Here are the income stats for www.financialjesus.com in October 2009.

Google Adsense - $74.86
Direct Links – $10
TopEuro.biz – $2.2

Total Income – $87,06

What happened

The total income for October 2009 was a bit down from September – $87 vs $89. In spite of growing traffic the total Google Adsense revenue was down 5 bucks.

I didn’t have a lot of time to work on the site, but just as I feared on my income post for september – people got used to the new design and ad blindness started to kick in. We showed more ads but got less money.

An average monetized site getting about 1000 visitors per day can except an advertising income of 200-400 dollars per month so I started thinking about ways to better monetize the site.

I asked around in forums and got some nice feedback in WickedFire, DigitalPoint and the Cheating Network. (click on the links for the threads I started and the great information I got back – specially the first 2 forums).

I signed up for CPM ads at TopEuro.biz. I only had them for a couple of days – that’s why the low income(2.2 dollars). These ads only show to people coming from USA and Canada and I don’t need people to click on them – I get money for just showing them! I’ll see on November how they perform!

Traffic is Growing

Traffic was up 20.3% in October – going from 25 000 to 30 430.

With the last 2 months the total traffic to Financial Jesus has grown 60%.

Goal for November

This month I will try to put into practice all monetization advice I got from the forums – my goal is blog income of $200 dollars.
In October I also happened onto a blog post in German that talks about 19 websites and how they make money- I intend to go through it again to find some great advertising programs.

I am also in the process of launching at least 3 new websites – I will let you guys know what they are when I launch!

Blogging has become increasingly popular in the last 5 years. Today it has become so mainstream that it is difficult for a new blog to establish itself simply because there are thousands of blogs on every thinkable topic.

Most Blogs Fail

It is widely known that popular blogs can generate a positive cash flow sufficient for a very nice lifestyle – this has further fueled the onslaught of new blogs.  The sad truth is that more than 95% of new blogs fail to gather a significant readership and will be abandoned soon after launch.

Today I am going to reveal the 2 most important things that you need to know to make your blog popular. These ideas are in fact so simple that almost everyone knows about them but most bloggers still fail to use these principles consistently.

The fact that I am writing a post on something that most of us already know shows how important these ideas really are.

Blogging Success Formula

Blog Popularity = Content + Marketing

The popularity of any blog is a direct result of the content the blog puts out and the marketing the blog is doing to get new readers.

Principle 1 – Produce new quality content

Content is the single and most underlying cornerstone of any blog. If there is no content there is nothing to read. If there is nothing to read no one will visit your blog.

Importance of new content

A potential reader can bookmark your blog after reading an interesting article but after several times of coming back and not finding new content the visitor will cease to return. Depending on the quality of your former blog posts it will vary how long this will take but after not finding new content the blog will sooner or later die out.

Importance of high-quality content

It is also important to make sure that the content produced is high-quality. If the articles produced are inferior to the blog posts of your competitors there are no real reasons for a reader to follow your articles.

There are probably hundreds of ways how a blog post can be low-quality – It can mean an article with a lot of spelling mistakes, a blog post that really doesn’t say anything new or a superb article that talks about something that is not interesting to your readers. Hopefully your blog doesn’t correspond to any of these categories.

What to keep in mind

Producing new content is by far the most important principle of successful blogging. One has to keep in mind however that only concentrating on producing new and quality content is the best way to fail at blogging. In order to become a successful blogger you have to be consistently producing top notch articles and at the same time excel at the second principle of successful blogging – marketing your blog.

Principle 2 – Market your blog

Having great content is not enough for success.

In order for your blog to become popular people will have to know that it exists.
If William Shakespeare had never published his books he would still be a great writer with the exception that absolutely no one would know of him – none of his stories would have been made into plays.

After writing a new blog post your goal should be to get as many people reading it as possible. If you don’t get people to read the exceptional content in your blog it can never become popular.

Be a proactive marketer

By marketing your blog you give people the chance to decide whether what they are reading is worth reading for them. If it is – you can be sure that they will let other people know as well. That means that the more you market your blog the easier it will get – people who like your content will tell their friends about it.

It is possible for a blog to grow big enough that there is no need for active marketing but this is only the case when a blog has thousands or tens of thousands of daily readers.

If you think that you have enough readers and you can stop marketing your blog you are wrong.

How to market your content

Choosing the marketing methods that work best with your blog or website depend on your niche and what exactly you want to accomplish. A good way to market could be anything from leaving comments on blogs with similar content or printing and handing out flayers in your the local mall.

What to keep in mind

Producing and marketing your content only work hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. If you have content but don’t have marketing you will never get any visitors. If you have marketing but don’t have any content your visitors will never return.

Keeping track of progress

Producing new content and marketing it are the two most important factors for a blog’s success. Contrary to what you would expect – at some point most people stop following one or both of these principles. As a consequence they will get little traffic, feel discouraged and eventually stop blogging.

My System

In order to combat the problem of not doing what I know should be done I created 3 simple graphs that help me stay in control of my article writing and marketing activities.

Here they are:

Graph 1 – goals for my everyday activities

At first glance this graph looks rather stupid – all the lines are parallel and they don’t seem to indicate much. The idea behind the graph is simple – it shows the every day goals of my blogging activities. The blue line represents the number of articles (1) I need to write every day this month. The yellow line is the maximum amount of time I am willing to spend on my daily blogging activities (4 hours). The upper line shows the amount of comments (10) I want to leave to other relevant blogs in order to market my content.

I printed this graph out and every day after finishing my blogging activities I will draw a line representing the actual daily figures. If the hand-drawn lines fluctuate from the pre set one’s it will indicate a possible problem.

Graph 2 – totals

This graph shows the total amount of work done after every day of reaching my goals. By the end of October I will have written 31 new articles, left 310 relevant comments on other blogs and spent about 124 hours doing it.

Graph 3 – results

This graph represents the expected rise in visitors and RSS subscribers if I manage to fulfill my daily blogging goals for October. Currently I have on average about 315 daily visits and hopefully it will rise to 571 by the end of the month. The amount of average RSS readers will hopefully go from 72 to 130.

This is the only graph that represents the things that are not under my direct control. I can control how many articles I write and what I do to market it, but I can not directly control the amount of people coming to read my content – I can only make educated guesses.

Remember

Control the controllables – focus writing new articles and marketing your blog. These are the only 2 things that you have direct control over. By consistently doing these activities you can influence more people to read your content.

Never forget:
Blog Popularity = Content + Marketing

EDIT:

This is a repost of an article I wrote in October 2008. Since that time my RSS subscriber count has gone from 70 to over 350 and the average daily readership of this blog fluctuates between 600-1000 people per day!

Keep in mind that all this has been done without any money! If I can do it, you can do it as well.

For more insights about making your blog more popular sign up for our full feed RSS or sign up via email.

You might already know that I started my first online internet marketing campaign today!

I’m excited!!!

But I also have some questions that I feel need to be answered. The most important is this:

It’s a tough question to answer and to tell you the truth I don’t know the answer. It depends a lot on what kind of a website you are running and how many visitors you have.

The only certain thing is that in the long run you should always focus on content. You should make sure that your blog has a lot of high quality content.

There is a saying that you can keep in mind

“If you will write it, they’ll come and read it”

Having a lot of quality content ensures you basically 2 things – search engine traffic and word-of-mouth advertising.

If your blog already has quite a following there is no point to spend a majority of your time on marketing.

But if you are just starting your blog?

Yes, what if you have a starting blog like Financial Jesus and don’t have any readers?

Well you can spend all your time on writing posts, but what’s the point when you don’t have anyone reading what you are writing? Since it is definitely better to write when someone is reading, a startup blog should spend some of it’s time marketing.

As I found out today, marketing can be difficult and take a lot of time. I spent more than 8 hours today on writing comments at www.johnchow.com hoping that by being the number one commentator I will get some traffic back to my website.
The life of a marketer is uncertain, so I don’t even know yet if what I did pays off! Crazy, I know

There is however something that I have already learned today.

Content comes first

You should always start your day by writing your content and then spend the rest of your time on marketing. This ensures that you will be able to write the number of posts each day that you have set as your goal. I promised myself that I will write a minimum of 3 posts a day on Financial Jesus. However I spent so much time on marketing today that it is already way past my bedtime – it is 4 am in where I live and I am writing this post in order to keep a promise I gave to myself.
If I had written the blog posts in the morning and after that spent my time on getting traffic and marketing I would already be asleep. Well, I guess we all learn from our mistakes!

My advice is to write the minimum amount of content that you are satisfied with and use the rest of your time getting more traffic to your blog. After achieving your daily marketing goal it’s up to you if you write more content or spend more of your time on getting more traffic. But keep in mind – when you don’t have any content you won’t have any readers so it’s usually more important to write new stuff than to try and get more readers.

If you like the common sense advice I give on writing blog posts and marketing your website be sure to subscribe to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.

Since Financial Jesus is just starting out, we figured that we need to do something to boost the number of visitors.
The first online marketing strategy that we are going to use in order to boost this blogs popularity is basically this:

We took a bunch of successful high traffic blogs that mainly talk about the same topic as us and looked for a “TOP for commentators” section.

A good “top commentators” section shows you how many comments somebody has left and therefore you will know how many comments you need to leave before becoming the number 1 commentator.

The first time I came across this idea was when reading John Chow’s free ebook about how to make money online (which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the topic – you can sign up for it at www.johnchow.com).

Today I have been reading Johns blog and writing comments on some of his more interesting posts. Since I am totally against spamming it was my first priority to leave comments that give some extra value to his blog as well. This way it will be a win-win situation for both of us – I will get traffic from being a top commentator and build some links and John gets an active member to his blog who helps to make it even better

I don’t have any idea how many (if any) visitors I am going to get from JohnChow.com but there is something that I definitely found out

Leaving comments is hard work

I have spent 8 hours today on reading through tons of posts and writing about 25 comments – and that’s all on 1 website. After about 5 hours I felt that I’ve had enough, but then I had that feeling what you get when half-way through a difficult task – you want to stop but you won’t because of everything you stand to loose. So I kept on reading and leaving comments. Here are some of the posts I liked most:

• Get More Exposure for Your Blog with a Guest Post – This post gave me a great idea to contact other blogs about making money on the internet and how to get rich and offer to write them some guest posts.
• Blog Income Report – April 2008 – In April John Chow made a whopping $29,569.05. This post gives an overview where all this money came from.
• The Dot Com Lifestyle – This is actually a somewhat quiet video with John in a park with his daughter where he talks about the real dot com lifestyle – “I blog because I hate rushhour”

If you want to stick around to see how much traffic I will generate for being the top commentator on John and other online marketing blogs be sure to subscribe to my full feed RSS or subscribe via email.