How to Profit off a blog

How to profit off a blog is something I have learned how to do, and I share that knowledge.  As a former content writer at the content, mills I saw the beauty of blogging long ago. When you update a blog often, you earn more money if it is the right niche. Visitors will return often because you update often and more visitors equal more money. 

Make sure the information is relevant and helpful so people will return. If you have good information, they will return repeatedly. Maybe they will post it on Facebook, or email a friend about your web site. Every bit of traffic helps if you are trying to profit off a blog.  Find the right keywords in your niche and write up the posts.

Add fun stuff, make your blog helpful or entertaining and they will return.  More visits means more profits for you and if that is your goal update often.  Updating often does not mean writing daily, although you could do that. The smarter blogger pre-writes posts and schedules them to be published a week at a time.  That is how to profit off a blog!  I hope this short blog post will help you on your road to profits or at least gave you food for thought. 

Pimping Content Page Views

If you are sick of pimping page views for articles, you have written on the content mills, this is the blog post for you.  Take that anger and make something positive happen. Begin to get profits off blogging. Get an adsence account and put your articles on line.  Of course, you need to make sure your posts are SEO’d or you will be writing for free, and that is a bad thing.

Every niche out there has a golden key word or key phase that will bring in the visitors, which means more visitors to your web site.  Find that golden key word or phrase and you will be set to begin profiting off your blog. Chances are if you are interested enough in a topic to write about it, then these are others who also enjoy that subject. Make your content engaging and people will return and perhaps bring a friend.

Of course, not all the visitors in the world will mean anything if your blog is filled with typos and grammar mistakes.  Type all posts in MS word to insure they are typo free, write good content, and keep the blog updated often. If you do these things perhaps, you will begin to see profits off your blogs.

A Contest, Win an Autographed Book

I belong to a writer’s group called the Circle 8 Writers and we have been publishing Anthologies since September 2010. I love writing fiction and have been doing it since I was a teenager.  The best way to relax for most people is curling up with a good book. The best way for me to relax is sitting down and writing fiction.

 I have a favorite character I often write short stories about and her name is Paisley. I am in the process with the Circle 8 editor Robert Arend to make Paisley a short story anthology I am honored that they think so highly of my character that they think she deserves her own book! So far four of my Paisley stories have appeared in the Circle 8 Writers group books.

I am blessed to be in a group with such awesome writers I consider friends. There is currently a contest where the visitors can win an autographed book by the founder of the group, Angel Sharum.  Check out her blog for more information. 

Angel's Blog http://www.angelsharums-storyboard.blogspot.com/

Hey also check out the group's Facebok Page. 

KDP Program Restored my Faith

My KDP select experiment began in February 2012. It is important to note that I had been selling on the Kindle platform since October 2011, so I am still a newbie. I have the stats to prove it, yes, it is sad.

I was ready to give up and began searching the net on how to spur sales. I found the KDP blogs, articles etc. it seems as if everyone as singing its praises. I prayed this would be my answer.

I wanted my piece of the pie. So I enrolled a brand new (never published) eBook entitled ‘3x Heart Attack Survivor’. This one is based on my heart attacks and the changes I made since I had them in 2009. I had 103 downloads for the two days that it was free and there were also 3 sales of this title in February.

I had seen that in the days immediately following the ‘freebie’ day that my sales were hitting. I knew I was on to something so I went ahead and edited the book one day. I put the titles of all of my books at the end of the ‘3x Heart Attack Survivor’ and found that it did spur additional sales.

I went ahead and added two more of my books into the KDP select program after I had edited them to include each of my other titles. I went ahead and scheduled the freebie days on all three eBooks to include Fridays for the near future.

I choose Fridays for various reasons, but the most important reason is that as a freelance writer I know my page views on blogs and web content seem to spike on Fridays and Saturdays. This means simply more people are surfing the web on Fridays.

Before I show results here I need to show my stats from previous months to show why I feel strongly that each indie writer needs to have at least one book in this program.

In October 2011, I sold two eBooks.

In November 2011, I sold two more eBooks.

In December 2011, I sold three eBooks.

In January 2012, the amount of copies sold three

Now you see why I felt the need to do something here. Sales were sagging and the first four months I sold 10 copies of various books.

February, which was my first month in the KDP program I got 23 sales and had 293 downloads! All of those free books, which were down loaded, had the other titles so I was essentially advertising all of my other books multiple times without effort.

February I had more sales than in the first four months combined. My profits were more than I doubled for this month when compared to the first 4 months. Some could argue that my eBooks had finally been noticed, but I do not think that is the answer. I do believe that if that were the case the sales and profits would have risen a little and not made a huge jump there.

I do honestly believe that that jump in sales is because I have the three books in the KDP program. March is already almost half of what I did in February and it is only the ninth. I cannot wait to see if sales keep on the current trend. 

Blogging for free

If you are wondering how to blog for free, this blog post will give you some great ideas. You can blog free many places, but some are much better than others are.

Wordpress will allow anyone to set up a blog for free. You can write on almost any topic but you will not really profit from this type of blogging.  The site does get a fair amount of traffic so if you want to spread the information you wish to share with lots of people, go for this option.

However, if you would like to enjoy what you write and profit then head to blogger.com. The traffic here is good depending on the topic. Best of all as you share your passion you can earn a bit of money. When you allow your adsence account to display ads on your blog here you might profit if someone clicks that ad.

The way I see this is, if I am going to write anything I would enjoy the profit no matter how small from visitors who may click on my ads.  Trust me a penny or two adds up, and some of these topics bring in ads, which pay way more than a penny or two. 

Content Writing Confessions

When I tell people that I am a freelance writer that looks I get are varied. Some people cannot believe that I actually make a living working for myself, and sharing my thoughts on different topics. Other people are curious and ask many questions about the process of it all.

Yet others cannot believe that online content writing is really considered work. Let me tell you writing is writing and as long as you are making money at it is considered work. I do not live in a mansion, and fax my house is a three-bedroom ranch style home. The money that I do make from my freelance writing does pay the bills on this house. I do not receive help for anybody as I do this on my own.

I began writing here of associated content writing articles for the web, 9 months later I moved to over to helium and began writing there. I have just had my second anniversary with associated content, and my helium anniversary was a few months ago. I've also written for a few other websites who pay me to a content. I do consider myself a professional freelance writer. I do make a living off this.

Back in November 2008, I had written an article that appeared in that month's issue of girlfriend-to-girlfriend. This article was about to single women's' guide to preparing her house for the winter. Primarily for the last nine years, I have been a single mom, except for a brief 18 months hiatus when I try to reconcile my marriage. Therefore, in that time I have done a lot of preparing my house for winter so that my heating bills could stay lower. I very much enjoyed writing that article, and to be paid for something that was not really considered content writing made me feel very good.

Back in April of this year, I had submitted a creative writing piece to unsent letters, which is a nice paying market. Specifically it is for those letters that you need to write for the emotional release, but never intended to send out to whomever you wrote the letter to. My letter has not been published as of yet however I do know that it will be published at some point in the future.

On March 4, 2009, I received an e-mail alerting me to the fact that I had sold my first article to an out-of-state newspaper. The Connecticut Post has agreed to publish one of my articles in their weekender issue of their newspaper. This one makes me feel that I have arrived and I am worthy of calling myself a professional writer.

Well I will continue to do the online content writing, because it is good money. I will be focusing more on the articles, which appear in print. I am also continuing to enter short story contest as well as to send my short stories about to be included in print as well as online collections. I am continuing to work on my work in progress and it coming along nicely but it is harder work than I had imagined.

Online content writing does pay and does pay well. As with anything in life, you get out of online content writing, which you put forth. Me I choose to write a lot, because I enjoy it and I love the comments that I got from people who enjoy what I write.

Associated Content Top 100 2009

When I first got official notice from Associated Content staff about my placement in the top 100, I was speechless and this does not happen very often. I am a very vocal person, but as I sat here stupidly pointing to the screen, unable to utter the words I was so proud of my accomplishment. Then I got excited and you could not shut me or my fingers up.

I called my kids, and I even called my parents and told them my news. Top 100 out of almost 200,000 writers from various locations around the world is something to be proud of and I was so proud of myself for this accomplishment.

I keep track of all my page views monthly so it was easy to separate articles that were written in 2008 and copy them to another excel sheet where I added them up. I am sure there are several higher but I got 1,010,677 views for those 567 articles. It paid off for me. SEO works but I do not use it for every article, but the page views soar when I use SEO and it's a popular topic.

1,010,677 page views is an awesome thing to see, and know that they are yours. Whoa. Knowing that 661,123 of those page views came from 48 articles just blows my mind that is the power of SEO and hot topics. As for the other 349,554 page views came from the other 519 article is sad.

Also thank you to my faithful readers who read everything I publish like you Charlie K and others. I would name you all, but I would forget someone's name and I wish to have no more hard feelings. Just know it is a collection of writers and readers from my fan base here.

A huge shot out to all those gaming fans who gave me over half a million-page views in just five and a half months lets do it again this year. I'll keep writing if you keep visiting.

I would like to say thank you  Amber, Alex, and Timothy (,y kids) for your encouragement to me to keep writing and giving me the time to do so. I love all of you.