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While you are out doing the surf thing this weekend, if you see a banner ad that makes you click, ask yourself why did you click that ad! As we all know, advertising is the money maker online.

Basically: Two ways to make money online – you run ads, you convert the results of those ads to sales – OR – you have a product (software as a service (SaaS) seems to be quite popular!) – OR – (third bastard child way) a kind of marriage of those two are apps. You know how to write one that everyone wants to buy or fund you to make more or hire you to make their app.

Still, I’d like to know what makes you click that banner ad. What is it in particular that turned you on to click that ad. If you’d like to leave some feedback on why that ad server that sent you that ad mattered, that would be great. Feedback is the comments area of this blog post of course.

Related articles

• Taking the Time to Design: The Importance of Optimized and Data-Driven Banner Ad Design (isocket.com)
• The Best Performing Banner In A Poorly Performing Class (adpulp.com)
• How to Make a More Effective Banners (naldzgraphics.net)
• Google +1 Buttons: Coming Soon to Display Ads (mashable.com)
• Google: Click-Through Rates Fell in 2010 [STUDY] (mashable.com)

Don’t know how recent this data is, and it probably doesn’t really matter as at one time this was the top 30 money making blogs:

30 Blog’s That Make A Lot Of Money Online

Rank	Website	Owner	Monthly Earnings	Main Income
1	Techcrunch	Michael Arrington	$200,000	Advertising Banners
2	Mashable	Pete Cashmore	$180,000	Advertising Banners
3	Timothy Sykes	Timothy Sykes	$150,000	Affiliate Sales
4	Perez Hilton	Mario Lavandeira	$140,000	Advertising Banners
5	Gothamist	Jake Dobkin	$80,000	Pay Per Click
6	Venture Beat	Matt Marshall	$62,000	Pay Per Click
7	Slash Gear	Ewdison Then	$60,000	Pay Per Click
8	Life Hacker	Nick Denton	$60,000	Advertising Banners
9	Smashing Magazine	Vitaly Friedman	$58,500	Advertising Banners
10	Tuts Plus	Collis Taeed	$110,000	Membership Area
11	Dooce	Heather B. Armstrong	$50,000	Pay Per Click
12	Steve Pavlina	Steve Pavlina	$45,000	Pay Per Click
13	TPM	Josh Marshall	$45,000	Pay Per Click
14	Car Advice	Alborz Fallah	$42,000	Advertising Banners
15	Problogger	Darren Rowse	$40,000	Advertising Banners
16	JohnChow	John Chow	$35,000	Affiliate Sales
17	Kotaku	Nick Denton	$32,000	Advertising Banners
18	Shoemoney	Jeremy Schoemaker	$30,000	Private Advertising
19	Coolest Gadgets	Allan Carlton	$30,000	Advertising Banners
20	Joystiq	AOL	$18,000	CPM Advertising
21	PC Mech	David Risley	$16,000	Affiliate Sales
22	Freelance Switch	Collis Ta’eed	$13,000	Membership Area
23	Abduzeedo	Fabio Sasso	$11,000	Advertising Banners
24	Sizlopedia	Saad Hamid	$9,000	Pay Per Click
25	Retire at 21	Michael Dunlop	$5,000	Affiliate Sales
26	Noupe	Noupe	$4,930	Advertising Banners
27	Uber Affiliate	Paul Bourque	$4,500	Second Tear Affiliates
28	Click For Nick	Nick Skeba	$3,900	Pay Per Click
29	Tyler Cruz	Tyler Cruz	$3,200	Advertising Banners
30	Just Creative Design	Jacob Cass	$3,000	Services

* * * * *

The Longer You’re Not Taking Action, The More Money Your Losing

I have helped tens of thousands of people start to make money online from blogging. The biggest issue I see across all my students is consistency and procrastination, if you want to make it in any business you got to actually start and then keep at it. Although I have had several websites that have made me a lot of money over night, this is not always the case, in fact quite the opposite with some blogs, so remember don’t give up to soon.

The first thing you need to do after visiting this page is to sign up for my FREE 7 day eCourse to making money online, this basically teaches you how I created IncomeDiary and how you can do it yourself to make a full time income (and more) from your own blog. Next I recommend you check out some of the eBooks I recommend, educating yourself is so important, even now that I am somewhat a success, I keep re-educating myself, every single day. You might want to start with Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank eBook or Yaro Starks Blog Mastermind membership website.

How They Make Money From Blogging

Their is over a dozen methods these top blogger’s are using to monetize their blog, different techniques for each niche. Some niche’s are easier to promote products to, some have high paying keywords and some are easy to drive millions of visitors easy month! Bellow is a run down on some of the techniques used.

Advertising Banners By far the most popular advertising method so far in 2009. A great new service called BuySellAds take care of finding you advertisers and takes care of all the process for a small 25% which is well worth it!
CPM Advertising This method is really popular for the website’s that receive a huge amount of traffic, advertisers pay you for impressions rather than sales or clicks! Check out Adtegrity for CPM Advertising.
Affiliate Sales Selling on commission depending on your niche can be a huge earner and is by far my biggest earner. You promote great products and then get great commissions. Affiliate networks include CJ.com and Clickbank.
Pay Per Click By far the easiest way to earn money from you website is getting paid per click you send to website’s. With programs such as Google Adsense and Netklix it’s so easy to add their code and start earning today.

Technically Speaking, there was a lot more, so you should read more …

Found this video on how to make your wordpress blog search engine friendly this post here:

Technically Speaking, even though it’s a video, there is some more good info to read more …

Found this post on making money online right here:

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

* blog publishing software
* HTML/CSS
* blog comments (and comment spam)
* RSS/syndication
* feed aggregators
* pings
* trackbacks
* full vs. partial feeds
* blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
* search engines
* search engine optimization (SEO)
* page rank
* social bookmarking
* tagging
* contextual advertising
* affiliate programs
* traffic statistics
* email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

Technically Speaking, that is only about 1/4 of what he had to say, to learn more – read more …

I think it should say “Where is your” but I guess “Where your” works as well, and other than me being nit picky, read below for good tips and info:

As a blogger, ask yourself these questions below:

• 1) Where your traffic is coming from?
• 2) Do you know where your blog visitors are going?
• 3) What do they want from your blog?

These are some really important questions to ask yourself and you must know the answer to them if you want your blog to be successful.

In this post I will help you to answers the questions mentioned above.

Where your traffic is coming from?

This is a very simple question to answer if you have Google Analytics tracking code installed on your blog. You do this by simply logging into your Google Analytics account, select view report, and then go to the traffic source overview. View the traffic source overview report. You will see where all your traffic is coming from.

For example: If most of your traffic is coming referring sites this means you were doing some sort of promotion to get this traffic. So if you were commenting on other blogs keep doing so, if you were doing forum posting keep doing so or if you were guest blogging keep doing so.

Do you know where they are going?

You can find this out by using the WP-Stats plugin. I use this to see where my visitors go after leaving my blog.

If your visitors are leaving your blog to other sites then you would no doubt want to patch up this “loop whole” and keep the visitors in your blog. You would also like to drive some of these visitors to your affiliate links and hope to generate some sales.

What do they want from your blog?

This is the easiest question to answer. If you have a site about dog training this means your visitors want dog training tips. If you have a site about recipe this means your visitors want some cooking tips to fix up a great meal.

Develop good writing technique to deliver unique and quality content to your readers to satisfy your readers appetite.

In Conclusion

Now that we have answered these questions, share with us, what are you doing to get traffic to your blog?
What are you doing to keep traffic on your blog?

Technically Speaking, have you read more lately …

This is a good list, too bad this blog doesn’t do enough traffic to use these top cpm ad networks:

If you pay attention to the types of traffic you are getting in your website or blog, you should be able to tell if most of them are organic traffics from search engines, or direct referrals. Organics traffics from search engines convert good to CPC, but visitors who visit your site on regular basis (the direct ones) will hardly clicks on these CPC ads. To convert this type of traffics to revenue, using CPM ads are one good solution.

CPM (Cost Per thousand Impressions), generally on publishers’ point of views are how much one can earn when an ad gets 1000 impressions on the website. Some ad networks pay $3/CPM, some $4, but the average is about that. If you have 700 regular unique visitors generates about 1000 impressions a day on your site, these people are not likely to click on CPC ads, so I’d say CPM ads are probably a better way out. Here’s few of the top paying CPM ad networks that I’ve come to know, used or heard before. If you have more, I’d be happy to add them in.

Technically Speaking, maybe I will go with a small series of these type of cpm ad network reviews.

Here are 5 tips that I found this morning that Chris Brogan told ABC News about making money online:

If you want to make money via the web, my five tips would be:
• Grow bigger ears (listening) – the best way I’ve found to help people make money via the web is to “listen at the point of need.” The idea is that people are offering up their interests and requests and desires via the social web every day. If you have what they need, there are opportunities to get into the selling cycle on the spot, instead of waiting.
• Be protective of your community – this is how Oprah succeeded. She grew a community around content that was helpful to the people consuming it, and then she attracted sponsors who wanted access to those people. She then stayed fiercely in between the two groups, making sure her community was always protected, and that sponsors had access on her terms only. Own the relationship, own the money.
• Add more value than promotion – selling is often heavy-handed and based on wanting to close. The real winners are relationship-minded people who make not only the first sale, but all the subsequent sales thereafter. By giving your community much more value (more content, more things they can use) than just promoting your stuff, you win longer term sales relationships.
• Promote and recognize others – in selling and marketing, we talk too much about ourselves. People want to be seen and recognized. Use your platform to point out the good stuff that would appeal to the rest of your community. Mention them. Talk about your customers more than you talk about yourselves.
• Be clear on your ask – when you finally have a hard ask, a request for a sale, then be very clear about it. Don’t ever sidle up to the sale. Never let there be a confusion between your goodwill efforts and your direct need for a sale. Never flinch about it, and never make it a mushy mix of community warmth and indirect sales requests. Just like relationships, short and clear is better than long and convoluted.

Technically Speaking, while there isn’t much more, you probably want to read more ….

While I posted yesterday about the BGCC launch press release, I started to think about this today – and decided to do a quick twtpoll.

Technically Speaking, I never seem to have much of a response out of these and have been told it’s because I give nothing away for you to vote! So for those people that get a great response to your polls – What do you give away to get people to vote???