Why You Shouldn’t Start a “Make Money Online” Blog

Posted: 21 Nov 2013 05:30 AM PST

This post might make me unpopular … but I think this needs to be said:

Your first blog should NOT be a "make money online" one.

You can blog about all sorts of things – but if you're giving advice on "making a living online," "blogging for money," or anything like that, and you've not yet done it yourself, then you're making a mistake.

Why Bloggers Often Start Out With "Make Money Online" Blogs

If you got into blogging as a result of reading sites like ProBlogger, DailyBlogTips, John Chow dot com, etc. then it's easy to see why you'd want to create a blog that's all about making money.

After all, that's what you've been reading about, and that's what your goal is.

I'll let you into a secret. Before my first real attempt at a "pro" blog – before I even knew problogging existed – I came across a neat little blog that was tracking the blogger's attempts to make money online.

And I instantly decided to do the same. I had no idea there was a whole "make money online" niche out there – I just thought this was a cool idea.

My blog lasted perhaps a week before I gave up. Of course, I didn't make any money – I didn't even have a clue where to begin!

Why a "Make Money Online" Blog Won't Work For You

I'm sure you already know way more than I did back then. (After all, you're reading DailyBlogTips!) But you're probably not ready to start a blog about making money online either.

Even if you've been reading about making money online, it's hard to blog about it with any sort of credibility unless you've actually made some money already.

Plus, the "make money online" niche is absolutely saturated with new blogs: there's just too much established competition for you to make it.

I'm going to quote from a post about making money online, by a new blogger who looks like they've never actually done what they're talking about. (I won't link to the post but you can find it by Googling a few sentences of the text.)

Many People Earn Online by various ways. It is Possible to Earn Money Online. But You have to work hard for it. There are no easy shortcuts. We have seen in recent years Many Entrepreneurs who have made their Ideas into Millions of Dollars. For Earning Money Online you have to define a Strategy and stick to it. There are Thousands of ways to Earn Money Online. All you need a Computer with Internet Connection and an Intresting Idea.

As a reader, this makes me think the blogger hasn't ever made any money online – he (or she) is just telling me about what they've read. The weird capitalisation doesn't help, or the fact that the blogger is listed as "admin" rather than a name on their blog – a sure sign of a newbie.

(If you need to fix your "admin" name, this post tells you how.)

Do you see the problem? Readers won't stick around and learn from you unless they're sure you've actually got some experience. After all, would you read a blog about parenting from someone who'd never looked after a child? Would you read a blog about cooking from someone who'd never switched on an oven?

What You Should Write About Instead

Maybe you were thinking about starting (or have started) a "make money online" blog. What should you do instead?

Think about your interest, hobbies, and experience. What topics do you already know quite a lot about? Could any of these become a blog?

You want a topic area that's broad enough to sustain your interest over the long term – but you also want to cover something specific, rather than writing about any old thing that comes to mind.

If you're stuck for ideas, here are a few broad, popular categories that you might work within, with some examples of specifics. Do you have enough experience with one of these to write about it?

Personal development: time management, motivation, organisation, de-cluttering, mindfulness, journaling, minimalism…
Health: weight loss, weight gain, fitness, sleeping well, quitting smoking, alternative therapies…
Technology: websites, blogs, Microsoft Office, social media, computer hardware, computer repairs, security…

You don't have to be an expert. I'm certainly not an expert on technology, but after years using Microsoft Office as a student, employee and business-owner, I could probably write a beginner-friendly blog about it, helping people who want to get to grips with basics.

There are an almost unlimited number of topics you could write about. Don't make the mistake of killing your chances of success by starting yet another "make money online" blog – the internet has plenty of those.

If you want some feedback on your topic (or if you disagree with me!) then drop a comment below.

Don't forget our new course, Get Blogging, is only open for new members until Saturday 23rd November.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

Practice Makes Perfect

Posted: 20 Nov 2013 04:11 PM PST

Around four months ago I had a pretty interesting idea for an application. The development of such application is very complex, however, as it will require some artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.

I therefore had two options: to hire some people who knew this stuff, or to learn it myself. Since I always liked this field I decided I would learn it myself and start developing the app alone, at least initially.

The first thing I did was to hit Amazon and buy the five best-selling books on the topic. I spent around two months reading the first three books, and gained some knowledge while doing it.

After that I enrolled on a Coursera course about machine learning. The course has only been rolling for three weeks and I already learned a lot more when compared to the books.

How come?

The Coursera course has practice involved. Every week you are supposed to complete a quiz and a programming exercise. You need to submit the exercise and you get a score based on the number of tests your program passes.

This made all the difference, as when you need to apply what you are learning you understand things much better and absorb them much easier too.

Sure, books are useful, but if you really need to learn or master something you’ll need to put it into practice.

Many books do come with exercises and projects you can try at the end of each chapter, but most people just skip through though. When you are following a course with deadlines and scores, on the other hand, you feel much more motivated to do the assigned tasks.

Bottom line: Practice makes perfect. If you really want to master something, make sure to find a course or a project that will let you get your hands dirty.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

ProBlogger: How I use Google Analytics ‘Compare’ Feature to Motivate Me to Grow My Blog

How I use Google Analytics ‘Compare’ Feature to Motivate Me to Grow My Blog

Posted: 20 Nov 2013 07:37 AM PST

This morning, a reader asked me this question:

“How do you motivate yourself to grow your blog traffic from day to day?”

We’ve covered a whole heap of techniques for growing the amount of traffic you attract to your blog in our Blog Promotion category (also check out this ‘how to find readers page‘ and listen to my recent finding reader webinar) but one thing that has helped me on the ‘motivation’ front lately is the report below in Google Analytics (click to enlarge).

What you’re looking at is the traffic so far today (the blue line) on Digital Photography School compared to the traffic on the site one week ago (the orange line) – arranged by the hour.

I’ll tell you how to get this report below but first, the reason I love this report is that it tells me whether I’m on track to get as much traffic to my site today as I had this time last week.

Having something to compare traffic keeps me motivated to better the previous week’s result.

Note: I always choose to compare traffic from exactly 1 week previous because on our site we see quite distinct rises and falls in traffic on different days of the week.

In the chart above you can see the day’s traffic started well, with the first 4 hours between 1.7% and 18.1% higher than the previous week.

This all happened while I was asleep so when I checked in at 9am I was pleased! However, I also saw that from 6am-8am that we were beginning to slip behind.

Knowing this gave me a little bit of motivation to find some ways to drive more traffic to the site today.

I took a look at the schedule of Facebook updates that I had planned for the day and decided to move a status update I thought would drive some traffic to be earlier in the day.

That status update went live at 9am and resulted in a nice bump in traffic to get the blue line trending up above the orange again.

I also identified some older posts from my archives that I then scheduled to be tweeted throughout the next 24 hours (based upon my advice from last month to promote old content), which I thought would help us to keep nudging the traffic up higher for the rest of the day.

Having this report open is a great little source of motivation to keep working not only at writing great content but also driving traffic to it.

I also find that having this comparison open during the day (and watching ‘real time’ stats) helps me to spot anomalies in traffic. It helps me to quickly spot if there’s a problem (server issues) or on the flip side it shows me when a post might have been shared on a big blog or social media account.

Knowing this information helps me to react quickly to fix a problem or leverage a traffic event.

UPDATE: here’s how the traffic looked at the end of the day in the comparison view:

Things slipped for the last hour or two but over the full day visitor numbers were up by 4.22%.

While a 4% increase in traffic isn’t the most spectacular result I see it is a small step in a larger race I’m running. I know if I can see even a 1% increase in traffic each week that over a year or longer that it’ll significantly grow the site over time.

How to Get This Report

For those of you new to Google Analytics here’s the easy process to get this report (it will only take you a couple of minutes).

1. Login to your Google Analytics Account

2. In the menu click on the ‘Overview’ link under ‘Audience’

3. By default you’ll be looking at the last months traffic. You want to drill down now to today so in the top right corner click on the date range and a calendar will open up like this:

4. Select today’s date.

5. Check the ‘compare to’ box and then in the new date field that opens up underneath you can put in last weeks date by clicking on the day you want to compare it to. Once you have – click ‘Apply’.

6. You’re almost done now. You should be looking at a report that compares the two days but by default it’ll be showing you the total of the days in the chart as two dots. You want to view this now as ‘hourly’ so hit the ‘hourly’ tab.

You now should be looking at the comparison of today’s traffic with the same day last week (note: your current days report won’t yet be complete unless the day is almost over and it does run an hour behind).

Variations on this report to check out

This comparison tool is really useful for a while heap of reports.

For example you can choose to compare one week with another:

In fact, any period of time can be compared with any other period.

Also, with a date range locked in you can drill down into many other metrics.

For example, earlier today I was doing some analysis comparing this last week with the corresponding week in September, which was just before we did our new redesign on Digital Photography School.

A day by day comparison showed a great improvement in overall traffic.

Drilling down further, and viewing the two weeks by the hour, was also fascinating and showed that the two weeks had remarkably similar patterns in traffic from hour to hour – so the increase in traffic was very even across the week.

Under that chart was some interesting data:

Not only were Visits and Page views well up – but being able to see that bounce rate was slightly down and that average visitor duration was up was encouraging. Seeing Pages Viewed Per Visit was down showed we have an area to improve on (we’re already working on this) and seeing that we had a good rise in ‘new’ visitors was something that should be investigated further.

To investigate the rise in ‘new’ visitors I moved into the ‘Acquisition’ menu on Google analytics. The same date range and comparison is still selected so now I’m able to compare the two periods when it comes to different sources of traffic and see why we’ve had rises in traffic:

It turns out we’ve seen increases in a few area:

Search Traffic is up:

All_Traffic_-_Google_Analytics_and_Preview_of_

Facebook Traffic is up (due to my recent experiments):

But interestingly Feed traffic is down (giving us something to investigate).

There are many other areas you can drill down into with the comparison tool – almost anything that Google Analytics has a report for you can compare from period to period and get a great overview of how that stat compares very quickly.

Have a go yourself – do some comparisons and let me know what you find in comments below!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How I use Google Analytics ‘Compare’ Feature to Motivate Me to Grow My Blog