Expensive Lesson

I paid nearly $50 today for an ebook about making money from blogging. It promised so much and was generous in the number of pages, nevertheless the biggest lesson I learned from this ebook was that people can make a lot of money from information products irrespective of the quality of the writing and the information.

I have read a few ebooks lately which have fallen greatly short of professional quality. Yet, the authors are making a small (and sometimes big) fortune from selling their products online. As writers, we have a unique opportunity to profit from our writing by writing high quality and informative ebooks.

One of the things that has amazed me on my content writing journey is that people who have poorly written (if not downright shocking) websites, put their name to inadequate and unpolished ebooks and other material and in other ways indicate a poor personal standard, are often the most picky and difficult clients and pay the lowest rates. I've actually had a potential client want a number of unnecessary revisions because he wanted so many sentences between keywords - on unpaid test articles! What does this mean for a writer? It means we can expend a lot of unnecessary effort for little recompense instead of focusing our time and energy on activities that actually profit us most.

I read a self development ebook last week which had clearly been transcribed from a talk. As a written work it was dreadful but this author rakes in the money. So what do you think the possibilities are for good writing and great content? Of course, we could certainly learn a great deal about marketing from these people. They'd have to be great marketers to become wealthy from such poor quality work.

If you have been writing for any length of time, you will probably have favorite areas of interest and therefore have accumulated valuable research. What if you wrote an informational ebook and sold it yourself? How many books have you written that others have put their names on?

So this is my challenge to myself and to other content writers: write something for yourself and find a way to profit from it. Believe you can do it and you can. Just look at what's out there every time you waiver and doubt yourself.

To Ping or Not to Ping, That is the Question!

This is my first blog. I’ve written blog articles for clients but I haven’t had my own blog before. It’s another world complete with a language of its own. I’ve used various traffic generation techniques with my website, but blogging is a world apart. I suppose that’s why they call it the ‘blogosphere’.

As I researched how to build the popularity of a new blog, I came across the term ‘to ping a blog’. My first coherent thought was “What the..?” And yes, that was coherent compared to well… brain freeze! “To ping a blog.” It sounds like something in a Dr Suess book doesn’t it? “I pinged before lunch. I pinged before tea. I pinged my blog to get traffic, you see!”

I discovered with a little investigation, that pinging one’s blog was simply notifying blog index services when a blog was updated. This information is then made available when people search their directories. It also increases the likelihood of major search engine spiders finding and indexing your blog pages. When I realized what pinging was, I jumped in boots and all and used Pingoat.com to ping a number of directories. A little step in the right direction, I thought.

Unfortunately, when I went back to the Google search page for my search term “What is pinging a blog?” and continued to read the results, I was confronted by cautions about using ping notifications. A number of people warn that 75% of all pinging is spam and it is having a devastating effect on user confidence. Many people filter out free blog services such as Blogspot because of this and there are rumors that pinging may become outlawed. After just having pinged, I hoped I hadn’t done something that would permanently harm my blog.

Yet, are these simply ‘nay sayers’? After all, so many credible people who have successful and genuine blogs have used pinging to their advantage. Some say they receive about a hundred visits to their blog with every ping.

It seems that the internet can be a minefield for unwary travelers. Fortunately, the internet itself has the answers. We just have to ask the right questions. I’ve pinged my blog, but I think I’d better become a bit more knowledgeable before I ping again.

Make Money with Affiliate Programs

There is an increasing number of writers who are making money writing for themselves rather than for clients. I believe that doing both is the ideal. Writing for clients keeps our skills honed and growing because clients require a variety of services and we have to be adaptable. Getting paid for our services also ensures regularity of income, whereas making money from affiliate programs can take time and be influenced by factors outside our control. How many people confident in their Adsense earnings experienced a dramatic decrease in their income because Google changed its policies? Although Adsense is often not thought of as an affiliate program, it really is when you think about it. Other affiliate programs can seem to be going well and fail, still owing their members money.

So, it's wise to keep writing for money while building a business with multiple passive income streams. The big question is, what affiliate programs should we become involved in? Writing software, e-books and writing courses are all relevant to writers and can slot very well into niche writing websites or blogs. Specialist writers, however, might receive more benefit from affiliate programs relating to their subject of choice. For example, specialists in internet marketing will find a number of excellent affiliate programs appropriate to their expertise, which would be easy to recommend naturally in their writing.

When researching affiliate programs with a view to joining a select few, carefully evaluate their strength and reliability. How long have they been running? Who owns them? Is there any solid evidence of affiliates profiting from them? Choose two or three initially and carefully monitor their success over time. If after three months an affiliate program is not profitable, replace it. Your goal, after all, is profit.

Writers are in a marvelous position to use their skills to create content that not only sells their services, but refers people to affiliate programs and is relevant to Google Adsense. Once we have put the foundations in place, our job is to keep generating content and to attract traffic to our site.