I have come across an article today stating the pros and cons of using Google Adsense for extra income. It discussed about what else but the good and bad sides of Adsense as source of extra income. I agree with……

If you decide that, for your particular blog, each post is worth $100, you’ll start to look at things in terms of the number of blog posts they cost. “Hmm, nice car – and cheap at just 200 posts!”

You’ll be subconsciously encouraging yourself to write more posts. That might not sound like a bad thing, but you’re now starting to put value on quantity only, with little regard for quality. You’ll measure your progress and success by how many blog posts you can crank out in a week. Rather than writing a single great post, you’ll write 10 pretty rough ones and feel like you’ve achieved so much more. That’s a sure way to lose readers.

Remember all those ‘long tail’ articles you’ve read over the past year – most of your traffic and income is probably coming from just a handful of posts, with the vast majority of posts generating little or nothing. Averaging earnings across this kind of distribution is misleading.

I think you’re better off looking at your top 10 posts, say, and working out what they’re worth.

If your average post is ‘worth’ $100, your highest-earning posts might be worth more like $1000 or even $2000 or more. Analyse what these posts are about, how well they’re written, and why they attract so much traffic and generate so much income. They’re likely to be offering interesting, unique and useful information about a popular topic, giving people good reason to link to and visit them. Try to repeat what you’ve learned, and maybe even outdo them. At the very least write follow-up articles to expand the topic and refresh the interest.

Also look at your bottom 10 posts in terms of earnings. These ones are likely to be merely links to other sites, with little originality or usefulness. Try to do less of those ones.

Hope this helps.

Asides from that fact remains fact, most people have not near to enough visitors to even get close to making a suitable amount of money from their blog, so how nice the formula would be; it wouldn’t offer them any good news.

- Bryan
http://www.BryanCFleming.com

1. many blogs are very “seasonal”
2. if you write about something ahead of the curve, historical posts could potentially gain in earnings at a later date.
3. Inversely if you are writing about a subject that has already peaked, you are not going to get any linkbaiting effect.

Thus if you have a high traffic authority blog, and are good at link baiting, every post you make can easily become an authority page on the subject you are referring to, vastly increasing its longevity.

I think that all posts have value, regardless of wether we are writing for the ultimate goal of making money or not. If we provide information that is of value to our readers, then it is worth something to them.

I do have a question that sort of fits in with this post (I couldn’t find a “contact” info on the site here). If we’re talking about the value of a post, then what is a post worth on a “product only” blog with 3-5 posts specifically designed to promote a product and do nothing else?

What I’m talking about here is a concept like ‘blogging to the bank’ by Rob Benwell. I don’t know if you have ever reviewed anything like that, but I question the long-term viability of his strategy. It appears that this may be working for him in the short-term, but what will the long-term result be? Help me out with this and give me some of your thoughts Darren (or anyone else for that matter).

Thanks.

I agree — the most useful thing about the evaluation is really to twig everyone that their posts have real worth.

The dollar value is an average to be sure — but just like the old saw about copywriting (that every single letter, every single word makes money, albeit on average a small amount), when we find value (even if its incremental) in what we do, we’re spurred on to do even more of that thing.

Which, after all, is nothing but a good thing, particularly if you’ve started wondering if what you’re doing is worth anything.

Cheers
t @ dji