Show and Tell – The Money Shots

Posted by Grizzly on Nov 7th, 2008 | 161 comments

If I had a dollar for every time I get asked how much money I make I would have… even more money! Regular readers have learned by now that I don’t play by the A-List rules and more or less contradict their whole methodology when it comes to making money online. I use free blogs (Blogger), I like my sites good and Ugly and of course I don’t sell crap to my readers – I prefer making money with Adsense. My method is really very simple; I target keywords. I rank on top of Google’s serp’s and bring in traffic. Visitors see my inept, amateurish and oh so ugly blogs and they run like hell. Fortunately 10 -12% of them leave by clicking on my Adsense ads. That is my system (not totally as I do have other forms of monetized blogs) and it works.

How well it works is relative – I don’t pull in $30,000 a month from a single site as that illiterate food monger claims out in Vancouver but then again I don’t have to post crap every day either. I also don’t have to deal with people be it advertisers, affiliates, staff or anyone else for that matter. I do get a ton of emails and a ton of comments on a couple of sites but that is my own choosing. I don’t mind helping others out and truth be told I quite enjoy it.

I should also point out that when it comes to the make money online niche I outrank all the A-listers and drive more search traffic than the whole works combined. There is only one fellow in this niche that I happily admit has me topped – Alan Liew and his moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com. If you aren’t familiar with him it’s not surprising as he doesn’t chase social traffic either. He does top the charts for the term “Make Money Online” and ranks in the top 3 for dozens of other related terms. He also uses free blogspot blogs…

A benefit of not selling anything to my readers has meant zero hate mail and I have developed a ton of good will over the last couple of years from the folks who do me the honor of reading my blogs. Oh and aside from a few expenditures (links) I have no overhead. I make money without spending much – almost nothing in fact and what I do spend in a month is recouped in less than a day.

All in all my system is perfectly suited to a guy living in the middle of nowhere running a full time business in the real world. My system is also perfectly suited to beginners. This is part time work with full time income and I have been telling people how I do it for a few years now. No strings attached. Your success will not hurt mine and the best thing is I have made a lot of online friends – friends who have helped get this blog up the MMO charts in record time. I have always lived by the motto that you help yourself when you help others.

So where is this going…

Oh yes… the money.

Well another year is coming to a close so I thought I would give you a peak at how the year has gone – or at least how my public network has fared. This basically means my earnings from the Make Money for Beginners blog and associated sites that I have used when demonstrating my techniques. The site was built as an Adsense blog and strangely enough has morphed into a social/affiliate/adsense blog due to the fact that some people just had to read it instead of running away like they were supposed to. I love my readers but they have lousy taste in blogs – apparently they didn’t get the memo regarding how worthless a Blogspot blog is. Good thing though – it is far from worthless but don’t tell the “experts” as the prevailing myth that bloggers using free platforms can’t know much has been working in my favor (and Alan’s) for years now.

Due to Google TOS I can’t show you all the stats but I’ll give you what I can. I have been open about what I do so I may as well be open about what I earn.

Most of the money is made from the Beginners blog and at present there are only two sites running Adsense on that account. I have had maybe a dozen sites using the same account over the past two years but only two have been Adsense winners and the rest have been transformed into affiliate sites or farm blogs. One is now making headway as a lead generation site and this blog is being groomed to make a killing by scamming all my readers once I develop the perfect scam – still working on that.

Overall I have 4 networks but only one has been made public – meaning you can track most of the sites on it if you do a little digging. You will never find my other networks by way of this one. I see the queries in my stats all the time though – people trying to track my adsense publisher number, my name, IP etc. (You are wasting your time. I am 4 completely different people online and never will the four meet.)

Making Money Online with Adsense

Contrary to popular myth it can be done. You hear stories and complaints all the time from people making $1 a month. The reason is simple – they don’t know what they are doing. I like Adsense for one simple reason. It allows a complete computer illiterate like me to make money online. No skills required other than a half functioning brain and a determination to succeed. Well okay – it helps if you understand SEO and you should if you have been reading my blog. That is what I do and that is the secret to making money online. SEO is what drives traffic and traffic is all that is important. All modesty aside – I am really good at getting traffic and it has nothing to do with my good looks or computer savvy. It has everything to do with – write this down – Getting Backlinks. A little on-site tweaking and a lot of backlink building equals traffic.

I wanted to add the ever popular screenshots to this post but they are so small as to be unreadable so I will list my earnings using text as well. If any of my computer savvy friends feel the urge to tell me how to make a screenshot larger by clicking on it (like blogger does) please fill me in as I haven’t the patience to figure this out. (I told you I was mentally challenged  when it comes to computers)

Monthly Adsense Revenue = Currently averaging $3000-$3500 on beginners blog (Best month = $5200). The top 7 blogs across all my networks bring in roughly 20K a month in Adsense.  The shot below is for November and I added it to explain the slow start concept to you. Without getting into all the reasons (I’ll save it for the book) it is normal to see low earnings at the start and end of each month and higher earnings mid month. This month started out with a $60 day and is climbing back up to the $100 mark ($96 yesterday). It was at $23 bucks early this morning which tells me today will end around $110 or so. Mid month usually sees days of $150 – $200 per day and then trails off again at the end of the month.

The shot below shows my all time earnings with this account – just over $65k. This is for the past two years and includes about $8k from the other blogs. The main blog has earned roughly $46k this year and the remainder in year one. (Two of my other networks have earned more)

The Beginners blog has also earned just over 15K from affiliate sales this year – the largest source from Project Payday which sits quietly out of the way down at the bottom of the page – the least effective spot and I have wondered what it could do if I just put it where my posts are.

Overall the Beginners blog has earned a little more than 60K this year with total expenses (re: link building) about $1800. Not bad for a blog that averages 4 posts a month and costs me nothing to maintain.

Traffic

The blog averages 1500 – 2500 visitors on weekends and 3500 – 4500 weekdays. This is all search engine traffic. 90% from Google. On days I post I get an increase between 5000 and 6500 visitors – my Adsense earnings/affiliate sales don’t see an increase on those days and this is why I have stated that social traffic does not convert to sales.  Traffic has increased steadily every month and is due to targeting new keywords. The site ranks on page 1 on G for over 70 related terms and I’m adding more every month.

That is my system – pick a keyword and get to the top of the serp’s with it. Then repeat with a new term. Over and over and over. It works and it gets easier to do as you build up authority for the site as a whole. Last week I showed just how easy I can claim top spot for just about any MMO related keyword I want. It took less than an hour for Google to rank me number 2 for “make money online in Canada” without quotes and number 1 with quotes. (12 million competing pages)

Now while this all comes across as bragging I’m not really that impressed with myself as I know that this can be done by anyone. And that’s the whole point of this post – if you are starting out online the chances are good that you are going to come across Problogger or John Chow or Shoemoney and then spend the next year trying to duplicate what they have done. You will fail – yes – you will. You just don’t know it yet.

The reason you will fail is because they don’t teach you how to make money online. You will copy them like Caroline Middlebrook has done or John Cow did – and then you will begin to wonder why you still aren’t making money even though you have 3000 RSS subscribers. Caroline still hasn’t figured it out (you don’t have the right traffic Caroline) or you will sell out like the Cow did when you realize how much work is involved in building a social site with no return on the investment. Most of you will never see 3000 subscribers to begin with so take a cue from them – they aren’t making money following the A-List and they are successful as far as social blogging goes. Closer to home two friends of mine Vic and Court are busy with new ventures in spite of 3000 and 5000 subscribers to their flagship blogs. Why? Because there is no money in just having readers – they are using the flagships to funnel traffic to where they can make money. All the people I just mentioned have talent and quickly grew a large audience – most of you won’t even get that far – far enough to realize that you are wasting your time chasing bloggers. I have readers as well and truly enjoy them but I don’t need them to make money.

And that is why my system succeeds while social blogging doesn’t.

If you are new here and made it this far then you have just experienced what I do – I write agonizingly long posts full of terms that Google is going to rank me for. When I finish I am going to go out and build backlinks for all those terms and the end result will be that G will send the same traffic to this blog as it does to my other one. This site will be making the same kind of money as the other MMO blog but in a quarter of the time. And then I will build another site and do it all over again.

There are 36 million pages telling you how to make money online in Google’s index – only one of them sits on top of the list and it doesn’t belong to an A List blog. Google it and then start reading.

Thanks for enduring this,

Cheers,

Griz