Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

This post I'll show you one of the secrets to monetizing blogs and websites. Most online marketers that make good income practice this. When I first started out, I made the mistake of not doing it and it cost me a lot of sales at first.

The mistake was that I gave away too much good information. I had spent years in business, real estate, finances and consulting, and I would write these articles talking about a whole bunch of stuff I knew and had been successful at. The problem was, I gave away so much information, that the visitors weren't clicking on the offerings I had that were my moneymakers.

So what did I do? I started only writing stuff that would wet the appetites of my readers and have the offerings available on the appropriate web pages that would give them the opportunity to search further into the subject. Once I did this it was amazing how much more money I started to make.

Ludwig von Mises

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This post I'm going to talk about a wildly popular site that you probably haven't heard about. It uses the strategy I've been talking about blogs and websites with and has had an extraordinary success.

The name of the site is called "Lew Rockwell.com." It is a site that promotes libertarian thinking. The point I want to make about this site is that it is extremely popular and viewed. Do you want to know its monthly visitor count? It's over 28 million. A site with 28 million visitors that isn't created to make money.

What is it's purpose? We hear a lot about Web 2.0 and communities as if it's something new. Those of us that have been online for years laugh at the nonsense. But that, essentially is what the site exists for. Numerous authors write and they interact in the forum among a number of things.

Let's look at the reason that these sites perform this way.

The greatest reason that these sites don't make much money is their popularity itself: people really like to read them and get a lot out of them. What? Say that again! You heard it right. Blogs that are really well read, don't monetize very well.

Why not? People that really come to read indepth on a blog or website, have less of a desire to click on the type of advertising that is offered. In other words they are coming with the thought of staying at least for a little while.

Weird isn't it? The very popularity of a blog keeps it from making much money.

If you don't think this is true, check out the great majority of well-known bloggers that get read well and they'll tell you the same thing.

Are you shocked by the statements the Guy and Darren made? Does that mean there is no hope for bloggers if those with the numbers of visitors they get don't do well on those sites?

The key phrase here is "those sites." It's the types of sites they are talking about that is determining the lower income from them.

I remember when one blogger was asking Darren for advice on how to optimize things so that he could at least pay for the costs of his blogging. Darren gave him several things to do to make it work better for monetization, and he basically turned down all the options.

                                                               Guy Kawasaki

It is interesting to note recently that Guy Kawasaki mentioned how hard it is to make money on blogs. Here is how he puts it:

"It's hard to make money blogging. The advertising revenues don't add up to much, but there are other significant rewards like helping people change the world..

"Finally, a little story for you: At 11:00 pm a few weeks ago, my wife asked me, “What are you doing?” I wish I could have said, “Making money.” Instead I told her, “I'm changing the world, 15,000 people at a time.” To which she deadpanned, “Oh, you're blogging again...”

Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse also mentions concerning his popular problogger.net that he makes very little from it: