About Writing Books

I’ve found that my book’s audience is folks who are just starting out and are not willing to spend hard-earned cash on an ebook that might not provide what they’re looking for. The folks who bought my book have a general idea of what’s going on online and purchased my book looking for insider tips or bits of information they haven’t thought of as yet.

So, to better get the information in front of the people who really need it, I’ve decided to take on a different distribution approach. To that end, I’ve refunded the purchase price of my Make Money Blogging book to all those who purchased it.

Instead of selling the book, I’m giving it away for free.

How to Make Money by Giving Free Books Away

Here’s where my books can serve several purposes. After reviewing the download activity on my first free book, I realize that there were several thousand copies of the book downloaded since writing it back in August of 2010.  Not a ton of downloads, but not bad considering it wasn’t marketed. There were enough downloads for me to believe it’s making its way around the Internet and hopefully helping newbie writers.

Those downloads tell me that there is an audience out there that might be receptive to targeted links from individuals who would like to get the word out about their blog, product or service. Yep, I’m talking about targeted advertising.

Thinking Out of the Box

My book is several chapters long. At the end of each chapter, I’ve created an advertisement page. On that page, I am selling ad space to anyone interested in getting a little exposure (I’m talking about links to blogs, affiliate marketing and the like).

Since I don’t do loud and obnoxious, the ads won’t be either. Basically I’m seeking people who wish to purchase ad space or links that are synergistic with the information I’m providing in my book. I’m not looking for flashy pictures or graphics that would detract from the book’s content.

Pricing for Ebook Advertising

Before I go into the pricing, I want to make this point clear. I was leaning towards giving the book away for free whether or not it is financially supported by ads. But, if someone is interested in purchasing ad space, here’s the pricing (which I think is reasonable). Ads should be 75 words or less:

• 3 Months for $9.99
• 6 Months for $18.98
• 9 Months for $26.97
• 12 Months for $33.97

(Less than $3.50 a month)

Why Quarterly Ads?

I’m trying quarterly ads (and am leaning towards semi-annual ads) because it allows me to weed out dead links and remove ads that are no longer valid. By using Broken Link Checker plugin, I’m becoming painfully aware just how quickly links become obsolete.

Quarterly (or semi-annual) ads will force me to keep the book and ads up-to-date and relevant (Once I’m finished with the Make Money Blogging book, I’m going to take on the task of updating the So You Want to be a Freelance Writer book).

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think the advertising cost is too high. For less than four dollars a month you can get your link into a book that will be freely distributed and shared on the Internet.

Let the Experiment Begin

I’ve set up the basic groundwork to start accepting ads for the second quarter. The cut off deadline is 48 hours prior to the end of the quarter (in other words March 29th). At that time I will make the necessary changes and release the revised free ebook on April 1, 2012.

Keep in mind that with something new there will be glitches and work-arounds. Please bear with me as I navigate through these unchartered waters. I welcome you to join me in this new adventure.

If all works out well, it will be a win-win-win situation. Newbies get free information, bloggers/affiliate marketers can advertise to a targeted audience, and I…well, I can make a couple of bucks and get my book in front of the eyes that need to read it. I think it’s a win all the way around.

Wish me luck!

Anyway, between learning more about consolidating blogs, formatting ebooks for a professional look, formatting books for Kindle and PubIt, I’m also learning quite a bit about newsletters, email lists and Aweber features (not to mention that my brainstorming sessions are never ceasing).

On top of that, I recently came across an ad management tool. This tool, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business is an answer to a growing problem that I seem to be having. You see, increasingly I’m receiving requests to advertise on my blogs/websites. The requests are emails that go something like this:

I’ve recently come across your site and am impressed with the content (they never tell me which site). I have a client who is interested or I am interested in advertising on your site (sometimes it’s a link within the content or a link on the home page).

My client/I have a budget of $XX and would be interested in arranging an advertising partnership.

That’s not the exact text of the emails I’ve been receiving but you get the gist of it. The emails have been coming with increasing frequency, which is good (I guess). The problem is I don’t know how to or want to spend the time with managing ads. That’s why I use Google AdSense. Set it and forget it.

Enter DoubleClick for Publishers

In reading the Inside AdSense blog, there was a recent post entitled Ad Serving Explained. Not that I was interested on how ads were displayed, but the DoubleClick video caught my attention. Check it out for yourself.

The best part of the whole deal is that sign up is free. So, I immediately signed up and realized, “Whoa, I’ve got a lot to learn.” I have no problem with learning, but for some reason I’m in an obsessive learning phase in my freelance writing career. If I could boil everything down into liquid form to drink it or vaporize it to inhale it, I’d be ahead of the curve.

Unfortunately, drinking or inhaling isn’t an option so tacked onto the rest of the things I’m learning, I’ve got to learn how to utilize DoubleClick for Publishers to get the most bang for my buck.

Although this current learning phase seems a little overwhelming, I fully expect that it will pay off in the end. A year from now when I’ve mastered these tools, I’ll be glad that I took the time to grow.

Speaking of growth, what have you been learning lately?

Abandoning a Blog

One of my newly created blogs has been taking quite a long time to get off the ground. I never expect too much in the first year, but this particular blog wasn’t showing the same signs of life early on in the process as my other blogs had. I figured the topic was a dud topic and that it just didn’t pay. Some folks don’t believe in placing ads on a new blog, but I do. It’s my measuring stick to see if my efforts are paying off.

The traffic to the blog is minimal, which is to be expected. What was a bit unusual was that in the several months that the blog has been up, the ad clicks were just about non existent. That was a little unusual even with minimal traffic. So, I made a mental note to abandon the blog. After all, in the space of 5 and a half months I earned a whopping .03 cents.

Changing the Ad Size and Location

Before totally abandoning the blog, I decided to change the location and the size of the ads. The color remained the same, but I increased the size of the ad and placed it within the content instead of above the content.

The flow of traffic remained the same but in less than a week, the blog earnings increased from .03 to $1.92. No, I won’t get rich off of $1.92 but it did tell me one thing…don’t abandon the blog. After not having a single ad click since August, I’ve had ad clicks several days in a row.

Getting Back to the Basics

I guess I was falling into the “disposable society’ syndrome. If it doesn’t work, throw it out. Instead, I realized that I didn’t need to get rid of the blog, it just needed some tweaking.

Lesson Learned:

If your blog’s income seems flat or barely existent, play around with the ad placement, size and/or color. You might be pleasantly surprised at the results.

Of course after a momentary celebration, I had to take a more detailed look at how I did it and how I should approach this residual writing stuff going forward.  Here’s how I got there this year:

• eHow 49%
• Suite 24%
• Google 16%
• Infolinks 4%
• Text Link Ads 2%
• Amazon 1%
• Chitika 1% (I’ve since dropped Chitika)
• Affiliate sales 2%
• Kontera, Orato and AdBrite 1%

Earning $20,000 in residual income is especially exciting considering how much it cost for me to do it.  My top two money makers cost $0 to join.  Most of the rest of my income is tied into my own sites which cost me about $100 per year in hosting and $10 per domain name (I’ve registered about 5 domain names this year and only used 2). When I renewed my existing domains last year, I renewed them for multiple years so I didn’t incur the expense this year.

So far in 2010, I spent about $150 (although, this doesn’t include purchasing a new USB headset when my other one crapped out on me a couple of weeks ago).  When I compare my current expenses to the expenses I incurred driving to a part-time job 5 days a week, I’ve got to say that quitting that part-time job and working from home was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. After all, the part-time job only paid $8.38 an hour.

My Goals Going Forward

It is quite obvious after looking at the percentages that I’ve got a lot of work to do. I need to balance my numbers a bit more and add one or two more revenue sources.  In addition to more diversification, I need to beef up my numbers all around.  By increasing everything else, my eHow percentage will have less of an impact on my income. I’m not comfortable with them being the lion share of my revenue source.

I also want to invest in my money making resources.  I need to do things like upgrade my computer software, blog themes and some of my computer hardware.  My existing software/hardware has done a fine job in getting me to where I am, but I’d like to ramp things up a bit going forward.

In addition to the physical ramping up, I’ve got some mental ramping to do.  I’ve got to spend more time studying, learning and improving on what I’ve done in the past three years.  The Internet is constantly changing and if I want my earnings to grow (I’m still aiming for $10,000 per month in residual income), I’ve got to change along with it.

Well, there you have it, $20,000 in residual income.  If I can do it, I KNOW you can too.

A few facts about the blog

1. It provides reviews of a particular type of product.
2. Blog was created in January of 2009
3. It currently has 43 blog posts (an average of 2.2 posts per month)
4. Its written under an assumed name
5. All comments are closed
6. Google page rank: 2
7. Alexa Page Rank: 5,049,715 (far from impressive)
8. WordPress platform using a basic Thesis theme. No bells whistles or pretty pictures.
9. Daily traffic averages between 100 and 150 pages views. On a good day I may get close to 200 views, but generally it stays between 100 and 150.
10. Monetized with Google AdSense and InfoLinks. Earlier on I applied to Text Link Ads but they turned my blog down. I guess it didn’t get enough traffic for them. Who knows, maybe I’ll try applying again in the future.

Things I Noticed

I paid a little attention to where the traffic was coming from and where it was going. I used to insert a lot of links to the product manufacturer’s website to help my readers continue researching the product. One day, like a bolt, I realized I was linking away my income.

Most of the product manufacturers use Google AdWords and their ads were displaying on my blog. My readers were clicking on my links rather than the manufacturer ad links. Once I realized that, I went back and removed all manufacturer links. Now I will refer to the manufacturer website such as manufacturer.com, but I won’t hyperlink it.

The only hyperlinks in the posts are to other posts on the blog or articles I’ve written elsewhere on the same subject. No more giving away income.

Once I stopped giving away income I noticed the blog started earning more money. I can’t say for sure whether the monthly change in income was because I stopped the outside linking or because one month I wrote 4 posts instead of two, but between May of 2010 and June of 2010 the blog’s monthly income went from $69.97 to $315.20!

The following month the income dropped a little but it still earned $273!

[smartads]

As far as blogs go, I believe it has a nice monetary return per post. Since starting the blog, the posts are averaging $31.88 each (that’s 43 posts divided by the total blog’s income of $1,371.01). The $31.88 is a bit deceiving because during the first year the average earnings per post were $15.12. This year, so far, each post is averaging $54.33. I’d say that’s an improvement.

Lessons Learned

Here are a few things I’ll carry forward when I develop my next blog.

1. The blog’s topic will be about a product or service. I find those types of blogs offer the best financial return. I’ve got blogs on topics that are dear to my heart, but those are a labor of love because they earn bupkis.
2. I won’t give away links
3. I will place ads on the blog from day one. There had been some debate as to whether its good practice to immediately place ads on a brand new blog. Well, if I’m creating a money making blog, it’s difficult to make money without ads, so I put them on immediately. The blog that I refer to above earned $4.32 in the first month. That’s hard to do without ads.
4. Slowly add content and monitor the traffic. Some folks like to add a lot of content immediately when creating a new blog. I prefer just the opposite. I’ve found that even with a few posts you can tell whether the blog is a winner or not. I’d hate to spend an untold amount of time creating a ton of posts only to find out that it’s not a money maker. I like to work smart, not hard.
5. A surprising thing that I’ve learned is that there is life on the second, third or fourth page of Google. I don’t think my blog often ranks on Google’s first page. I’m sure if I put in a lot of time and effort I can make it happen, but I’d rather not work that hard.
6. I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that choosing the right blog topic and time are the two most important ingredients for a successful money making blog. If you have those two ingredients, your blog will make money.