Today marks the close of our Blog Smarter mini-series of posts, which explain a variety of techniques for scalable blog monetization.
In case you missed them, the posts were:
- Blog Smarter: Don’t Just End Up Trading Hours for Dollars
- Blog Smarter: A Step-by-step Guide to Boost Your AdSense Earnings
- Blog Smarter: Turn Your Blogging Skills Into Successful Affiliate Promotions
- Blog Smarter: 9 Ways to Make Money from WordPress … Without Having a Blog
- Blog Smarter: 5 WordPress Plugins to Help You Make Money From Your Blog
- Blog Smarter: Invest in Your Own Success
This little series hints at one of the ways we’re shifting the focus of our content this year here at ProBlogger. We’ve decided to trial a more collaborative approach to posts that aims to present a range of views on a given topic—in this case, getting more value (in this case, monetarily speaking) out of the time you put into blogging. We’re hoping that these will provide food for thought, and solid starting points for your own exploration.
I know that Georgina, our content manager, has some other ideas up her sleeve—but I also know that she’d love to hear your thoughts on this approach. Was the series too short or too long? Did you think there were too many authors? Not enough angles on the topic? Did it address you as a beginning, longer-term, or stalwart blogger?
And of course, if there are any topics you’d especially like us to look at going forward, we’d be very interested to hear those ideas, too…
I loved it. Every single post was extremely helpful and full of awesome information. All the info given away could probably be bagged into a book and sold. I’m just glad that you decided to give it all away for free. Thanks so much, Darren.
I loved this! Beginning last Friday, I’ve started a weekly piece that pulls my favorite posts about social media and blogging. I found that I reserved every “Blog Smarter” piece this week! Not on purpose at all, just what I liked in my Google Reader.
Well done!
“Don’t just end up trading hours for dollars” was my favorite one in this series, and “Invest in your own success” encouraged me as I just bought a few tools with the faith that they’ll help me monetize.
I would love, love, love to see a series on “Creating your own product” – both the genesis of the idea (how can you know what people will be willing to pay for?), to appropriate pricing, to promotion that’s solid without being annoying.
Thanks!
Shayna
Hey Shayna,
Thanks for your feedback and this great idea. A product series is in the works…
:)
Georgina
Having read them all I think they were all excellent and have gained knowledge from each one. The investment in your own success has really opened my eyes to we can take our site to the next level.
Thanks for the brilliant series.
great summary of those good posts that worth reading while sipping on a cup of tea. I’ve never thought this deep when blogging… really opening up another perspective for me as I used to think ‘I only blog to boost my CV and make me stand out in interview.’ There’s just so much we can do about blogging!
Love to see an in-depth how-to on creating an e-book . . . not the literal writing or finding a topic so much as the nuts and bolts of software/services to transform a Word doc into an e-book, covers, indexing, is it worth it to make a Kindle edition, pricing, where to sell it, how to sell it, do you need a sales tax license (in the US), setting up PayPal (is it necessary or are you better selling through an established site and letting them pay you?) . . . everything for the first-timer who has an idea but no clue where to go from there!
The series were great and I learned a lot. It was just like you said; fresh perspectives to monetizing blogs. I can’t wait for what else you have in store.
Thank you for such a great resource. I learned a lot over your last few posts, and I’ve been making notes to implement on my own blog. And I’m definitely going to purchase your ebook!
I look forward to more of your excellent advice.
I really appreciated the entire series – especially the piece about long tail keywords! Ever since it was posted, I’ve been playing with the keyword tool and revamping my trigger phrases on all of my blogs. I’ve also sat down and mapped out the next week’s worth of posts and put them into a Google calendar, so there’s no excuse not to have new content coming daily. Can’t wait to read more!
I like the idea of “Blog Smarter”. The posts provided there are enjoyable to read moreover for me as a start-up blogger that try to find smart ways building an online business.
One important thing I have learned from all the posts is if I want to start a make a living from a blog keep the value on. Earn every penny the “smart way”, and problogger have all the tips for that.
Keep up the good work.
It is a nice collection of articles. Worth to be in any bloggers virtual library!
Nice reference, specially found useful the long tail keywords tip.
Just as everybody else, I loved it.
What I’d like to see is a series about how to get going after big disappointments or when your blog just does not generate income. Strategies on pushing through periods where there simply IS no money coming in, even if you used all the strategies mentioned above.
I know this does not specifically have to do with the focus of this blog, but I still think it would be helpful for many of us.
I loved the series, maybe a little longer, of maybe even as a weekly thing… something like Blog Smarter Tuesdays, keep it as an ongoing series.
A good series. I would like to see a series on driving traffic to one’s blog. Maybe how best to use the individual social networking sites out there? Possibly one article for each social networking site.
Extraordinary post. Read every post and they are all AWESOME!
Thank you for sharing such a great post!