blogging for fun and profit...

[tee]

but mainly for profit

I have never done anything like this before but I think I have a great idea for a blog and a great domain for it.

I want the blog to eventually pay for itself and put something in my pockets too. (obviously)

Questions for the DG gods

1. PPS versus PPC, conversion, etc. What do these terms mean?

2. Starting from scratch how hard is it to turn a profit from a blog, or to break even for that matter, with zero experience?

3. I'm willing to work hard but I don't know where to start. Aside from building the site and adding content, what should my next move be?

[mhu]

i only know the first one

depending on what you're advertising, PPS is Pay Per Sale. You get paid a cut when someone buys something (like a porn subscription)

PPC is Pay Per Click. You get paid when someone clicks on the ads on your page, from what I've seen anywhere usually from $0.04 to $0.75 a click. RMK said he was getting over $2.00 a click and naturally won't tell anyone how, but his stuff is super specialized for some mortgage stuff or something.

[awol]

Before you worry about any of the above, i'd worry about just getting content on the site and blogging like crazy. If you seriously have a good idea for domain, blog, unique content, etc - you'll naturally hack google into giving you good search results and with some ads above the fold on the page, you'll profit. Optimization of monetization becomes a problem once you're actually making money - not before.

The most important thing IMO is to make sure you write about topics that are hard to find information on and use as many keywords in your writing as you can get away with.

Also, follow normal SEO tricks (vanity urls, meta tags, h1s, titles, etc)...

[awol]

RMK said he was getting over $2.00 a click and naturally won't tell anyone how, but his stuff is super specialized for some mortgage stuff or something.

$2PPC is not that hard to pull off. You just have to write about topics using keywords that pull high-paying ads. If you start entering keywords in Google AdWords and see how much they charge per-click, you can easily find some $5+ keywords.

Getting traffic/clicks on those is another story though...

[djmollusk]

people starting out generally fuck themselves over by worrying about ads before they have an established site. They do semi-regular updates but see that they are hardly making any money after a couple weeks and then loose motivation.

Focus on original content thats steadily updated. Establish your site, then worry about ads. Also in that time you'll understand your audience better in order to target advertising to them.

[Grover]

I know I'm the new kid around here, but I'm in a similar situation and tought this might help as I just got my site built and am now commencing to content the shit out of it.

I noticed that helpful web2.0 things, such as tag clouds, work pretty well to bring in hits considering that it's just a big cloud full of keywords. You then link back to that tag cloud by tagging all of your blog entries, just keyword dropping even more. This seemed to help me even on my personal blog that I wrote about 6 months back.

Sorry if I'm out of place, thought it might help.

[le0]

www.frozenspace.org

makes me some moniez. not much but i just haven't fucked with keywords enough.

[BladeX]

i start my stuff of w/o ads for a while then once they get some traffic / ranked i place targeted ads

[tee]

I know I'm the new kid around here, but I'm in a similar situation and tought this might help as I just got my site built and am now commencing to content the shit out of it.

I noticed that helpful web2.0 things, such as tag clouds, work pretty well to bring in hits considering that it's just a big cloud full of keywords. You then link back to that tag cloud by tagging all of your blog entries, just keyword dropping even more. This seemed to help me even on my personal blog that I wrote about 6 months back.

Sorry if I'm out of place, thought it might help.

Which content management system were you using? Do you know of any that natively support tag clouds?

[Grover]

At the time I was using Wordpress, which is what I normally use. There are multiple tag cloud plugins you can get for it, or skins that have it implemented already and just draw keywords from the categories you can setup in the blog system.

I'm going to start dabbling in Mephisto, just gotta find a dev who knows Ruby and is willing to work in trade.