I have now been a blogger for nearly 3 years at this point. While I really enjoy blogging (especially the writing part), I have struggled in making the income pay enough to match the effort. At this point, I am only making around $300 per month with all of my blogs, and this is via the Google Adsense program.
Adsense is wonderful, don’t get me wrong. I love the program and it has been a great fit. I think every blogger should use Adsense in some capacity. However, my thinking has recently evolved and I am now seeking newer ways to increase my overall blogging and self employment income. Here is my strategy:
- I hope to go through all of my sites and do a little SEO work. This means adding a few anchor text links to other articles within the same site, build a few backlinks (which will require me to be a little more social in the blogosphere), and more. Hopefully this will help in the long run with SEO, and increase my site’s awareness in search results. I will do this ethically of course (no black-hat stuff). This is all in effort to increase traffic, and also maximize my Adsense income.
- I hope to blog more on each site (increase my post count), and provide informative or entertaining posts that satisfy the reader (or at least I hope so).
- I am going to experiment with paid post programs. I think there is a lot of potential here, and I hope this works out like I hope. I could really use the extra income.
- I am going to do some freelance writing on the side. I hope to join a few sites that pay up-front for articles. I think this might be a nice way to earn income writing (other than just blogging).
- Build more content for some of my newer sites (in hopes that they will build up over time).
So that is the plan. Basically, I am just going to maximize Adsense, do some pay per posts, and try my hand at freelance writing. I will try to update on how this works out for any other bloggers who are struggling to find success like me.