KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (6 page)

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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen

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But it’s not a fun way to work, and when you’re not writing about a topic you enjoy, it will feel like work, and it will be hard to do well enough to earn money consistently. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try writing about a subject purely for the high-paying keywords. But I wouldn’t recommend it. I think that choosing a topic you enjoy will always be better in the long run. You might be packing away fewer dollars for each KaChing but you’ll generating more KaChings, and most important, you’ll be having fun while you’re doing it—so you’ll be able to keep doing it.
 
But there are things you can do to ensure the subjects you blog about within those topics are the highest-paying subjects possible.
 
That’s important. Writing about photography in general might deliver ads from stock agencies or camera shops. Writing about equine photography on the other hand might deliver ads from stables and horse breeders—and those ads might pay much more!
 
When you’re searching for subjects about which to publish, knowing that the ads for one subject are worth more than the ads for another can help to guide you toward the best revenues.
 
Google, though, won’t tell you how much you’re receiving for each click on a specific ad. Nor is Google the only company that should be serving ads on your web site. However you’re receiving your ads, you should always be tracking the clicks and the money those clicks generate.
 
You have to do this yourself. Keyword value lists will give you only a vague idea of what a term or a subject is worth. In practice, the amounts change constantly, and they can be different on different web sites. Google uses a practice called Smart Pricing that takes into account not just the amount the advertiser has bid to appear on Web pages, but the actions that users take when they reach the advertiser’s site. The higher the value of your users to the advertiser, the more advertisers will have to pay. And the reverse is also true: A site with visitors who have little connection to the subject will receive little for each ad click, even when the advertiser has expressed a willingness to pay more.
 
Once you’ve decided on an overall topic for your web site, you should then write on different subtopics and track the revenues that those pages generate. Just as Darren Rowse noticed that camera reviews generated the most views and the highest revenues, so you should soon be able to see which subjects interest your readers and which bring up the highest-earning ads.
 
Niches Are Nice, but Micro-Niches Create Nicer KaChings
 
Let’s say that you’re excited about gardening. Every weekend you take a trip to the garden center, load up on plants, and spend your spare time digging around trees, laying down irrigation pipes, pruning branches, pulling up weeds, creating mulch, and doing all of the other things that green-thumb types do to keep their gardens looking pretty.
 
That’s not me, but let’s say it’s you.
 
You sign up at
Blogger.com
and write a few articles about gardening. You also join Google’s AdSense program, receive your AdSense code, and place it on your pages, optimizing the units so that they blend into the page. You leave comments on a few other gardening blogs and join forum discussions to let people know you’re there.
 
There’s a good chance that before the week is out, you’ll have received your first KaChing. One morning, you’ll look at your AdSense stats and find that instead of the total earnings column saying 0.00, it now says 0.10.
 
KaChing!
 
Okay, that’s not a very loud KaChing. You might think that dime isn’t going to change your life, but if you let it, it will. Forget the amount. Think of the principle. You’ve written about a topic you love and picked up money by doing it online. It’s small money now, but if you continue, those amounts are going to grow, and that KaChing is going to get louder.
 
So you continue writing articles. You pay attention to search engine optimization, and you use link exchanges to build up traffic. As your traffic increases, so does your income.
 
You also keep track of the performance of your articles. AdSense provides Channels, which are tracking tools that allow you to follow the performance of individual ad units. So you create separate channels for articles about fruit trees, flowers, lawn care, and bonsai management, and when you compare those channels, what you find is that articles about bonsai trees do particularly well. Traffic spikes every time you write about bonsai trees; your click-through rate (the percentage of users who click on an ad) is 3.5 percent instead of your usual 2.5 percent, and the average price per click on these ads is a dollar instead of the 60 cents you tend to pick up on other topics.
 
Fantastic. Now you have a blog about gardening that’s making money, and you know of a specific gardening topic that’s particularly valuable. That’s a real KaChing.
 
You could continue as usual, making sure that you include plenty of regular posts about bonsai trees. But you could also be a little clever. You know that bonsai might be a small part of gardening, but it’s still a broad enough topic to stand on its own. So you create a second free blog on Blogger dedicated to bonsai trees. You talk about it on the first blog to help build up the audience and keep posting content, keep including the AdSense code, and keep tracking the results.
 
Because this site is about only bonsai, you can be sure that everyone who reads it has a strong interest in that topic. More of them then will click the ads that are now from bonsai growers and suppliers of bonsai pots and training wires. The keywords will be more relevant and more concentrated, and as the site grows, it will appear higher in search engine results. And because it’s focused, other sites on the topic will talk about it, giving you even more traffic and even higher earnings.
 
That’s usually the way the Web works. The more specific the topic of a web site, the more dedicated the audience, the easier it is to market, and the more the site’s users are worth to companies active in that niche.
 
Your first choice then will be to decide whether you want to create a niche site based on knowledge from your profession or knowledge from your passion.
 
The second choice, which you’ll make once you’ve been online for a while, is which micro-niche you’ll write about next. Sure, you’ll then have to write two blogs, but because those two topics interest you anyway, writing about them should be fun—and the revenues will make it all worthwhile.
 
Best of all, because you have one site that’s already successful, you should find that the second one is able to get off to a flying start. When Darren Rowse started
Twitip.com
, a blog about Twitter, he had 1,000 RSS subscribers within a week of launch. Those people were signing up because they already knew his ProBlogger site and trusted Darren to deliver interesting information on his new blog as well.
 
As you expand the topics of your Internet business, you should find that easy growth happens for you, too.
 
You’re Not That Unique—Building Your Community
 
The goal of this chapter is to show how the things that interest you have value. Whether you work as a builder or a lawyer, you have professional knowledge that can bring you money online. Whether you’re interested in gardening or photography, you have passions that can bring you money online.
 
Everyone has a unique set of interests, a unique degree of interest in those topics, a unique collection of information about them, and a unique way of describing them.
 
But the interests themselves aren’t unique. If you’re the only person in the world interested in the sewing patterns on the sails of ancient Greek triremes, then you’re going to struggle to make money online. You won’t have any users, and the AdSense code will look at your content, shrug, and serve up something vaguely related.
 
But because other people are interested in the subject of your web site, you have an audience. Your advertisers have a market. And you have a community.
 
A community is more than just a collection of people. It’s a group with a shared interest and a shared goal. That interest could be gardening, jewelry making, American ghost towns, or anything else. The goal could be a better garden, jewelry that people want to buy, or the discovery of more ghost towns. The interest and the goal themselves aren’t what’s important. What is important is that the community feels tightly knit and that each member feels that he belongs. That closeness helps to keep your site going in the long term and makes it less likely that users break away to competitors. It’s why businesses offer membership plans and loyalty programs that reward customers and keep them close.
 
You’ll want to do whatever you can to keep that community together. That group of people with an interest in bonsai trees, photography, home repairs, or whatever your site is about should see you as one of its leaders. It should regard your site as a prime source for information about its topic.
 
When that happens, you draw lots of easy traffic to your web site. You are talked about constantly. The price of advertising on your site shoots through the roof, and you find it very easy to grow and sell.
 
In the past, turning your readers into a community used to be fairly difficult. You could look at your site statistics and see all sorts of information about your users. You could see where they were located, what search term they entered into a search engine before they reached you, which site they reached you from, and even which kind of browser they used to view your site.
 
But you didn’t really get to see them. Users were numbers in a table, faceless figures who determined your month’s online revenues. That’s all changed.
 
Now, users are people. You can see their names in their comments. You can read about their lives on Twitter, you can become friends on Facebook, and you can form professional relationships on Linkedln.
 
Those are all important elements in a successful site. Users have such a huge choice of Web pages to read and sites to visit that you have to keep them entertained, interested, and engaged if you’re going to ensure that your site grows. You want your visitors to see you not as another source to check every now and then, but as a friend they have online. Reading your web site should be as much a part of their daily routine as checking e-mail and visiting their Facebook page.
 
First, encourage people to leave comments on your blog. You should find that readers do that anyway, and it’s a fantastic thing. Seeing the results of a KaChing in your stats table is always encouraging, but when you get unsolicited comments from readers saying, “Great post!” and “Fascinating article,” you really do feel you’re on the right track.
 
Those sorts of comments are nice ego boosters, but you want more than that. You want users to leave their opinions and continue the discussion you’ve started. If you’ve written a post explaining how to create good compost, you want other gardeners to chime in with their composting tips. If your post is an opinion piece about the noise electric hedge trimmers make, then you want other people to join the argument, whether they agree with you or not.
 
Most of all, you want comments on your blog submitted by professionals. That shows that your blog has influence, is respected, and has content that can’t be found anywhere else—even if you didn’t write that content yourself.
 
There are things you can do to encourage comments. Writing about controversial subjects is perhaps the easiest. Every niche has issues about which people feel strongly. Editors on news sites know that when they write a news story about abortion, Israel, or health care, they’re going to get page after page of comments. If they write about the cost of potato chips in Sweden, however, it’s unlikely that they’ll get any.
 
You shouldn’t be writing about controversial topics all the time. That would make your site look predictable. But you should know which subjects are most likely to cause a storm in your community.
 
You should know too the effect that storm is going to have on you. My blog,
JoelComm.com
, is mostly about entrepreneurship and online marketing. Occasionally though, I’ll let fly on a subject that I feel strongly about it. It could be politics, business, or people not washing their hands after going to the bathroom. Those posts always generate lots of extra comments, but they can also irritate people—especially people with dirty hands (and they know who they are). Writing about controversial topics might cost you a few users who strongly disagree with you, but overall it’s a winner. Those who remain feel a closer connection with you. You’re not just a web site, you’re a person with opinions, thoughts, and feelings. You’re someone just like your readers: a friend and a member of their community.
 
Comments are one way for your readers to communicate with you and to share their thoughts with other members of your community. It’s social media, though, that’s really made the difference for publishers trying to turn their users into a community.

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