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!

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!