Bob Lotich has many blogs from which he earns more income than he did when he worked his day job. What kind of blogs? Christian-themed ones, I think, but his very brief autobiography here (2 and a half pages!) is very vague. But just know that he makes money from his blogs!! seems to be the message.
This book is basically for people who know literally nothing about blogs. He explains what a blog is, what blogging platforms are available, and the various bits and pieces that you can use or not to develop your blog. The answer to how to make money from your blog is pretty obvious – ad revenue.
How do you get ad revenue? Sign up for Google Adsense. The rest is up to you – start writing!
There’s slightly more to it but those are the bare bones of what you need to do. The way Adsense works is the more traffic you get, the more money you make, and this is where things get cynical. Lotich instructs you to research key words people are searching for and then write articles that’ll get the most hits. Hmm… no thanks, I’ll stick to writing about what I like to write about instead.
And adding your blog address to web signatures and posting on boards all over the internet is generally not a great way of increasing traffic. I wrote for a high traffic site for well over a year with my blog address prominently on my author’s page and I didn’t see an increase in hits. Basically all your visits are likely to come from web searches so I wouldn’t even bother throwing your blog address around random sites – you won’t get enough visitors to make it worthwhile.
There are a lot of links to different services you can use for your blog (all of which come with discount codes from Lotich meaning he gets a cut of anyone who uses them) which I suppose are useful to a degree but really a lot of stuff you need to know about blogging is readily available online already, mostly from the platforms themselves. Blogger, Google’s blogging tool, contains a lot of tutorials and tips for site optimisation and how to increase revenue, making guides like this redundant. Stuff like search bars and privacy policies are integrated into Blogger already so mentioning them here is a waste of space.
He also suggests online courses and books that he readily admits not knowing anything about so I’m not sure why he’s recommending them besides perhaps profiting from sending readers to them.
The best advice Lotich gives is to keep at it. I’ve had my blog for over a year and had ad revenue for about 4/5 months now and it’s very, very small – I could maybe buy a paperback on Amazon with the amount I’ve earned! But I keep at it because I enjoy it, not because I’m trying to make money from it. Maybe in a year I’ll see an increase, maybe not – but keep writing and you could make some money off of your blog, emphasis on “could”. Besides persistence and effort, experimenting with different platforms and continuing to learn feel like obvious “lessons” but I suppose they’re worth mentioning considering this is a book for everyone, including the completely clueless.
Is this worth reading? If you’ve already got your blog up and running and are posting to it regularly and also have Adsense set up, there’s not much here that’s going to make picking this up worth your time. It lists a bunch of options that might or might not help but frankly I didn’t get anything out of them that I didn’t already know.
But for the absolute, “coming at this subject cold” person who knows nothing about blogging, I’m sure it’ll help. Just don’t expect some magic answer that’ll get you rich quick and have you writing your notice for your day job within a week!
How To Make Money Blogging: How I Replaced My Day Job With My Blog
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