Savvy Affiliate

Sooner or later all bloggers reach the point where they decide it is time to start trying to make money.  I’ve gone on growing long enough, now for the rewards.   And of course there are several ways to monetize your site.  The one this post covers is ReviewMe

As you are probably aware, reviewme is a marketplace where bloggers can sell blog posts to advertisers for a price they name.  ReviewMe takes have the proceeds, the blogger gets the other half.  Some people like the revenue that this brings in, some people think that it is whoring out your blog.

I personally don’t have a problem with paid reviews.  But if I’m going to whore my blog, I better get a decent amount for it.  So in order to decide when I should post on the marketplace, I need to decide what the minimum dollar amount I will accept is, and if I can get that.

I think that in order to be worth the research and writing time I would need to put into a review, as well as the potentially negative effect monetizing my site can have on traffic and future growth, I would need to receive $50 from the review.  As ReviewMe takes half the earnings, this means that my reviews would go for $100.

Will I be able to charge $100 for a review?  Will people pay it?  In order to figure that out I need to scope out some of the blogs on the site which are charging similar amounts, and see if SavvyAffiliate can compete with them.

In order to do that I go to ReviewMe and look up my category, blogging, and pick several sites at Random.  ReviewMe grades a site on 3 categories, Alexa Ranking, Technorati Ranking, and RSS.  Since it will be hard to get the stats for their feeds, I will just compare Alexa Ranking and Technorati.  So how do my stats compare up?

 The Stats for Savvy Affiliate

                                 Alexa Ranking            Technorati Ranking      

Savvy Affiliate -    347,000                           59,000                     

Lets see how some other sample sites stack up

Deadprogrammer’s Cafe  -964,492             66,334

Jarkolicious            226,000                          6,564

Stephen Fung        80,500                             10,000

MaxPower             26,700                              8,300

ShandyKing           66,890                             22,020

Friday Traffic Report - 25,633                   25,847

Business Blog Wire     - 145,611                 6,199

Average                        219403                20,752

Clearly Savvy Affiliate isn’t quite popular enough yet to merit charging $100 for a review.  In fact further analysis seems to indicate that I would be quite competitive at the $40 price range, but that is not my threshold.

What does this mean to you?  This is just an example of the kind of analysis you can do with your site to find out if you are maximizing your profit from it.  If my analysis had indicated that my site was too strong for $100, I would have kicked it up a notch to charge all the traffic would bear.

Additionally it means that you, as a reader of Savvy Affiliate, can enjoy a while more of interruption free blogging tips.

Do you use ReviewMe?  Has it become a solid source of income for you, or merely an also-ran?

• » Comments (0)

Although many bloggers are working for themselves and don’t have client to bill per se, bloggers are, almost by definition, entrepreneurs.  One habit that entrepreneurs have is a tendency to start many different businesses.

So it is likely that many bloggers, (perhaps you?) are in the process of starting a business or are considering it.  So how will you decide how much to charge your clients? 

FreelanceSwitch has a handy Hourly Rate calculator.  

Although I only rarely do any free lance work anymore, running some test numbers from back when I used to do a lot more showed me that it is remarkably accurate, so I recommend checking it out.

• » Comments (0)

Can Blogging Really Make Money?

People unfamiliar with blogging often ask if you can actually make a decent amount of money blogging.  Happily, the answer is a whole hearted yes.  As such I like to post good example of bloggers making bank whenever I find them.

Although this site is still in a growth stage, and I haven’t attempted to seriously monetize it yet, one great example of similar page raking in the cash is Self Made Minds.  They recently posted on their May income, and since it isn’t the end of may I can prorate that a bit, and say they made approximately $2000 this month. 

More importantly is their site is still growing madly.  Although $2000/month is not quite living expenses, their sites profit is continuing a mad dash upward.  They are still in the growth stages and can easily be expected to be making $7-8 K / month by the end of the year.    If you are interested in making money like that online, maybe you should start a blog.

• » Comments (2)

How Your Technorati Authority Relates To Your Income

There have recently been a lot of posts relating to how much money bloggers make.  I decided to take one of those posts, Paula’s List of Bloggers Salaries, and see if income had any correlation to Technorati Authority.  I used Paula’s list as my base and weeded out any I didn’t think qualified as Blogs, as well as any that didn’t have technorati Authority and plotted up the result.

I fit the data with a second order polynomial curve.  My reasoning here was that income would not be linear, i.e. as the site grew bigger and bigger additional authority would have less and less impact on its income. Although the curve fit isn’t as good as I had hoped,  ( R squared = .747 isn’t great), it still has a fairly distinct trend, especially once you get above the 1000 authority range.

The most striking thing about this chart is how little affect your authority seems to have on income for sites with Authority less than 1000.  It appears that for smaller sites, especially those first starting out, there is not a strong correlation between the number of other blogs linking to them and how much money they are making.   Several of the sites (Paula Neal Mooney, Authority 1031 Income $12000) have fairly strong authority but little income.  A couple (GPS review, Authority 80, Income $50000) have very weak authority but relatively strong income. 

I offer two explanations for some of the discrepancy between income and authority for lower ranking sites. The first is that sites such as Paula Neal have seen a recent jump in their authority, but the income hasn’t caught up.  Paula Neal is the source of this blogging income, and I know that it acting as heavy link bait.  I can only assume that posting the blogging salaries list has greatly driven up her backlinks, but that income has a lag time as she figures out how to best Monetize the new traffic.

Additionally some sites (such as GPS review) may be in a much better niche than others. It appears that GPS review, which I assume reviews GPS products, is in a very good niche.  They have managed to monetize their site well without relying heavily on blogger backlinks.  This is also partially due to the fact that their site is only part blog.  Additionally income is generated by their forums and shopping pages.

Kudos go to Steve Pavlina - who is managing to make bank despite only a medium high authority. His site says that he is making $1000/day (up significantly from a year ago).  So if you are looking for someone to model your site off of, you may want to check him out and learn his secrets.   So Steve, got an e-book?

Here is the Data I used to make the chart.  As there was no good income for Problogger or Shoemoney, those are both Guesstimates.   Several webpages on Paula’s chart (Woot for instance) were left off because she just considered Adsense income and not the income for the entire site, throwing off my chart.  Finally, a couple of the incomes (Connected Internet) were tweaked to be a better fit when I saw that the Paula had used April’s earnings which had taken a huge dip from March earnings.  In that case I gave connected Internet a salary of March earnings * 12.

I would like to continue this study, and maybe do an updated earnings/authority in a while.  In order to do so I need more data!  So what kind of money does your blog make?   Drop it in a comment and I’ll be sure to include it in the next batch.

• » Comments (9)

There Are So Many Things A Successful Blogger Must Do. Why learn them all when you can focus on your strengths

There are a lot of things that a successful blogger must be familiar with.  They include

• Html
• CSS
• PHP
• RSS
• SEO
• Generating Content
• Getting Backlink
• Tracking Stats
• Monetizing Your Site
• Affiliate Programs
• mySQL
• Taxes and Legal
• Databases and Backups

However many people starting blogging in the first place because they didn’t want to have to deal with those things.  Many people would like to focus only on a couple aspects of blogging, be it writing content, or SEO, or networking with other bloggers.  They don’t have the time necessary to learn the ins and outs of every detail.  But luckily they don’t have to!

So what can you do to help make your blog a success with out learning 5 different programming languages?  Outsource.   One of the biggest secrets to running a successful blog, or a company for that matter, is to pick what you are good at, do that, and outsource or delegate the rest of the work.

Self made minds wrote a recent article about blogging delegation and had a great quote

This is a good example of working in the business and not On the business

If you are spending too much of your time working at tasks you are not best at, then you are not maximizing your potential.  Instead of taking the time to learn a lot of skills you will need infrequently, contract them out to someone else.  That is a good way to ensure that you are thinking like a business owner, on how to expand your business, rather than like an employee, on how to do your job.

What are some things that you can outsource?  And how to do it?

1) Site Design - If you need a new design for your website, but aren’t very experienced at it, you may be much better off getting a more seasoned person do to it for you.  You will save yourself a lot of time, and you will get a better product in the end.   You can ask a friend to do it, pay someone to do it, or better yet Hold a Contest!

If you have a blog with a lot of viewership, try holding a contest where your readers can submit blog designs, you pick several that you like, and let your readers vote on the final choice.    Reward the winner by ensuring that their link is displayed at the bottom of every page.  (Works best if you have decent PR) What do you get out of this?  Well you will get a great looking site for starters.  You will also get increased ownership in your site from your readers.  If you change your site on your own, they may feel slighted.  But if you let them help you design your new layout, and vote on what they like best, they will be enthusiastic

2) Content Generation - If you would like to spend more of your time on networking and SEO and less on writing content, try getting some writers for your blog.  You can either reward them with backlinks or some ad placement on the pages they write.  This is great if you can get some newer bloggers who need to get some attention to their site and are willing to moonlight on your site to have a crack at your traffic.     As a bonus you will get a fresh point of view on your site, which may attract a new visitor base.

3) Technical Bugs - Although if you are running a program like Wordpress, you are not likely to have too many persistent bugs you don’t have to deal with these all yourself.  Try the wordpress support forums or any other technical forum.  Instead of spending your time trying to find the answer you can post a question and come back in a day for the solution.  Alternatively, try going down to the Computer Science classes at your local college to hire a student to help you part time.  They tend to be intelligent and cheap.

So do you do outsourcing for your site?  Do you try to run it all yourself?  Are you considering trying to expand your site and need help?

• » Comments (1)

How You Can Create a Million Dollar Webpage

With all the buzz out there about some 1 person blogs being worth 1 million plus dollars it makes people think, how can I create a million dollar page.  And there is actually no secret to it.   Most people already know how they can create a million dollar site, but are unable to do it.

There are two different methods for creating a valuable site

1. Viral Traffic - If you have a great, unique idea, you can create a million dollar site right away.  All you need is a slick idea, a slick interface, and you can be the next million dollar homepage.   What’s the problem with this?  A million dollar idea is hard to come up with, and it does no good to try and copy one.    Although viral sites can make a lot of money very fast, a good viral site can be hard to create.  And if you want to take an existing viral page and copy it to cash in on its success, think again.  Copycat viral sites almost always fail.
2. Contextual Traffic - This is the method which most bloggers attempt to do.  That is build up a content rich site which ranks well in a variety of keywords and has a wide base of monetization methods.  Building up a million dollar site through this method isn’t easy, but it does have the advantage that if you put the work into it you can almost always make a nice profit from it.

Creating a Million Dollar Contextual webpage isn’t a job for one day.  And learning how to do it right isn’t either.  As such, instead of trying to cram all the information into one post, I will be launching a new series of posts over the next 100 days.  The 100 Day Website Guide will be a step by step approach on how to start a webpage, get it off the ground, build traffic, and make money from it.  So stay tuned over the next 100 days.

Want to easily read all the posts in the 100 Day Website Guide?  Subscribe to my RSS feed

• » Comments (2)

How Much Money Can A 1 Page Site Make?

Scott over at self made minds recently posted a great article about Creating Mini-Sites.  In it he walks you through the process of why you should consider owning and creating a whole network of sites, not just one.   The best part about those sites is that once you have built them you have no maintenance. 

So what is a mini Site? A mini-site is a webpage which only has a single page, or at most a few.  It is designed to get its traffic through viral means, i.e. other people linking to it, as opposed to putting up lots of content and getting search engine hits.   Since a mini site is only intended to be a single page, once you have built that page you are done with the site, and can move onto the next one. 

What do you put on a mini Site?  Because the mini Site doesn’t have a large amount of content to draw search hits, you have to have something on there which will draw blog links.  You need to create viral content to have a mini Site.  One idea for viral content is a very well researched and written how to guide for a common problem which people have but is not well documented.  A better idea for viral content is to create a web based tool which answers a question no other tool does.  If you can create that tool, or many such tools, it can be a good idea to place them on their own page.

 So what are some of the advantages to creating mini Pages?

• Easy To Create - Although most bloggers have experience running their one site, and think that all websites require a lot of work to set up and maintain.  A mini Site is brilliant in its simplicity.  Once it is set up, you are done
• Can Build On Those Sites In The Future - If you have a large network of mini Sites, next time you want to start a new larger site you won’t have to start from scratch.  You will be able to take one of your mini sites and modify and expand it.  That way you will already have a page which is ranked in the search engines, is out of the Google Sandbox, and is getting traffic.   The hardest parts of starting a new page will be done!
• Can leverage your network to each new site - If you have a whole network of pages you will be able to leverage them whenever you create a new site.  If you have 30 mini pages + 1 or 2 larger sites whenever it is time to start a new webpage you will be able to point 30 links at it and direct 30 sites worth of traffic to it.  This is a great way to jumpstart the PR of a new page! 

 The bottom line?  Next time you get a good idea, but think you don’t have the time to start a whole new website, conder creating a Mini Page.  Your bank account may just thank you.

• » Comments (0)

It Should Reassure New Webmasters, Your Earnings Will Grow

One thing that should help low earning webmasters feel better about their website is the assurance that if they keep working on it, their earnings will grow.  In fact, it is likely that new sites will experience exponential growth which will help their page earn profits in a short order.

So what is the biggest reason that a webpage’s profit grows?   Accumulation of content and links.  Problogger has a recent post about seeing his Amazon.com affiliate earnings grow with out understanding why, until he realized it was just due to general growth of his site.

The best thing a webmaster can do to grow his earnings is to simply grow his site.  As you grow your page by writing more and better pages you will quickly acquire a huge mass of content on your site.  This content will get increasing numbers of search engine hits and will display increasing numbers of ads.  Although at the beginning of a webpage’s life it may seem like it isn’t making any money at all, soon enough your site will hit a critical mass, and the profit from it will take off.

I have been asked before how long it generally takes a webpage to become profitable.  The answer is that you should give your site at least 6 months of work before you expect to see a decent profit from it.  Although it may seem excessive to work for 6 months before you get any money back, once you do start making a profit it will tend to continue without too much work for you.  However some webmasters never make it to the 6 month critical point.  They are willing to give their site a month of hard work, and once they don’t see returns they give up.

If you want to make money with your site, you have to be willing to stick with it.

• » Comments (0)

A Rash A Blog Values, But This One Is The Best

There has recently been a rash of posts out there about how much bloggers earn, and how much their blogs are worth.

 Paula has posted a list of blogger salaries

WW-Success followed on with a list of Millionaire Bloggers

I posted how I though Millionaire Bloggers was overstating the case

But far and away the best to come out of this so far is a post on A Virtual Exit - detailing a much better way to value a blog.  And better still, they have a spreadsheet that allows anyone to put in their own numbers, and see what your blog is worth.  Alternatively you can put in some numbers for how you think your blog will be doing in a couple of months.  This will let you know what your blog will be worth in the future.

Why is this valuation the best?  Well it does two things.  The first is that it uses a very realistic PE ratio of 3.  Since bloggers own very little and have trouble defending their intellectual property it makes sense to value them less highly than some other ventures.  Additionally the model takes into account a bloggers expenses.  One interesting thing you see from the spreadsheet is that bloggers expenses scale very well with traffic.  Using their model, a blog with 6000 unique visitors a month and a PR of 3 has only 1/2 the expenses of a blog with 240,000 visitors a month and a PR of 6.   But the PR 6 blog has over 60 times the PR 3 blog’s earnings!

• » Comments (2)