KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (5 page)

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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen

BOOK: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
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What do you spend the bulk of your day doing? What do you do in your spare time? What books do you read when you have a free moment? All of those things can be topics for a profitable web site, whether you spend your day climbing mountains or battling aliens on your Xbox.
 
In practice, you can divide your choices into two categories: your professional life and your personal life.
 
Your professional life is always going to yield rich pickings. People already pay you for that expertise. If you’re a plumber, people call you because you know how to fix a dripping tap and they don’t. If you’re an administrator, you know how to keep an office in order and deal with paperwork. Those are valuable skills. And if you’re a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, or anything else, you don’t need me to tell you how valuable the information in your head is.
 
Whatever your job, your experience and training have given you information you can use to earn a living. The Internet has given you a place where you can share that knowledge. And all of the revenue systems that have developed online mean that you can turn that knowledge into KaChing.
 
One of my favorite sites, for example, is Tim Carter’s
AsktheBuilder.com
(
Figure 2.1
). Tim is a former contractor and home builder who has been online for a long time. He first set up his site in 1993, and it’s seen a lot of incarnations since then. One thing that hasn’t changed is the quality and the subject of his content. His articles are syndicated in newspapers nationwide, and he even ended a radio career so that he could focus on something that could make even more money: his web site.
 
Figure 2.1
Tim Carter’s
AsktheBuilder.com
is a great example of someone making money online with his professional knowledge. Note the banner ad, Google search box, e-books, newsletter, and shop. Those are just some of the ways Tim generates KaChing online.
 
Tim posts content that explains how to put up shelves, grout tiles, refinish stair treads, and a whole lot more. Some of that information appears in articles, and some is posted in short videos that can also be seen on YouTube.
 
That’s valuable information. If you wanted to learn how to do these things, you’d probably have to pay for an expensive college course. If you wanted to hire someone to do these things for you, it would cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. It’s knowledge that’s taken Tim years of training and experience to build up.
 
Tim gives it away for free, and he uses the Internet’s revenue systems to make money from it.
 
Carolyn E. Wright does something similar at
PhotoAttorney.com
. Carolyn is an amateur photographer and a professional lawyer who specializes in the law as it relates to photographers. Her web site, which takes the form of a blog, provides articles about the law and photography (
Figure 2.2
).
 
Again, it’s valuable information. When Carolyn explains the relevance of a recent court case involving a photographer, people who take pictures, especially professional photographers, realize that they’re getting gold dust. Lawyers charge a fortune for advice. Carolyn is giving away her professional opinion for nothing.
 
Figure 2.2
Carolyn E. Wright’s blog,
PhotoAttorney.com
, lets one lawyer earn money from her professional knowledge.
 
What does she get in return?
 
She certainly gets branding. When a photographer finds that a company is using one of his or her pictures without permission or is being sued by an unhappy client, Carolyn’s firm is the first place that person will turn for legal representation. But Carolyn isn’t relying on that. Her site also announces her speaking engagements, her workshops, her books (both legal and photographic), her legal packages (including trademark registration, debt collection, and consulting), and even affiliate links supplied by Amazon.
 
The web site alone is unlikely to be a replacement for Carolyn’s professional services. But it does allow her to create an additional revenue stream from her professional skills.
 
It’s certainly possible to make money online with a web site that draws on your professional knowledge.
 
But you can also do the same thing with the knowledge that you pick up doing what you love. Carolyn E. Wright does this as well. She has chosen a niche within the law that interests her as a photographer. That means she derives even more pleasure from her job than she might if she had chosen to specialize in real estate law, for example, or patent law. Because she’s chosen to work in a niche that interests her personally, her blog is interesting to read and people are more likely to come and read it.
 
Not everyone is as lucky as Carolyn E. Wright. Many people have a job they enjoy (if they’re fortunate), then do something completely different on the weekend because they enjoy doing that even more. The good news is that you can earn money online from that information, too.
 
In fact, this is where the Web really rolls out its golden opportunity.
 
Offline, it’s very difficult to make money from a hobby. Lots of people dream about becoming professional writers, designing computer games, or taking photos for a living. For the most interesting and exciting jobs, the competition is always fierce, and the number of people who want them tend to push the pay down to bargain levels.
 
With the Web, anyone can now make money from a hobby.
 
Perhaps the most famous person to do this is Darren Rowse. When Darren started his first blog at
TheLivingRoom.org
back in 2002, he intended it to be a personal diary that would discuss his views on life in his native Australia, politics, and the church. He didn’t expect the site to make money, but it did become popular with members of the emergent church movement in Australia. Again, he was writing about something that was important to him, so he picked up an audience who found the topic important to them, too.
 
The following year, Darren started a second blog, this time about digital cameras. He planned to use the site to show off some of his own images, but he also found that whenever he posted a review of a camera, his views went up by a factor of 20. Encouraged, he posted more camera reviews—and received even more traffic.
 
Things really took off though when Darren added AdSense ads to the blog in October 2003—although they initially took off very slowly. In his first month, even on a site with thousands of readers every day, Darren made just $1.40 per day, enough to cover his server costs but not much more. But he kept going, and he kept watching his ad revenues increase. By December, he was making $6 per day, in January $9, and in February $10. The following month his ad revenues jumped by 50 percent. Today, Digital Photography School (
www.digital-photography-school.com
) and Darren’s second site, ProBlogger (
www.problogger.com
), generate up to 100,000 page views a day and earn more than $20,000 for Darren in ad revenue each month.
 
And those are just two of the many blogs that Darren now runs.
 
Those two sites are great examples of the two different kinds of profitable sites that anyone can build. Darren isn’t a professional photographer. He’s not even an expert photographer. There are plenty of people on the Web with much deeper photographic knowledge and much better pictures. Today, Darren writes very little of the content that appears on Digital Photography School, offering space instead to photographers who contribute their own articles in return for the kind of visibility that only a successful blog can deliver.
 
But it’s a subject that Darren is passionate about, one he knows a lot about, and one he enjoys publishing about. That passion comes across clearly in the quality of the content on the site, and it’s that devotion that brings in other equally dedicated readers.
 
Darren is now a professional blogger. In addition to running Digital Photography School, he is also a cofounder of b5media, a stable of around 300 blogs on a range of different subjects. That’s given him a huge amount of valuable knowledge about what it takes to create a successful web site. He makes that information available on
www.ProBlogger.com
and again earns money from ads and affiliate links on those pages.
 
Whereas Digital Photography School is a blog about Darren’s passion, ProBlogger is a blog about his profession. Both earn money.
 
The Value of Your Niche—How Keywording Can Boost the Price of Your Passion
 
While web sites about either your profession or your passion can earn money, they won’t necessarily make the same amount of money. The most important factors that determine the value of a web site are:
• Content
• Traffic
• Revenue systems
 
Content includes quality and quantity (the more frequently you post, the more views you’ll win), but it also covers topic. Some topics simply pay more than others. You might be able to get a KaChing by publishing a web site on any subject at all, but the sound alone won’t tell you how much money is going into the cash register until you count it.
 
That was something that Darren Rowse discovered very quickly. His first blog, which was mostly about spirituality, built an audience. But because it’s a topic with little commercial value, it didn’t generate much money.
 
A site about the Bible, for example, will largely attract ads offering Bible study courses. These might be supplied by nonprofit or religious organizations that have few funds to pay for ad clicks and little to gain when they do pick up a lead. The amount the publisher will pay for a click will be relatively low.
 
However, when Darren began writing camera reviews, he didn’t just pick up lots of additional readers, he also picked up higher-paying ads. Someone reading camera reviews is exactly the sort of person that camera stores most want to attract. Those stores will happily compete to put their name—and a link to their online store—in front of those readers. The result will be much higher payments each time a reader clicks an on ad, because there’s a reasonable chance that a percentage of those readers will pay an advertiser hundreds of dollars for a new camera.
 
This is where things can start to become a little dangerous. There’s no shortage of companies on the Web offering lists of the highest-paying AdSense keywords. They certainly look useful. At a glance, you’ll be able to see that a web site about “purchase structured settlements,” for example, can generate $53.48 for every click on an AdSense ad. A page about a “Phoenix DUI attorney” can bring up ads worth $50, and “California mesothelioma doctors” are worth $46.14 per click.
 
Compared to the usual dollar or two per click, those look like giant KaChings. Generate just three or four clicks on ads like that every day and you could be making a cool $6,000 a month in additional income.
 
If only it were that easy. It might work, at least for a while. You could create a web site that focused on structured settlements—whatever they are—and put in the AdSense code. If you’re also prepared to put in the effort to be able to write about the topic intelligently for a while (because traffic takes time to build), then you might well find yourself generating some income.

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