“Going Pro” or “Did I just jump off a cliff?”
Like Darren, our 6-figure blogger, and Liew CF, I’ve quit my job and gone pro. Of course, being a TA at Cornell University part time isn’t high-paying employement, but it is a steady flow of cash. Unlike famous pro-blogger Kottke, I’m not a full-time anything so don’t get your hopes up. My goal is to continue blogging the same things as before, as well as playing with some niche content blogs to boost overall earnings.
In an interview with Apple computers yesterday, I was asked why there are advertisments on my blog. My interviewer and his team of brilliant well-paid designers and programmers were all bloggers themselves, sans ugly advertising. Unfortunately, I am a student with bills to pay and this is now my only source of income. So, we’ll make an agreement:
1) I will continue to have advertising on my sites
2) I will do my best to keep this advertising within reasonable and innocuous limits
That said, what’s my short term plan for growth? There are a few things I need to do:
1) Identify content market segments which are highly popular on a long-term basis, and thus highly profitable
2) Develop content or services for #1
Of course, this is identical to the formula for developing a successful startup, so it is probably harder to solve than just that. However, I can acquire popularity data and do regression analysis on different internet content sites to figure out which markets I should enter. I have my eyes on consumer electronics, music, video, and entertainment, photography, and poetry.
One problem I have is that it’s hard to run a one-man empire. How can I challenge weblogsinc with just 2 hours a day? Let’s just say… fall break is coming!
| This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 6:50 am and is tagged with niche content, university part time, regression analysis, entertainment photography, market segments, cornell university, content market, apple computers, fall break, employement, steady flow, advertisments, term basis, internet content, interviewer, blogger, music video, bloggers, programmers, earnings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
I decided that Google rewards clean site design and lots of backlinks, so I endeavoured to get both going here. I use analysis of my conent to generate tags and other search engine results. One of my sploggier blogs uses the yahoo term mispelling service to generate possible alternative search queries. If you do a search, you find there’s a lotta links to me. Get some more backlinks!!
That’s truly an amazing amount. I’m struggling like hell to get more than 500 uniques per day on my blog and I do have lots of lenghty interesting articles that took hours to write. I wonder what I’m doing wrong?
I get the lousy blog design showcase blog which has over 1000 backlinks in Google…
Care to teach me some techniques, master?
Well, they just come! I have nearly 1000 entries here, some of which are quite popular and original, like my research on blog names, or wp-hashcash. Then, there are my other blogs, which all bring 500-1000 hits a day, so it’s a nice little distributed system, you know?
Holy ****! How did you get that amount of visitors without spamming?
I get about 10k visitors a day, which, last month, brought about $600.
Elliott, would you care sharing how many unique visitors you get currently? I’d like to earn more from Ads as well but I have a LONG way to go I think…
Does this really bring in a substantial amount of cash?
Well, you can always merge with another one man empire to create a bigger and better one. Let me know if you are interested in an exchange of ideas. You know where to find me.
Best of luck with it Elliot, hope you reach success!
I’m not nearly dedicated enough to even attempt doing something like that. I’m distracted far too easily.
welcome to full time blogger club!
thats where i come into the picture lol