Last December I set out a goal of making at least 2000 dollars from blogging in next 3 months (first 3 months of new year). I did reach my goal! Many where asking how I did it. So here is a follow up. Concise, but I feel it is sufficient for a start. If you need more information, do not hesitate to ask!

Choose a niche

I chose 4: Nokia, Apple, Gadgets, and Asus eee PC. For the sake of experiment I purposely chose niches that have different popularity and . Set up a blog/website for each one of them. Tell you honestly I personally have no particular interest in any of these I am not an expert in any of these areas, and I do not have anything special to say. Actually I never even owned Nokia phone or Eee PC, but who cares.

Find right content

Check what is hot in the niche and blog about it. Make sure to have at least 2-3 core posts, longer and more extended entries full of meaning and key words. These will be the top attractors from the search engines and also posts that others will want to refer to. I have 2 posts on Nokia blog about ICQ-agents for cell-phones. Nowadays they alone drive several thousand visitors every day.

Place your ads wisely

I clumped my ads all other the sites, but chose the colors wisely, so ads do not annoy visitors too much, yet they are visible and “attractive”. I experimented with placings and colors for a long time, changing something once a week or one a month. All my blogs have same placing, however same blocks work better on some sites and worse on others.

Wait

It took a while until Nokia blog took off. From 150 visitors a day to 1500 several months later, and to 5000 just a couple days ago (after over a year of setting up the blog). Do not aim for high numbers though. My other blogs have much less visitors. Apple and Gadgets each enjoy only about 200 visitors a day (this figure changed very little since I started the blog also about a year ago). Asus Eee PC is doing better, with about 800-1000 visitors. One thing I learned is that higher numbers of visitors does not mean higher income. Sometimes I could get 10 dollars from Apple with its 200 visitors and just a few clicks, and could not break through 5 USD per day barrier with Nokia and its 1500 crowd. Shuffling ads around a little bit helped a lot.

AdSense is not the key

One of my secrets is that I do not rely on Google ads alone. Basically for the past year Google was a poor source of income for me. One of the reasons is that all my sites are in Russian, and Google is not the most popular service in this part of the world.  Because of this I used the local PPC service, offered by main Russian SE, Yandex. Check to see what alternatives are around, especially if you do not blog in English.

Look around

Pay attention to other blogs. See what they are doing to make your blogs look better and read better. Do not hesitate to make change. Aim for satisfaction. If you feel happy with your blog, let it be for a while. And see what happens. Often time is a best judge.

Thats basically it. Hope it helps! Questions and comments are more than welcomed!

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After failing to reach my 1000 dollars in first 6 months of blogging milestone, I am not discouraged. Rather I dare to set even more bold goal. How about 2000 dollars in next 3 months?

To make it a little easier on myself I will start counting from the 1st of January 2008.

Just to boast… here is my first Google AdSense cheque.

Just as I mentioned in my previous post, I had a problem cashing it in Russia. Perhaps, I can do it in Taiwan. BTW, I moved to Taiwan last week

6 months passed. Milestone was not quite reached, but I am not discouraged. I got just a little over 800 over this period. Taking into account that I have not done anything with my blogs for the past 4 months, this is a very good result. I believe it is very well worth while to spend more time blogging.

Sad thing is that it is pretty hard to cash Google cheque in Russia and former Soviet Union countries. Good thing is that income from Google was only 102 dollars. So even if I do not cash the cheque I do not lose much.

Ok, alright, I have not been doing much blogging for quite some time now. I am not going to apologize for that, cause I believe that I have not hurt anyone with that. The main reason I was off blogging for over 2 months now, is that I just have not had enough time to post. Too much web-design work lately, family responsibilities and other duties.

Nevertheless I got some encouraging results from my blogs. I got my first 100 dollars in Google AdSense. It took me just a little over 5 months to do that. It happened to be the slowest gainer out of the 3 pay-per-click ad systems I am using now and one link-selling system. The other ones brought me about 350 bucks over 3 months. Not so bad I guess, especially taking into account that I was almost completely off blogging for the past 2 months.

As for my 1000 USD in 6 months of blogging goal, I am almost half way there, got 2 more months to go. I believe I can still make it.

Following the advice from Shane Pike I am dropping the idea of earning anything from AdSense in the first months of blogging. I removed most of the AdSense units on Blogs’n'Bloggers and on both of my Apple Blogs (English and Russian). Try to find the ones I left ). I believe they blend well and do not affect user’s experience at all. Please let me know if it is not so.

I believe Shane’s comment that pushed me to make the decision will be helpful to others too, so here it is:

Michael, you’ll have lots of people offer you “great ways” to increase your revenue, but ignore them. Take off the AdSense ads and blog heads-down for 3 months–creating at least one great post a day on each of your blogs. Spend some time each day, too, doing some free things to get more traffic. If you do both those things, you’ll easily pass the $1,000 threshold in just the remaining three months–if not in Month 4 alone. Resist the temptation to monetize too early, though, You’ll sabotage yourself before you ever get started…

Oh, and switch to full posts for your feed. Until you prove that your content is worth clicking through to every single time, people are not going to stay subscribed to a partial feed. Heck, I even unsubscribed from ProBlogger when he switched to partial feeds for awhile.

See this post for more details.

Comment comes from my 1000 Dollars Milestone post.

BTW, Shane’s comment is a great example of long term blog promotion. His advice was very useful to me, and I believe to others as well. He gave a link to his 2 blogs, which I certainly checked and really enjoyed. And he got a link love from me in this post ).

Thanks, Shane!

I’ve started blogging just about 2 weeks ago. Today I decided to set the goal for the next 6 months to earn at least 1000 USD purely by blogging. It should be enough to cover some expenses for my family (wife and 18 months old daughter), and give me confidence that blogging does worth my time. How am I going to do reach this goal? No idea.

Currently I have three English blogs:

• Blog Reviews — the one you are reading right now.
• Apple Blog — blog about Apple Inc., and its i- and mac- products, about Apple’s fans and so on.
• Meaning of Names — experimental blog about meaning of names, popular baby names and other things related to names. It is a niche site. I came up with the idea while using Wordtracker.com to find some competitive keywords for my projects. It happened that some of the phrases related to names are pretty popular and yet not very much used by other websites. We’ll see how the experiment goes.

Also I have two blogs in Russian (yes, I am Russian):

• Apple Blog — same content as on the English one, just more Russia oriented.
• CMS World — this is not exactly a blog, but more a directory of CMS (Content Management Systems) where you can compare different CMS side-by-side.

I have plans to open more blogs and sites, but I am inclined to wait a little bit, and let the ones I already have grow, and gain some ground. It is so easy to come up with the things to blog on, once you get started.

I count on Google Adsense as the main source of income. So far I got only about 20 USD from AdSense from all my blogs, which is a little disappointing. Perhaps, I will try some other affiliate programs as time goes by and my traffic increases. Traffic is my greatest concern these days.

Any ideas, recommendation or questions are more than welcomed! Stay in tune for updates.