Making Money Blogging – Blog Stew

I’ve spoke before about looking hard at yourself and working out what services you could sell to make money online.

Today I want to speak about just how much money I have made selling services online.  I won’t go into total detail on all the services I have been trying to push.  But instead I’ll focus upon logo and graphic design site, corelogo.  To begin with corelogo was set up to mainly sell very low cost logos to people with smaller budgets.  Initially I was looking at people spending around $20 per design.  This was a great model to begin with as it helped me gauge the amount of demand for such services.  I soon realised based off my initial findings on selling over 10 logos for this price there definitely was money to be made online selling such a service.

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Everyone who uses Adsence is looking for the next ‘holy grail’ in profitable niche’s.  Selecting a high paying niche when building your next site can dramatically increase the amount of revenue generated by Adsence.

The ‘key’ is to target keywords which have the highest cost per day estimations.  This means that businesses and companies are actively competing for these advertising spaces and therefore more money is being pushed into specific niches.  The advertising budgets of these companies is a good indicator of the profitability to be found in certain niches.

After the break I’ll include a table which outlines the cost per click, clicks per day and cost per day of some keywords.

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Finally made it, its taken 2 months but I’ve finally hit the magic $100 on Adsense!

Ok so lets look at how I actually managed it.

Sites displaying Adsense:

• 2 blogs, this one and another on a popular mmorpg pc game.
• 2 content driven sites.
• 21 web proxies.

The main bulk of the income has come directly from Adsense which is displayed on the main page of the proxies.  The very nature of proxy advertising is to get burst traffic, generally over time the revenue generated from proxies tends to drop, that’s why setting up new fresh proxies as often as possible is the way forward.

My current Adsense total = $102.12 that’s as of 2nd March 2009 (date of this post)

My goal was to try and break the magical $100 mark in February, but I think I can let myself off for missing the mark by 2 days!

The question is, what to do now?  Well more of the same really.  I’ll be looking into updating my content sites along with adding more.  Creating more web proxies and focusing on services I can provide.

My latest project is www.corelogo.com which has taken off really well.  I’m happy with the design of the site and I’ve just started to advertise the services CoreLogo offers around webmaster forums.  Its nice to have something different to do, its all very well staring at text for hours on end but that can soon become a drain and off putting to some extent.  There’s nothing better than whipping out Illustrator and Photoshop to get the old creative juices flowing!

There are many way to make money online.  Sure you can make money from Adsense and other ad networks, but what about selling services you can provide?  Take a hard look in the mirror and decide what you can and can’t do.  The beauty of selling your talents online is you past work acts as the qualifications.  You don’t need fancy degrees in this or that, you just need to know how to complete the work.

The hardest part can be forming a back catalogue of work, known as a portfolio.  If your just starting out then you have nothing to show, so people are less inclined to take you on.  You can either try and push through this phase or produce work for yourself to primarily act as portfolio content.  Once you have a developed portfolio of work you will need somewhere to show it all off.  This would be a good time to find a catchy domain name and develop a site to suit your services needs.

There are many components to making money online, simply putting all your effort into one sector can become boring and maybe not be as profitable as diversifying.

Finding work can also be tricky to begin with.  The best option would be to post on active webmaster forums announcing your services, showing your portfolio off.  You could then move on to job forums, people ask for specific jobs to be completed.  You tender for the job, giving a quote and hopefully given your good portfolio you get taken on by the client.  When I first started to look into offering services that I can provide myself, I was astonished at the sheer amount of money being thrown at things I could do!  It seemed silly to me to ignore this possible stream of income.

So my message is this, sell yourself online.  If you can design logos, code websites etc then look into the market and find a gap for you to fit in.  People want jobs doing all the time, and people pay.  They pay for knowledge and time, that’s ultimately what you are selling.  You’re selling yourself.

I want to move into graphic design, offering my services for logo and banner design.  I have no qualifications in design, no certificates to show I can use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, yet I have years of experience with both.  So I need to depend upon a solid portfolio of work.  From reading various forums I came across a quote similar to this:

Self taught people have confidence, they had no teacher to help them out during the hard times.

I know people that run small the medium size businesses here in the UK.  They have no degrees in business or anything like that.  They have the drive and focus to succeed.  Confidence is key in this world; you have to be confident in what you can do.  Then you need to get out there and do it!