Do you Blog for Money or Readers?

One of my new online friends Heather at Home with Heather was commenting in a recent post that she was thinking of dropping adsense from her blog as it wasn't producing anything meaningful for her. Heather is not alone as I know a number of bloggers who feel the same way. What these folks have in common is that they all produce top quality reader friendly blogs. This unfortunately is a death blow for adsense income.

Adsense works if you derive most of your traffic from the search engines. It doesn't work if you attract a loyal readership. Readers read - they come to your blog because they like your content. They may leave a comment and possibly follow links you have mentioned - what they don't do is click on ads or adsense. For the most part they don't even notice the irrelevant parts of your site once they have been back enough times. They know where your content lies and get straight to it.

Search engine traffic produces mostly first time visitors who are looking for something in particular or are just out sunday driving. If they find something of value on your blog you may gain a new reader. If they don't find what they want there is a decent chance they will click an ad or follow the adsense trail. Most, of course hit the back button and continue on their merry way.

I bring this up because we all need to ask ourselves what type of visitor are we after? Do I want readers or browsers?

When I started this blog I structured it like my my niche sites. This was not so much a conscious decision but rather an old habit. My niche sites have 1 purpose - to make money. To make money they have to produce adsense clicks and sell affiliate products. I have found a pretty successful way of doing this and without thinking about it I set this blog up the same way. It worked well for the first 6 months and then something strange happened - readers started showing up. Comments were left. People started asking questions. I suddenly had to concern myself with writing for an audience. Cool I thought.

Once I started writing as if someone might actually read my stuff I found that I could no longer experiment with adsense bait or affiliate links. The result is that while my readership has grown my income has decreased drastically. In the past I wrote articles on popular ebooks, products or the latest fad designed to attract beginners. These topics could draw a decent traffic flow from the serp's and every so often I would rank well for a winner and my adsense revenue would take off. Project Payday and Roadmap to Riches are two of my most productive keywords - they still bring in 100 plus visitors a day to this blog, visitors who do the most adsense clicking. I could slap affiliate links into my posts and know that there would be some sales.

The problem now is that I am finding it hard to experiment or "play around" with this blog as I don't want to turn off my readers. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that I have readers. I've never had any before and this is my first taste of belonging to the "community". The thing is, and you need to define this as well, what is your purpose in blogging? Do you want to be an A-list blogger? Do you want to make money? If you want to be the former then it will be hard to do the latter.

Hey, hold on there. John Chow is an A-list member and he makes lots of money. True or so he claims and I don't dispute this. The point is that he makes money selling his name. He can command money for paid reviews and advertising because he is well known and has a large readership. People pay him to get mentioned by him. Everyone and their dog pastes a link to him on their blog hoping he will acknowledge them in return. The problem is that until you become an A-lister you will not be able to make money like they do. In the meantime you can't do the things that will make you money because you wont become an A-lister if you do.

There is what, maybe a dozen people at the top and a few up and comers that might make it but after that there are millions of blogs that wont. This isn't a slight on anybody - just a numbers thing. There isn't room for a Thousand A-listers, there will always be a handful that crawl on top of the pile and reduce everyone else to B-list status. It's just the way it works.

I don't spend much time reading the A-listers - I can't remember the last time I learned anything from them that made me a dime. Really, reading about who they know and what conference they just attended doesn't make me money. I have never read a paid review - have you? Did you go to the reviewed site and spend money? (Have you paid for a review? What were the results?) I've never clicked an ad on their blogs. Sure there is lots of info available on what the IM community is doing but this doesn't make me money either. Getting visitors that click and buy is what makes money. Posting a link to John Chow doesn't get me these types of visitors. I have said this before - if your audience is Internet marketers then you will starve. IM'ers don't buy and if they do they use their own link. They don't click ads and they don't click adsense.

I got involved in this niche because it allows a blogger to increase pagerank easier than any other niche I know of. Try and get a thousand backlinks for "Ugg Boots" or "Fish Recipes". Try and get 1 high PR link. Hard to do. Niche marketers don't handout links. IM'ers do and I wanted a high PR blog so that I could use it for all sorts of things.

What am I getting at?

I guess this is my way of apologizing in advance to my readers, I want to start making money again and thought I would warn you to ignore some of the stuff you see in future - my experiments to come as it were. Or you can try it yourself. I don't want to be an A-lister, not my style and quite frankly I have always liked making money anonymously. There is less work and you can try a lot of stuff and get away with it as long as you are under the radar.

This doesn't mean I don't value my readers, I do. I just don't want to bore you to death writing about the same topics as everyone else does in the IM community. It bores me actually. And it doesn't make me money. That said if you notice some strange things on here just chalk it up to an experiment. Some will work and some will not but it keeps me interested and hopefully I can pass on what I learn to you.

Cheers,

Grizzly