Bleach - D-Tecnolife

Ienai itami kanashimi de kizu tsuita kimi yo
kesenai kako mo seoi atte ikou ikiru koto wo nage dasanai de

tsunaida kimi no te wo

Itsuka ushinatte shimau no kana
usurete iku egao to kimi wo mamoritai kara
hibiku boku wo yobu koe sae kare
toki ni sou kaze ni kaki kesaretatte
kimi wo mitsuke dasu

Ienai itami kanashimi de kizu tsuita kimi
mou waraenai nante hito girai nante kotoba sou iwanai de
mienai mirai ni okoru koto subete ni imi ga aru kara
ima wa sono mama de ii kitto kizukeru toki ga kuru daro

sabikitta hito no you ni

Sasanari au dake ga munashikute
hitori de ikite ikerutte itta
arifureta yasashisa kotobajya
ima wa mou todokanai hodo ni kimi wa uzukidasu

Tsunai da kimi no te wa nanigenai yasashisa wo motome
Do you remember
itami wo shiru koto de hito ni yasashiku nareru kara
Drive your Life

Ienai itami kanashimi de kizu tsuita kimi
mou waraenai nante hito girai nante kotoba sou iwanai de
mienai mirai ni okoru koto subete ni imi ga aru kara
ima wa sono mama de ii kitto kizukeru toki ga kuru daro

How can I see the meaning of life
kieteku you're the only. . .

Kowarenai you ni to hanarete iku kimi
mou waraenai nante hito girai nante kotoba sou iwanai de
ima wa by and by mie nakuttatte subete ni imi ga aru kara
kesenai kako mo seoi attekou ikiru koto wo nagedasanai de

You'd better forget everything. Remember. . . your different Life?
You'd better forget everything. Remember. . . modoranai kedo

Hizunda kioku no you na toki no naka de itsuka wakari aeru kara

Leia Mais

Tired Heart - Bleach

I haven't felt good in months
The well has run dry, all at once
The habits come easy, but they're so hard to break
I really need to hear, to hear you say

Peace be still
I am with you
Rest in me for one more night
Peace be still
I am with you
Replace your tired heart with mine

So i'll sing songs of life
For all these broken hearts
Just like mine
And i'll lay down
All this pride
So i can hear you whisper
That it's all right

Peace be still
I am with you
Rest in me for one more night
Peace be still
I am with you
Replace your tired heart with mine

And i'm so sorry
I haven't come home
But i'm coming home soon

Leia Mais

This Week in Audiobooks

I have been meaning to write a wrap-up post about the NBAs, but at this point I feel as though all my strength is going toward surviving until the four-day weekend. Although I believe a relative is expecting me for the holiday, I think I'm going to beg off and hole up at home.

In the meantime, I have been devouring audiobooks because the arrival of winter weather has nearly doubled my commute. A book on tape makes the drive bearable. It took to about halfway through Stephen King's Dreamcatcher before realizing that I have already both read the text and seen the movie. Obviously, either occasion wasn't memorable enough to keep me from grabbing it on tape. I wish I hadn't remembered the movie, though, since now I can't get the image of Donnie "Duddits" Wahlberg's bald head out of my mind. Now that's horror.

Leia Mais

Hardcovers, Why Can't I Love You?

Imagine the scene: it's the 2007 National Book Awards. In the banquet hall, each table features a centerpiece made up of copies of the nominated titles. Invited guests polish off their desserts while, up in the balcony, the press and a small pack of bloggers put some polish on their writing. Fran Lebowitz speaks the last words of her closing remarks and the awards ceremony officially ends. Lured by the scent of freebies, crazed bloggers stampede down the stairs and run through the banquet hall grabbing books as authors and industry-types topple in their wake.

Well, it wasn't exactly like that. But I'm sure I moved at a quicker clip than usual. And I did stick my finger into an untouched dessert tray just for a little taste. Whatever happened, my copy of Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End started out as an NBA centerpiece.

It's a hardcover and it has been pissing me off. Not the story, which is entertaining enough, but the actual, physical object.

First off, I took off the dust jacket. Such action is sort of counterproductive since the jacket exists as protection, but I find it a nuisance. Jackets tend to creep skyward on me, making books too tall and gangly. Up to now, Then We Came to the End has been at home, at work, in the car, and on several lunches. The poor thing is becoming positively filthy, and it bothers me more to wreck a hardcover than a paperback.

When at lunch, the damn thing is simply too heavy and inflexible to hold open with one hand while eating with the other. I am forced to read with it lying on the table, so it also has been doubling as a placemat.

Then yesterday as I rode the elevator, I dropped the book on my foot. One of its corners got smashed in the fall and I have a little round bruise on the top of my foot. I'm glad I didn't break a toe, but none of this is helping me love the thing.

Leia Mais

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

• You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
• You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
• You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Enough introductory comments - lets get stuck into the Adsense Tips for Bloggers!

The full series of AdSense Tips is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

Leia Mais

Amazon Kindle Review

Earlier this year I bought an Amazon Kindle reading device, and I want to share my impressions of it so far.

I ordered the original Kindle in January, but I was informed it was backordered and wouldn’t ship for 2 months. A month or so later, Amazon informed me that they were about to release the Kindle 2, so they automatically upgraded my order for free, and I received the Kindle 2 shortly thereafter.

I’ve had a few months to play with it now, and overall I like it a lot.

Electronic Ink

The Kindle doesn’t use an LCD screen. It uses a special technology called electronic ink. This involves shifting around physical particles to form each pixel instead of turning on tiny lights. This means that the Kindle isn’t back-lit, so you won’t be able to read it in the dark without another light source. In practice this isn’t a big deal because it’s no different than reading a print book.

I thought the e-ink was pretty amazing when I first saw it. The text is very crisp and easy on the eyes. When my Kindle arrived in the mail, I noticed there was some text printed on the screen. I assumed it was one of those plastic stick-on sheets to protect the screen from scratches during shipping, as you often find on electronic devices. However, when I tried to peel off the sticker, I discovered there was no sticker, and I got confused. Was this a piece of plastic I had to snap off somehow to get to the real screen underneath? It took me a while to figure out that the device was already turned on and displaying a welcome message. The text was so unlike what I’ve seen on an LCD screen that I didn’t realize it was being displayed by the device itself.

The wow factor lasted about 15 minutes, and soon I paged through the Kindle manual, which is included on the device when you buy it. The manual works like a tutorial since it encourages you to try out features as you go along. I read the whole thing because I read a lot and expected to use the device a lot, so I wanted to familiarize myself with all the specs and diagrams.

Page Turning

The Kindle 1 received many complaints about the page turning buttons, which were too easy to bump by accident. The Kindle 2 solves this problem definitively by making the buttons hinge from the outside in, so you have to press them on the inside edge. That’s easy to do intentionally but hard to do accidentally.

I like that there are duplicate “Next Page” buttons on the left and right sides of the Kindle. This makes it easy to keep reading while holding the book in either hand.

My #1 gripe with the Kindle 2 is the slow page turning. It’s faster than the Kindle 1, and it only takes about a second, but those seconds add up when you’re seeing only a couple paragraphs per screen.

The slow page turning means I can’t really PhotoRead books on my Kindle. I can still use many of the PhotoReading techniques, but not all of them. Some aspects are just too tedious because of the slowness of the device. However, if they can speed this up a lot in future versions, then it would be practical to PhotoRead with the Kindle.

If your reading speed is average or close to average, then the Kindle 2 page turning should be just fine.

Cool Features

You can change the text size very easily. I only use the two smallest sizes. Even at those sizes, you’re only seeing 2-3 paragraphs at a time. At the largest size, you’ll see about 50-60 words per screen (not much longer than a Twitter tweet).

The search feature is very fast. You can search through individual books or across all the books in your collection. I wish I could instantly search through all the print books on my bookshelf since that would be incredibly useful. As I add more books to my Kindle, the search feature will become more valuable.

Battery life is excellent. I’m very impressed with that aspect. The battery drains faster with the wireless turned on, but it can last for a couple weeks if you keep the wireless off and just turn it on when you need it. It only takes about 15 seconds for the wireless connection to boot up once you enable it, so I usually leave it turned off. Even so, you’ll still get many hours of use with the wireless turned on.

I like the innovative power cord and USB port which share the same jack and cable. The cable has an attachment on the end to turn it from a USB connection to a regular power plug. There’s a charging indicator light that is yellow while the Kindle is charging and turns green when it’s fully charged. Unfortunately since I’m colorblind, I can’t tell the difference between those colors. That lame design decision makes this feature worthless for me and the millions of people who see colors like I do. Fortunately it doesn’t matter much because the device only takes hours to charge completely, and the long battery life means I don’t have to charge it more than once every few weeks, even if I’m using it a lot. My iPod tells me on the display when it’s fully charged.

I love the wireless connection to Amazon.com’s online store. It’s really nice shopping for books this way, especially since I’m used to buying items from them. You really can purchase and download books in less than 60 seconds. The first book I bought took 35 seconds to receive. And the best part was that I bought it from my backyard. The Kindle accesses a 3G wireless network directly from the device, just like a cell phone, so you can shop for books from just about anywhere — no need for a WiFi connection.

When shopping online you can access essentially the same info about a book that you can get at Amazon.com, including the reviews that people have posted. The downside is that you can’t see as much info on the screen at any one time, so it takes longer to page through lengthy text. I like to scan through multiple reviews very quickly, and that’s harder to do on the Kindle.

You can make annotations throughout any book you read, and then you can review the annotations later. I haven’t used this feature much, but it could come in handy if I read a book with a lot of sections I want to highlight, such as for posting a book review.

Amazon backs up your purchases as well as your annotations, so you can download them again later if you buy a new Kindle-compatible device. I like that all the books I buy for my Kindle can be accessed indefinitely as long as I have a device that can read them. Some people might not like being locked into a proprietary system though since you can’t read Kindle books on other ebook readers. Personally this doesn’t bother me since Amazon is the only online bookstore I patronize anyway, other than buying ebooks now and then. I’d probably be very concerned right now if I were one of their competitors.

You can subscribe to magazines and blogs on the Kindle for a small fee. Each blog is 99 cents per month, and you can get a free 14-day trial. The latest content is automatically downloaded to your Kindle via the blog’s RSS feed. But not all blogs are available because the blog publisher must explicitly submit their blog to Kindle and agree to Amazon’s long list of terms. There were about 1000 blogs listed last time I checked, but I haven’t checked for months, so there are probably a lot more by now. Personally I don’t use this feature at all, but that’s probably because I don’t regularly read any blogs other than Erin’s. I also thought the selection of blogs on the Kindle was pretty weak.

Despite several requests I’ve received from readers to make my blog available on the Kindle, I won’t be doing so anytime soon because Amazon’s Terms of Service for bloggers are too draconian for me. I might make a little extra money from the subscriptions, but it isn’t worth the headache to change the way I blog just to satisfy their requirements. Many other bloggers will balk at those terms as well, so I think the availability of the most popular blogs on the Kindle will be rather limited if they stick to their current terms. But perhaps they’re deliberately trying to start out slow so they don’t get overwhelmed with submissions. Personally I think it would be to Amazon’s advantage to lighten up their terms and not be so controlling. It seems silly to hold blogs to a different standard than the books they sell.

Sometimes the Kindle version of books don’t include everything the print version does. Recently I read the book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer on my Kindle. I received the book in less than 20 seconds after ordering it directly from the device. Yesterday I was in a local bookstore and happened to see the hardcover version on the shelf. I thumbed through it and noticed it included several pages of photos on glossy paper. I didn’t receive any of those photos with the Kindle version. I don’t see why the photos weren’t included. They were all in black and white anyway, and the Kindle is capable of showing photos in 16-color grayscale, which would have been adequate to display the ones from the book. Incidentally, this was an excellent book — highly recommended if you’re curious about the future of robotics and unmanned combat. Did you know there are now thousands of robots now on active combat duty in the Middle East, many of which are armed?

Experimental Features

The Kindle also includes some experimental features.

Text-to-speech allows you to have your Kindle read any text to you. The Kindle comes with built-in speakers as well as a headphone jack. You can choose from male and female voices and different reading speeds. This is a nice touch, but personally I never use it. The Kindle is a bit too bulky to make a good portable listening device, so I’d rather listen to audio programs on my iPod. Nevertheless, this could be a useful feature under certain circumstances. For example, if you’re going on a long road trip and reading in the car makes you carsick, you can listen to your books on the road and then continue reading normally once you arrive at your destination. Same goes for plane travel. You can also set your Kindle down on the counter and have it read your latest book to you while you make dinner.

You can play MP3s from your Kindle, uploading them via USB. I haven’t tried this because I’d rather use my iPod for audio.

You can surf the web in a limited fashion, much like you would on a cell phone. I was able to check my Gmail account with it, but it’s pretty tedious due to the slow speed. The web browsing feature crashed on me a few times as well. I like that they included this feature, and I found it useful during a trip to L.A. when I didn’t bring my laptop, but realistically I’d only use it in a pinch if I had nothing else available.

Using the Kindle – My Personal Experience

So far I really like my Kindle, and it has quickly become one of my favorite gadgets. But I’d still like to see the technology improve, especially the overall speed of the device.

The Kindle reminds me of the pads from Star Trek: The Next Generation. When I use the thing, I feel like Wesley Crusher reviewing engineering schematics in Ten Forward. I mean that in a good way. I know this tech is still evolving, but I already get the sense that we’re on the cusp of a major transformation. I feel I’m witnessing the future of reading when I use my Kindle. As I sit in my office right now, I’m staring at hundreds of print books on my bookshelves and thinking, your days are numbered. And that includes my own book (which by the way does have a Kindle version and is currently in the top 1% of Kindle books by sales rank).

By far my favorite aspect of using the Kindle is the shareware marketing element coupled with the instant gratification. When I go to a bookstore, I like to browse books on the shelf. I’ll often read a chapter right there in the store to decide whether the book is worth my time and money. But many times they don’t carry the book I want, or they have a weak selection on the topic that interests me. And then I may have to wait in line to buy, especially during the holiday season. When I shop online, I get a bigger selection and better prices, but I have to wait days for my order to arrive. Even with the Amazon Prime program, which gives me free two-day shipping on every order for $79 per year, I still have to wait two days or pay extra for overnight shipping. That’s too long if I find a book I want on a Saturday morning and would like to read the whole book that weekend. I’m used to finishing books within a day or two after I buy them.

With my Kindle I get the best of both worlds. I can shop online with a vast selection since almost 300,000 books are now available on Kindle. When I find a book I like, I can instantly download a free sample chapter and start reading immediately. Then if I like it, I can buy the full book right away, usually for $9.99 or less. This whole process is superb. It’s not perfect — I still love to be able to thumb through the entire book like I can in a bookstore — but it’s a huge step in the right direction.

The Kindle also eliminates the hassle of shelving print books in my home. Erin and I own hundreds of books, and they take up a lot of space. I can donate the ones I don’t need to keep, but I still want many of them available for reference. The Kindle makes this very easy because it can hold up to 1500 books on the device itself.

I think it would be especially cool if Amazon gave you the Kindle version when you bought the physical version of a book too. It would also be nice to get Kindle versions of the print books I’ve already bought from Amazon over the years. They certainly have that info in their database. I understand if they can’t do this for free, but maybe they could offer a deep discount on the Kindle price for books they can verify that you already own, like 99 cents or so. If I could instantly Kindle-ize all the Amazon books I’ve bought over the years for 99 cents each, I’d very likely do it. But $10 each is a bit too much. This problem of digital rights management isn’t specific to Kindle — you see it with music, movies, and software too — but I think Amazon is in a good position to offer better solutions so you don’t have to keep buying the same content in different media forms.

For someone like me who buys dozens of books each year (despite being sent so many for free), the Kindle is likely to save me money in the long run, even with the $359 price tag. Most Kindle books are $9.99. For the types of books I frequently buy, I probably save about $5 per book on average, so with 72 books I recoup my Kindle investment. The money isn’t a big deal to me, but I point this out because I know that some people would consider this a pricey gadget. The price may be offset partially or completely if you buy a lot of books.

My kids got curious about my Kindle when they saw me reading it. Since it doesn’t look like a book, I think they regard it as something of a toy, like a Nintendo DS. My daughter Emily (age 9) keeps calling it a kettle. I showed her how it works, but she didn’t seem to care much. She loves to read as well, so I may have her read a book on the Kindle to see if she likes it. If some of her favorite authors are available on Kindle, she may quite enjoy it. This would save us from having to store all the books she buys.

Kindle DX

This summer Amazon is releasing their new Kindle DX, which is currently available for pre-order. Compared to the Kindle 2, the Kindle DX is significantly larger (10.4″ x 7.2″ x 0.38″). It has a bigger screen (9.7″ diagonal compared to the 6″ Kindle 2 screen). It has more memory (4GB, enough to hold 3500 books compared to the 1500 books on the Kindle 2). And it costs more ($489 vs. $359 for the Kindle 2). It also has some new features like native PDF support.

At 10.2 ounces, the weight of the Kindle 2 is just right, roughly comparable to a paperback book. The Kindle DX weights 18.9 ounces, so that’s more than a pound and 85% heavier than the Kindle 2. By comparison, however, the last Harry Potter book in hardcover weighs 41.2 ounces, so the Kindle DX is less than half of that. Even so, the heavier weight may mean more wrist strain if you like the device with one hand at an angle like I do.

I’m not sure if I’ll get a Kindle DX. I’d probably get one only if Erin and the kids end up taking an interest in my Kindle 2, and we end up competing for who gets to use it. Then I might buy a Kindle DX, so we have a couple devices to share between us. This would allow us to share all the books bought across both devices if we link them to the same Amazon account. At present I’m quite happy with my Kindle 2 though, and I’m glad I bought it. I hope that in time the price will come down, so these devices can be accessible to a lot more people, including those who don’t read as often.

I would not want to be the owner of a brick and mortar bookstore right now.

Leia Mais

How to Make Money From Your Blog

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

• blog publishing software
• HTML/CSS
• blog comments (and comment spam)
• RSS/syndication
• feed aggregators
• pings
• trackbacks
• full vs. partial feeds
• blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
• search engines
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• page rank
• social bookmarking
• tagging
• contextual advertising
• affiliate programs
• traffic statistics
• email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog. Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Automated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.

The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.

I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.

Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a starter hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.

As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). This web site is hosted by ServInt. I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome host. What I like most about them is that they have a smooth upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. I wish I had done it sooner.

If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.

Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.

I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.

Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.

Build a complete web site, not just a blog

Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.

Testing and optimization

In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.

A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.

For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.

It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.

Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small

Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.

Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.

A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.

Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.

Posting frequency and length

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value. I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions. If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.

Expenses

Blogging is dirt cheap.

I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.

My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.

The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.

My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.

Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.

I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.

Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.

On the other hand, I can offer you a good alternative to recommend if you don’t have the technical skills to build a high-traffic, income-generating blog. Check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for details.

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