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Earning money is earning money regardless of which new toy you wish to purchase. Cashflow is the key. Here are some ways to get more flow towards you and eliminate cashflow away from you when it makes sense financially.

Steps

1. Find a job, start a business, negotiate extra chores that someone will pay you to complete, or find contract work. Do something that is legal and pays. It’s even better if you get something that pays and that you enjoy doing, but don’t let enjoyment stand in the way of earning a living.
2. Look for ways to save and budget for your toy purchases. Or, find ways to get a raise, or pick up a second income. A quick way to save is to eliminate lunches and dinners out and also eliminate "designer" coffee and soda from restaurants, fast food joints and convenience stores. Most people, this author included, can find many ways to save if we take a close look at our cashflow. There are probably lots of current expenses you can eliminate.
3. Once you receive positive cash from one of the above sources, set aside a portion of your earnings, and or new found savings, each pay period until you have saved for your new toy. This may be one pay period or many pay periods.
4. Avoid paying "convenience" fees whenever possible. An example of a convenience fee would be purchasing a 12 ounce soda at an event or restaurant for a $1.00, $2.00 or more, when you can buy the same soda for $.50 or less when you purchase them at a grocery store. If you track your money closely you may find many "convenience fees" that can be avoided daily.

A powerful personal growth tool is the 30-day trial. This is a concept I borrowed from the shareware industry, where you can download a trial version of a piece of software and try it out risk-free for 30 days before you’re required to buy the full version. It’s also a great way to develop new habits, and best of all, it’s brain-dead simple.

Let’s say you want to start a new habit like an exercise program or quit a bad habit like sucking on cancer sticks. We all know that getting started and sticking with the new habit for a few weeks is the hard part. Once you’ve overcome inertia, it’s much easier to keep going.

Yet we often psyche ourselves out of getting started by mentally thinking about the change as something permanent — before we’ve even begun. It seems too overwhelming to think about making a big change and sticking with it every day for the rest of your life when you’re still habituated to doing the opposite. The more you think about the change as something permanent, the more you stay put.

But what if you thought about making the change only temporarily — say for 30 days — and then you’re free to go back to your old habits? That doesn’t seem so hard anymore. Exercise daily for just 30 days, then quit. Maintain a neatly organized desk for 30 days, then slack off. Read for an hour a day for 30 days, then go back to watching TV.

Could you do it? It still requires a bit of discipline and commitment, but not nearly so much as making a permanent change. Any perceived deprivation is only temporary. You can count down the days to freedom. And for at least 30 days, you’ll gain some benefit. It’s not so bad. You can handle it. It’s only one month out of your life.

Now if you actually complete a 30-day trial, what’s going to happen? First, you’ll go far enough to establish it as a habit, and it will be easier to maintain than it was to begin it. Secondly, you’ll break the addiction of your old habit during this time. Thirdly, you’ll have 30 days of success behind you, which will give you greater confidence that you can continue. And fourthly, you’ll gain 30 days worth of results, which will give you practical feedback on what you can expect if you continue, putting you in a better place to make informed long-term decisions.

Therefore, once you hit the end of the 30-day trial, your ability to make the habit permanent is vastly increased. But even if you aren’t ready to make it permanent, you can opt to extend your trial period to 60 or 90 days. The longer you go with the trial period, the easier it will be to lock in the new habit for life.

Another benefit of this approach is that you can use it to test new habits where you really aren’t sure if you’d even want to continue for life. Maybe you’d like to try a new diet, but you don’t know if you’d find it too restrictive. In that case, do a 30-day trial and then re-evaluate. There’s no shame in stopping if you know the new habit doesn’t suit you. It’s like trying a piece of shareware for 30 days and then uninstalling it if it doesn’t suit your needs. No harm, no foul.

Here are some examples from my own life where I used 30-day trials to establish new habits:

1) In the Summer of 1993, I wanted to try being vegetarian. I had no interest in making this a lifelong change, but I’d read a lot about the health benefits of vegetarianism, so I committed to it for 30 days just for the experience. I was already exercising regularly, seemed in decent health, and was not overweight (6′0″, 155 lbs), but my typical college diet included a lot of In-N-Out burgers. Going lacto-ovo vegetarian for 30 days was a lot easier than I expected — I can’t say it was hard at all, and I never felt deprived. Within a week I noticed an increase in my energy and concentration, and I felt more clear-headed. At the end of the 30 days, it was a no-brainer to stick with it. This change looked a lot harder than it really was.

2) In January 1997, I decided to try going from vegetarian to vegan. While lacto-ovo vegetarians can eat eggs and dairy, vegans don’t eat anything that comes from an animal. I was developing an interest in going vegan for life, but I didn’t think I could do it. How could I give up veggie-cheese omelettes? The diet seemed too restrictive to me — even fanatically so. But I was intensely curious to know what it was actually like. So once again I did a 30-day trial. At the time I figured I’d make it through the trial, but I honestly didn’t expect to continue beyond that. Well, I lost seven pounds in the first week, mostly from going to the bathroom as all the accumulated dairy mucus was cleansed from my bowels (now I know why cows need four stomachs to properly digest this stuff). I felt lousy the first couple days but then my energy surged. I also felt more clear-headed than ever, as if a “fog of brain” had been lifted; it felt like my brain had gotten a CPU and a RAM upgrade. However, the biggest change I noticed was in my endurance. I was living in Marina del Rey at the time and used to run along the beach near the Santa Monica Pier, and I noticed I wasn’t as tired after my usual 3-mile runs, so I started increasing them to 5 miles, 10 miles, and then eventually a marathon a few years later. In Tae Kwon Do, the extra endurance really gave a boost to my sparring skills as well. The accumulated benefits were so great that the foods I was giving up just didn’t seem so appealing anymore. So once again it was a no-brainer to continue after the first 30 days, and I’m still vegan today. What I didn’t expect was that after so long on this diet, the old animal product foods I used to eat just don’t seem like food anymore, so there’s no feeling of deprivation.

3) Also in 1997, I decided I wanted to exercise every single day for a year. That was my 1997 New Year’s resolution. My criteria was that I would exercise aerobically at least 25 minutes every day, and I wouldn’t count Tae Kwon Do classes which I was taking 2-3 days per week. Coupled with my dietary changes, I wanted to push my fitness to a new level. I didn’t want to miss a single day, not even for sick days. But thinking about exercising 365 days in a row was daunting, so I mentally began with a 30-day trial. That wasn’t so bad. After a while every day that passed set a new record: 8 days in a row… 10 days… 15 days…. It became harder to quit. After 30 days in a row, how could I not do 31 and set a new personal record? And can you imagine giving up after 250 days? No way. After the initial month to establish the habit, the rest of the year took care of itself. I remember going to a seminar that year and getting home well after midnight. I had a cold and was really tired, yet I still went out running at 2am in the rain. Some people might call that foolish, but I was so determined to reach my goal that I wasn’t going to let fatigue or illness stop me. I succeeded and kept it up for the whole year without ever missing a day. In fact, I kept going for a few more weeks into 1998 before I finally opted to stop, which was a tough decision. I wanted to do this for one year, knowing it would become a powerful reference experience, and it certainly became such.

4) More diet stuff…. After being vegan for a number of years, I opted to try other variations of the vegan diet. I did 30-day trials both with the macrobiotic diet and with the raw foods diet. Those were interesting and gave me new insights, but I decided not to continue with either of them. I felt no different eating macrobiotically than I did otherwise. And in the case of the raw diet, while I did notice a significant energy boost, I found the diet too labor intensive — I was spending a lot of time preparing meals and shopping frequently. Sure you can just eat raw fruits and veggies, but to make interesting raw meals, there can be a lot of labor involved. If I had my own chef, I’d probably follow the raw diet though because I think the benefits would be worth it. I did a second trial of the raw diet for 45 days, but again my conclusion was the same. If I was ever diagnosed with a serious disease like cancer, I’d immediately switch to an all raw, living foods diet, since I believe it to be the absolute best diet for optimal health. I’ve never felt more energetic in my life than when I ate a raw diet. But I had a hard time making it practical for me. Even so, I managed to integrate some new macrobiotic foods and raw foods into my diet after these trials. There are two all-raw restaurants here in Vegas, and I’ve enjoyed eating at them because then someone else does all the labor. So these 30-day trials were still successful in that they produced new insights, although in both cases I intentionally declined to continue with the new habit. One of the reasons a full 30-day trial is so important with new diets is that the first week or two will often be spent detoxing and overcoming cravings, so it isn’t until the third or fourth week that you begin to get a clear picture. I feel that if you haven’t tried a diet for at least 30 days, you simply don’t understand it. Every diet feels different on the inside than it appears from the outside.

This 30-day method seems to work best for daily habits. I’ve had no luck using it when trying to start a habit that only occurs 3-4 days per week. However, it can work well if you apply it daily for the first 30 days and then cut back thereafter. This is what I’d do when starting a new exercise program, for example. Daily habits are much easier to establish.

Here are some other ideas for applying 30-day trials:

• Give up TV. Tape all your favorite shows and save them until the end of the trial. My whole family did this once, and it was very enlightening.
• Give up online forums, especially if you feel you’re becoming forum addicted. This will help break the addiction and give you a clearer sense of how participation actually benefits you (if at all). You can always catch up at the end of 30 days.
• Shower/bathe/shave every day. I know YOU don’t need this one, so please pass it along to someone who does.
• Meet someone new every day. Start up a conversation with a stranger.
• Go out every evening. Go somewhere different each time, and do something fun — this will be a memorable month.
• Spend 30 minutes cleaning up and organizing your home or office every day. That’s 15 hours total.
• List something new to sell on ebay every day. Purge some of that clutter.
• Ask someone new out on a date every day. Unless your success rate is below 3%, you’ll get at least one new date, maybe even meet your future spouse.
• If you’re already in a relationship, give your partner a massage every day. Or offer to alternate who gives the massage each day, so that’s 15 massages each.
• Give up cigarettes, soda, junk food, coffee, or other unhealthy addictions.
• Become an early riser.
• Write in your journal every day.
• Call a different family member, friend, or business contact every day.
• Make 25 sales calls every day to solicit new business. Professional speaker Mike Ferry did this five days a week for two years, even on days when he was giving seminars. He credits this habit with helping build his business to over $10 million in annual sales. If you make 1300 sales calls a year, you’re going to get some decent business no matter how bad your sales skills are. You can generalize this habit to any kind of marketing work, like building new links to your web site.
• Write a new blog entry every day.
• Read for an hour a day on a subject that interests you.
• Meditate every day.
• Learn a new vocabulary word every day.
• Go for a long walk every day.

Again, don’t think that you need to continue any of these habits beyond 30 days. Think of the benefits you’ll gain from those 30 days alone. You can re-assess after the trial period. You’re certain to grow just from the experience, even if it’s temporary.

The power of this approach lies in its simplicity. Even though doing a certain activity every single day may be less efficient than following a more complicated schedule — weight training is a good example because adequate rest is a key component — you’ll often be more likely to stick with the daily habit. When you commit to doing something every single day without exception, you can’t rationalize or justify missing a day, nor can you promise to make it up later by reshuffling your schedule.

Give trials a try. If you’re ready to commit to one right now, please feel free to post a comment and share your goal for the next 30 days. If there’s enough interest, then perhaps we can do a group postmortem around May 20th to see how it went for everyone. I’ll even do it with you. Mine will be to go running or biking for at least 25 minutes or do a minimum 60-minute hike in the mountains every day for 30 days. The weather here in Vegas has been great lately, so it’s a nice time for me to get back to exercising outdoors.

Earn Money Blogging Carnival Finally the 3rd edition of Earn Money Blogging Carnival have arrived after more than a month since the 2nd edition

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger again did the same exercise he did 12 months ago to find out how the most highly visited blogs earn money

If your blog is popular, compelling, and relevant, you can even earn money while you sleep.  Blogging for Dollars Blog / Make money blogging

How To Make It Work. Blogspot template designing, codings and everything in between! Home · Useful Links · Site Feed · Contact Me · Earn Money Blogging

Use the detailed guide on this blog to get your own personal Rapidshare accounts. EARN MONEY INSTANTLY All you have got to do is click the following link

How to Make Money From Your Blog

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004.  By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income.  Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06).  I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion.  In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there.  Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe).  I’ll even share some specifics.  If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs.  If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first.  If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine.  If you think it’s evil, fine.  But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path.  If you want to succeed, you must be congruent.  Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time.  It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed.  If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it.  If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful:  How Selfish Are You?  It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it.  If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads.  Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere.  If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations.  Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best.  If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them.  Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy.  If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it.  Don’t take a half-assed approach.  Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it.  I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005.  There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal.  Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback.  Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive.  Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month.  If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year.  Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source.  More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely.  At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home.  I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler.  If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it.  I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t.  I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word.  But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail.  The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.”  And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet.  So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can.  How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart?  Here’s a good rule of thumb:  If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will.  OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though.  You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry.  What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves?  It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it.  Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence.  But that just gets you in the door.  You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent.  And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are:  web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some.  But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice:  Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy?  You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies.  What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization.  But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

• blog publishing software
• HTML/CSS
• blog comments (and comment spam)
• RSS/syndication
• feed aggregators
• pings
• trackbacks
• full vs. partial feeds
• blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
• search engines
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• page rank
• social bookmarking
• tagging
• contextual advertising
• affiliate programs
• traffic statistics
• email

Optional:  podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness.  If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet.  Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list.  Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies.  Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into.  You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation.  For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well.  But you can’t consider each technology in isolation.  You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them.  Monetizing a blog is a balancing act.  You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others.  Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant.  In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration.  I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking.  And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors.  I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs.  Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones.  It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month.  Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic.  And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%.  Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts.  It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds.  You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it.  To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades.  Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.”  That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them.  It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic.  Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else.  Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work.  I don’t really care.  I can still use them to generate results.  In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you.  Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities.  You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset.  Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains.  It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst.  Blogging is cheap.  Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal.  Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily.  You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities.  I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity.  It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear.  If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out.  Many opportunities are temporary.  And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned.  And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies.  It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry.  And the rate of change is accelerating.  Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road.  Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself.  But I learned to love this insane pace.  If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too.  And people who only do this part-time will be very confused.  If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up.  So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high.  Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur.  This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea.  Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game.  Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous.  Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs.  They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money.  While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim.  Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site.  If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income.  You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is.  An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month.  It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances.  I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005).  And since then it’s continued to increase nicely.  Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain.  It’s a lot more secure than a regular job.  No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones.  We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else?  Maybe you want a combination of these things.  However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing.  I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy.  I only update it about once a year and review it once a month.  This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed.  It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site.  Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that.  Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site?  Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches.  Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat.  Don’t re-invent the wheel.  Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too.  Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money.  I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income.  Later I added donations as well.  This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views.  That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important?  Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic.  If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent).  You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail.  With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge.  All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic.  If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed.  So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months.  I just focused on traffic building.  Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan.  For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK.  Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation.  More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you.  And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer.  High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites.  On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews.  Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers.  Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about.  These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out.  Popular sites have a serious advantage.  The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site.  And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there:  How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog).  If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.  That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors.  No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals.  Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know).  Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche.  Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free.  Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form.  Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month.  You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog.  Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss.  Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff.  I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore.  Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic.  But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start.  Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong?  Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right.  Again, making mistakes is not the issue.  Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic.  The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE.  It’s just not true.  Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site.  Nothing.  Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links.  Nothing.  I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever.  Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site.  In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout.  I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this.  It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work.  I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development.  To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it.  This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing.  I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work.  If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything.  What could be more fair than that?  The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it.  For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site.  I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far.  The podcasts are all ad-free.  I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead.  More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy.  Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it:  “You know, Steve.  Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.”  Of course I’m aware of it.  I’m the one who put the ads there.  There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads.  They’re effective!  People keep clicking on them.  If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen).  Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads.  First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free.  I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart.  I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then.  For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa.  You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket.  Think multiple streams of income.  On this site I actually have six different streams of income.  Can you count them all?  Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note:  If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change.  I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too.  Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations.  My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too.  It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal.  So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish.  It’s win-win.  I’m very grateful for the visitor support.  It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though.  I’ve been earning income online since 1995.  With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles).  And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous:  advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot.  Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks.  Some of them are small, but they add up.  It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones.  I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Second Life is a virtual world that is very much similar to the real world. These two worlds meet in so many ways and one concrete example is the economy. Economy equates money. Money in Second Life is called Linden dollars. The exchange rate of the virtual money to real money is 275 Linden dollars to $1. Making money in Second Life is almost the same as making money in real life. One has to take into consideration the needs and wants of the consumers to come up with commodities that they will purchase to survive the world of Second Life. One can even make real money from Second Life, quite bizarre but definitely possible.

Buy and sell.Create or make and sell. Resell or direct selling. Pyramid Network. These concepts are the ones that can make you earn money in Second Life. They require an investment of something usually starting small and making ways to help keep the growth of money. Commodities that are promising and saleable can be as simple as clothing, shelter and services. Second Life is about 3D animation. Make virtual commodities that cater to the virtual consumer’s needs and desires. Develop a network and sell it to the Second Life people in one’s network. Use the internet to make profit. Earn Second Income From Second Life

One can make clothing animation using the computer, which is not an easy thing to do, and offer special clothes that can be sold in Second Life. A lot of people in real life buy from designers because of the quality and prestige of owning designer clothes. One can be a designer of animated clothing and then sell it to the ones who do not have time to make clothes for their avatars in second life. Encourage them to build their wardrobe from one’s created line and voila!

Money is earned from virtual or animated clothing in Second Life. If you want to earn real money from the virtual clothing, sell it through eBay. Do the pricing, present the product beautifully, advertise a little and wait for Second Life enthusiasts to stumble upon your entry and purchase your virtual clothing with real money. One can also look for a supplier that sells the product cheap and resell it with a higher mark up. One can look for down lines and establish a pyramid like in businesses that involve networking.

Using Adobe Photoshop, the image editing software can also earn you big bucks in Second Life. Improve the skin tone or color of the avatar using Adobe Photoshop and offer a tanning service. Invent hairstyles and edit the hairstyle and offer salon service in Second Life. Don’t let your Adobe Photoshop editing skills and passion go to waste. Use them and make a profit from them in this virtual life.