A few years ago, I found an article on SCORE, a non-profit group of retired professionals, by the veteran catalog guru, Lillian Vernon, called From My Kitchen Tabletop to Your Computer Laptop.

In the fascinating article, she shares her insights and history of the Lillian Vernon Corporation and catalog from a small kitchen business to a worldwide company with millions of dollars in sales online every year.
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Eager for my expertise, a company recently hired me to improve their web traffic by reviewing their web design, content, and structure.

I don’t do “web traffic” work. Traffic isn’t important. The numbers aren’t important. The ones who stick around, and pay for the privilege, aren’t on a normal score card. To influence me to take them on, they told me that they wanted to improve their online presence, visibility, and really connect to their customers, expanding their reputation to a global market, as well as be more attractive to modern shoppers and web users.

Basically, their site was six months old and not working for them. They wanted an expert to tell them why. With misgivings, I decided to take them on. In the end, I gave them their money back. Here’s why.
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I write and photograph, and play on the web. Okay, it’s more serious than that, but many think of these things as hobbies. I’ve never thought there were hobbies. They are jobs. My career. My business. I’ve been selling my writing and photography since I was 15. Blogging and web publishing was a natural career move as technology developed along with my skills and business. Writing and photography aren’t hobbies. They paid the rent.

Along with my work, I have hobbies, too. A hobby is something you do for fun, relaxation, and enjoyment. It’s a change from the day-to-day grind of your job, whatever your job is. Luckily, most of us live in a society that allows us hours away from a paid job to do something other than work.

For most, their hobby brings creativity and fun into their lives. It stretches the mind and body, actually making them a better worker for the time away from the job. Hobbies are wonderful things and they need to be honored.

The moment you make money with your hobby, your hobby becomes a business. Things change. You change. The hobby changes.

Recently, people have a new attitude about hobbies. I learned how to knit last year and I’m having some fun with it, making mistakes as one does when they are learning. I sit waiting in airports and offices, knitting away mindlessly, enjoying this new hobby that allows my mind to wander while my hands are busy and I’m accomplishing something. I like hobbies which make things.

Someone notices and they start chatting, eventually leading up to:

You Can Make Money Selling That

I cannot count how many people have admired whatever I was working on with these words, “You could make money selling that.”
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The San Francisco Chronicle has published an interesting, long, article about the potential profitability of blogs. Citing TechCrunch as an example of a successful blog with low overheads which owner Mike Arrington claims now makes $240k per month in advertising revenue, the article collects the views of a number of experts in the Bay Area — “a center of the blogging business”.

“As traditional media continue to contract, this stuff is going to expand,” said Steve King, senior fellow with the Society for New Communications Research, a Palo Alto think tank. “The business models have caught up and you’re starting to see little blog publishing companies that frankly are becoming not so little.”

Professional blogs “are at a fork in the road,” said Lisa Stone, co-founder and CEO of BlogHer, an online company operating a women’s blogging network. “Any publisher has to implement (ethical) guidelines. If someone recommends a mixer, a diaper or a personal digital assistant, it has to be because they absolutely love it. It’s the only way to succeed.”

“This is the next evolution of media,” said Jon Callaghan, a partner with True Ventures

Nick Denton of Gawker Media calls for caution: “A few self-sustaining blog media businesses do seem to have emerged. But they’re still minuscule by the standards of traditional media. And none have weathered a downturn. So it would be unwise to sound too triumphant.”

It’s good to see traditional media continuing to pay positive attention to blogging, though I hope it doesn’t give the impression that making significant money from blogging is a given, or that a large proportion of bloggers will easily do it.

When fringe political author Danny Carlton decided to block the Firefox browser from visiting his site, he sparked a firestorm of controversy.

According to Carlton, the issue is a popular Firefox plugin known as Adblock Plus (ABP), which enables users to filter out advertisements on the sites they visit. Since there was, at that time, no means of detecting ABP, Carlton blocked all Firefox users to prevent what he called an “infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers.”

Most Webmasters and bloggers have no desire to take this issue to the extremes Carlton has. The majority, in fact, have no real interest in it at all. Even the major players, right now, have taken no interest in these applications as they just aren’t popular enough to warrant fighting.

However, as spam blogs and misguided Webmasters make advertising more prominent and annoying, the popularity of these tools can only grow. A large-scale clash in the courtroom may be inevitable, but in the meantime regular bloggers are left with few reasonable options. Even if ad blocking is illegal, enforcing it will only be an option for larger players such as Google and Myspace, who have millions potentially at stake.

The question becomes, how can a Webmaster keep their revenue stream intact, even if some of their viewers are blocking ads.

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Now that the mainstream media is at least used to — if not either in love with or hostile to — the concept of blogging as more than simply personal diaries by sad geeks or teenagers, a number are also tuning into the possibility that they can be used to make money.

The Times newspaper has an interesting article on “Blogging for Dosh” which examines the possibility that some people are creating and writing blogs with the primary intention of making money.

Jim Furtado is one of those hoping for cyber success of his own. Furtado started his blog, Baseball Think Factory, nearly six years ago when he was working as a fireman in Massachusetts and had lots of free time. “Every firefighter has two jobs,” he explains. But what began as a hobby has slowly become more like a business, and now the Boston Red Sox fan says he spends about 40 hours a week working on the site – in addition to his regular job. Furtado is a bit frustrated, his time for writing about baseball crowded out by the demands of keeping the technology working and chasing down ads. “It’s not as much fun as when I first started it,” he says.

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Last April, I wrote about sponsored WordPress themes, in light of Blogging Pro’s release of their InSense theme with a sponsored link at the footer (but not a required link, as users can take it out). Performancing has also been exploring this business model, with the recent PhotoPress theme, recent announcement that sponsorship for News Theme, the Performancing Theme slated for release this coming August has opened, with $500 as the starting bid.

We are now taking bids for the August 2007 Performancing Theme sponsorship. Bids start at $500.

To give you a sense of the value of a sponsorship, take our first sponsor, Fusilly T-Shirts for the Photopress Theme. That theme has only been released for about three weeks, and yet a search on the linked keyphrase “funny t-shirt” brings Fusilly up on the front page of the Google SERPS (as of this writing). That’s a relatively high-competition keyphrase placing on the front page relatively quickly.

Performancing cites the SEO benefit as the main come-on for sponsors. You get your choice of link URL and anchor text to include. However, there are no 100% guarantees (as with most search-optimizing techniques, in my opinion). Still, with a clean-looking Design Disease creation like the News Theme (click for live demo) I can say the theme will be popular among bloggers who wish to establish a serious and professional look for their blogs.

Adsense users rejoice! Google has now officially expanded the number of Ad Links allowed on any given page.

Previously the search engine giant limited users to only one Ad link format, compared to the three regular content ads allowed on any individual web page. Now it seems that Google has become more open minded by tripling the number available.
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Yaro Starak is about to launch his Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program, designed for both new and more experienced bloggers who want to earn a living from blogging.

The ongoing program shows bloggers what Starak did to become a professional blogger able to earn a full-time income by working only part-time.

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If just recently tuning in I would reccomend checking out Using Contextual Advertising On Your Blog (Part I)

To start off on this post I want to give some suggestions to bloggers who own/author technology blogs. These types of blogs are great to earn a quick buck especially if you know what your talking about. Putting contextual advertising on blogs like these are virtually pain free when it comes to the stress of relevancy because the “gadget” market is always booming. This is not a suggestion to go make a lame tech blog and hopefully make some coin; I am just giving all gadget bloggers a pat on the back due to the fact that they have chosen to blog in an easily monetizable vertical.

Ad Placement Is Important
Ad placement is very important on a blog and can be the most important placement on any website. It can affect the payouts you receive and the way your readers interpret the advertisers. Keeping it simple will most likely earn you a smaller chunk of change but let you keep your users vs. just piling advertisers and relying on social media sites such as digg to provide you with random bursts of traffic. http://www.pimp-phones.com/2007/05/12/top-5-flip-phones/ is a perfect example (and is a work in progress of my own).

Two standard yahoo advertisements and an auction-ads banner on the site. As you see the blog isn’t overwhelmed yet as it has 3 advertisements per page. The one problem with that blog is how un-original that placement is. If you really want to make those big bucks off your “barbie doll” blog think up something originality with the advertisements on your blog. This is something I will also post on later.

When NOT to use Adsense
Although I am trying to praise contextual advertising on a blog I would like to let you know of some reasons why NOT to pile adsense on your blog. If blogging about certain grey area categories which happen to involve pictures of half naked ladies I recommend not using adsense or YPN on that blog due to the fact that you will most likely be terminated (and not paid!!) as they are violations of the Terms of Service. So, what to do?

If you happen to be blogging about adult related topics or anything that happens to have a low pay per click payout, OR you happen plain just happen to have ads that you would never click on, I would suggest you that you just do CPM based advertising. As blogs grow and form as a brand CPM rates can be huge and easily sold to huge marketing firms which are not looking for leads or sales, only branding. That is my suggestion to monetize your blog if writing about adult topics, dating, celebrity gossip, and so on.

In the next post i am going to cover some ways to tweak/increase the payouts you receive from the advertising networks.