You can take that to the bank (hey at least you have something to deposit). You can’t make money online with half baked, warmed over content.
Repeat that out loud, “You can’t make money online with half baked, warmed over content!”
Good! And again! “You can’t make money online with half baked, warmed over content!”
And now remind yourself that your earnings suck because your content sucks worse.
That’s right, it is as simple as that. Your blog will not earn a penny if what you write sucks.
While this is only my fourth post on this relaunched site I have hundreds of posts, pages, videos and whatnot on other websites. So I’ve decided to write a little bit about how important it is to generate incredible content to generate any revenue.
What I won’t talk about
Before I start talking about the topic I want to discuss I’d like to point out some things that you will not read in this post.
- How to make money online:
Sorry, but my intention with this article isn’t to tell you how to make money online, or tell you the secrets of a six figure income or any of the rest of it. If you want that kind of information there are plenty of sites which claim to tell you. - How to write good blog posts:
This is something that simply cannot be taught no matter how much one might like to try. It’s a skill that comes from writing hundreds of posts, reading hundreds of posts, and failing at writing good content more often than not. In other words I can only recommend that you practice, practice, practice! - How to “game” the adsense system:
I’m not going to talk about how you trick your readers into clicking your ads, or how you beg a click from them without doing so overtly. Like anything else there is plenty of material out there about that kind of thing, but I am not going to add it to my site. Number one it is a clear violation of the adsense program policies and secondly it wouldn’t be doing you any favors if I told you those things.
In the beginning…
Before I started worrying about monetizing websites I started blogging to kill time. I was unemployed and sitting around the house with nothing to do. Well I could have been looking for a job but instead, for the purpose of this story we will agree that I had nothing to do. Anyhow as I was doing nothing I discovered blogging and quickly borrowed a few dollars from my mom to a) register a domain name and b) secure some cheap (but very reliable it turns out) from Hostgator.
The domain I registered is the one you are on now, www.ablogaboutnothing.com and I registered the name back in 2007. I think it was in July. Because of all the free time I had I wrote a lot of articles during the first few months. I believe I averaged around 3 500+ word articles per day. You’d think that a guy with so much free time could write even more, but when I wasn’t writing I was diving headfirst in to the so-called blogging masters of that time. I never missed a post from the likes of John Chow, Shoemoney, Problogger, and other names I no longer follow or care what they are doing.
But the problem was I had no idea what I was doing. You see, I was following the examples of people who know how to blog (and do so very well I might add) but their content was… lacking. I remember I was so enthralled with John Chow for so long because of the income reports I posted on his site. But then I started to realize what he posted had very little meat to explain anything, they just touched on the subject enough to pique your interest. Unless of course you count his oft used dining pictures where he would treat the reader to pictures of his every meal.
The same pattern I found to be true with many others. They wrote posts that really weren’t authoritative in nature. They had very little meat and getting anything out of them became more and more difficult.
After a few months of producing content for my own blog and reading others I got burned out. Around November I more or less decided enough was enough and stopped writing altogether. It should be noted that while I stopped in November my writing had slowed down greatly since I had begun writing.
A purchase that changed everything
In early December of 2008, having just written a few articles on A Blog about Nothing I went to a reptile store and bought a Ball Python. I had snakes in the past and by this time I was working so I thought I’d get myself another one. Of course like anyone else I started researching how to care for them online because it had been about 10 years since I had a snake of any kind. I found a lot of disjointed, unorganized information about snakes but aside from message boards there wasn’t a lot of authority out there on the topic. At least not that was easily located.
Let me backtrack to my blogging experiences in 2007 for just a moment. During that time I often heard mention of niche websites. In fact I remember reading a series on niche sites at the now (apparently) defunct DoshDosh and filing it away in my head.
So with my new snake in hand, and a lack of information about snakes as pets in general online I purchased my new domain name, pet-snakes.com and started producing content. But there was a problem. While I was researching and giving the basic information that was needed it wasn’t authoritative. I had picked up a lot of bad habits from my earlier foray into blogging. I was writing 350 word articles and honestly believing they were of value to readers. But they weren’t.
My search engine rankings
Because my content was not of any great value no one visited my site. I would spam comments on every blog under the sun (almost none of them having anything whatsoever to do with snakes or animals of any kind), joined a lot of forums just so I could post a few times with my web address in my signature, and even held a contest to give a lucky winner a free snake up to $500 value. While all of those things got me a tiny bit of traffic none of them brought people who wanted to stick around. My bounce rate was around 95%, give or take a few percentage depending on the day. But worse yet was my site, so focused on one subject; pet snakes, with relatively little competition couldn’t rank higher than in the mid 150s.
At this point I was given a free phone consultation with Marc Butler of the Keyword Academy. It lasted about 20 or 30 minutes and he pointed out somethings to help me improve my google rankings in the search for the keywords I wanted to go after. His advice had very little to do with my site, or my content but rather focused on my link building. It was sound advice because in following what he told me I managed to break into the top 15 of Google search results. But if you know anything about search engine positions you know that if you aren’t on the front page, above the fold you might as well be on page 10,000. People simple do not give any credence to sites that they have to scroll or worse yet change pages to view.
For several months I languished on page 2 of the Google search results. And kept doing the same link building I had been doing the whole time which consisted mainly of comments (except now I focused on animal related sites) and forum signatures. But I was gaining no traction.
When things started to change
One day I got an email from a reader telling me that they were very disappointed in my site. You see, apparently they were one of the few people who went to the second page of Google’s search results and clicked on my site. The email basically said I was just regurgitating things that everyone posted on forums and sometimes on other sites. In other words it had no content that defined it or made it stick out from all the rest. Which while distressing was 100% accurate. I was just parroting what other sites had to say.
I thought about it for a while and at that point decided to write a post about how to make a homemade snake cage. I decided it was going to be an authority post. When people wanted to know how to make a snake cage out of those simple items my article was going to be the gold standard. So I wrote the article, made a youtube video so everyone could see what was going on and I posted it.
Within two days my Google rank had moved from 15th to 10th. All because of that one article. So I waited a few more days and wrote another article with as much depth and authority as I could muster. And then another and another. Soon I noticed I was climbing my way towards the top of the search engine results. It has been a slow process and I am currently at the 2nd spot with a lot of work to do to knock the first spot off.
What changed and why it is important
Three things changed, first I stopped commenting on blogs all the time. Second I stopped spamming my signature on forums. The third, final and most important thing to change was I began to produce high quality content on a regular basis. I stopped using the old blogging skills I had learned when I first started and started to write like an authority on the topic. That meant I was turning out longer, and much better researched articles than I had in the past. I should note, just like Corbett Barr said in his clarion call for bloggers to write epic shit longer does not mean better. It does not mean epic. When you write longer posts you better have epic shit to write about or it won’t do you any good.
Let’s take a good look what I just said.
- Stop using old blogging skills:
If your site isn’t getting any traction it’s time to stop what you have been doing that doesn’t work. Right about now I’m tempted to throw out a cliche about the definition of insanity is… but I’ll spare you. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. When you keep doing something over and over again and it never works you are insane! That means it is time to toss out the old skills and learn new ones. Your website and your audience will thank you for it. - Write like an authority:
If you’ve started a website and people are reading it then that’s a pretty good indication you already know more than 99% of the general populace about your topic. Act like it! Stop mealy-mouthing what you want to write and put it out there like the authority you are. If you don’t consider yourself an authority on the subject matter you cover then stop writing until you are so familiar with it that there is no question in your mind about your authority. - You better have epic shit to write about:
Websites are a dime a dozen these days. Ecclesiastes 1:9 has this to say:What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
And nowhere is that more true than when it comes to blogs. Whatever topic you write about, someone else has written about it as well. So you better turn out some awesome content to even begin to compete. It better be epic. If it is not it won’t matter how much work you put into it. Regurgitated crap is regurgitated crap.
In case you lost your place we were talking about how I suddenly made a leap in the Google search rankings. It had nothing to do with spamming comments or spending hours per day working on SEO. It happened because I started to write articles that had value to them. I started to write for people and not for search engines. Which was an approach that was counter-intuitive to everything I had learned up to that point.
Back to making money with my websites
Like I said earlier you won’t learn much about adsense from me. In my opinion everything you need to know about monetizing your site with adsense is already out there. What I do want to tell you about, to pound into your head is that what makes money with adsense isn’t how well you blend your ads, or where you place them on a page, or even how many hits you get on your site. Rather what generates revenue from your adsense ads, or any method you use to monetize your website is your content. It’s the value that you give to your readers.
For so long people have known that content is king. It is what makes you and your brand relevant. It’s what makes you an authority and being trusted as an authority makes your readers inclined to click your ads.