Work at Home Wednesdays: Step up what you already have

For today’s WAHW post, I want to talk about quick ways to pull in some funds. I had been tossing around this idea in my mind earlier this week, and a few outside sources all came together to really push home that this was the post to write this week.

Since it is just after the first of the month, I have just been paid for different ad schemes on the two blogs I write. This time, and last month, were big enough I finally stuck my head up and noticed. What changed? Well, let’s have a look.

- I ditched what wasn’t working.
- I added new or different sources of ad revenue.
- I moved things around.

I really also have to state that on this blog (my personal one) I am making more money off it than I was two years ago, and I have HALF the traffic that I used to. So clearly, this income is not traffic based. On the other blog, it is an extremely focused niche topic with a good page rank and a high amount of targeted search traffic. Between them both, the income from them has jumped TEN TIMES what it was six to twelve months ago.

If you’re reading this, chances are you have a blog and you’re at least slightly interested in making at least a small income from it. Kind of like the readers at Problogger. I left a comment on a recent entry of Darren’s, after his poll showed that a large portion of his readers made no money from their blog. I thought that was really quite odd, considering that’s what his blog is about – making money from your blog. I would assume the bulk of his readership is interested in making money from their blogs.

Something was up.

Now, it’s a really good blog, and since I have started following the advice there, my income *has* gone up. Many other bloggers can attest to that as well. So for the readers over there who were not making any money, one thing was clear to me: they were not following Darren’s advice. I left a comment asking basically what was holding them back? What I meant was, what was holding them back from making more money from their blogs?

I didn’t check for responses until today, and had no idea I touched off a bit of a firestorm. Or maybe hit a nerve in some people. Who knows? At any rate, form the rest of the comments it seems like most people had just stuck a tentative toe in the waters and were waiting.

So here’s my proposal: have an objective look at your site. Anything need improvement? if you are just using one source of ad revenue (google adsense, for example) then you are limiting your options. Most ad schemes allow you to run a maximum, and run alongside others. Take advantage of that, but try not to be so plastered with ads you annoy people. There’s a balance: find it.

If something is not working, drop it. Add something different to try that out. Move your ad placements around.

If you have affiliate links on your page, and you have them there because you like the products, talk about it. BLOG IT! This might seem obvious, but when I talked to some other mom bloggers who make money online, two of them said affiliate programs didn’t work for them. Which is fine, really I understand they are not for everyone, but the thing I noticed was, despite the fact I was a regular reader of both their blogs, I had no memory of them ever mentioning what affiliates they had.

Again, try not to be annoying and mention affiliate links in every post, but regular readers should be aware of you have them. Not everyone reads your blog at your site (hello rss reader) and many readers are “sidebar blind”.

There’s another point – if you have everything under the sun on your sidebars (or sidebarS to squeeze it all in) give them a real going-over and clean them up. There’s no point in having 20 ads all over the place if they all wind up getting ignored and most of them earn you nothing or very little.

What’s holding people back? In a nutshell, here’s an overview:

- too many or too few ads
- bad ad placement
- relying on one source of ad income
- fear of ticking off or driving away readers

I’ve covered the first three, and as for that last one – if you run a WordPress blog and you get a decent amount of search traffic, try the Who Sees Ads plugin. This will show ads only on archive & single post pages, and just to people coming from search engines. If they are a regular, they won’t see any ads. (This will be coming soon to all my blogs.)

From a readership standpoint, I use FireFox as my main browser and I have an ad blocker. I don’t see most of the ads unless I turn off AdBlock. And when I DO see ads on mom blogs, especially for other mom-based businesses, I try to look around and see fit here’s anything interesting and click when I find something.

I was also going to put “lack of knowledge” in there as a reason, but I have found that many people DO know what they should be doing, they just haven’t done it yet, partly because the information is either overwhelming or confusing. Or maybe it’s fear of failure, who knows. Check out your blog, pick a few things, and try shuffling items around. Let it run for a bit them, check your stats and see the change.