic!  Chris Anderson’s article appears to be one of the big articles in these discussions, and here is the original post that started it all.

Writing for your wealth discusses more about technical readers.  Again, the suggestion is to switch topics, but kind of ruins the fun (which is important to me).  The article does point out the AdWords Keyword Tool, which might be a little helpful.

The I’d Rather Be Writing seemed to experience the same thing that I am seeing.  After only a month, he only earned $8.53.  I thought it was interesting that mentioned Guy Kawasaki making more money off his blog.  Anyway, his take on the solution was to switch from AdSense.  I did click through to John Chow, and he did have some encouraging advice: “don’t quit”.

Finally, since some of the articles suggested trying something other than AdSense, this article was interesting.  The Kontera option looks like it might be a good option.

So, this is a lot of rambling and not many answers here.  Can anyone add anything in the comments?  Any suggestions?  Anyone else had success with technical readers?

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