In my previous article about how I make money online, I briefly mentionned that to run a blog, you need expertise about a given topic, time, and dedication. I think those are the three pillars of blogging.

When I tell people how I make money blogging, they get really excited and want to start their own blog. Some of them actually do start their own blog but the majority fails because they either lack expertise, time, or motivation. If one of the pillars is missing, your blog is going to collapse.

Let’s have a look at the three pillars.

Expertise

Expertise doesn’t mean being a living encyclopedia in a certain field. It simply means knowing more than most people in a certain field. That’s a big difference.

For example, I blog about the iPhone but I really don’t consider myself an iPhone expert. More often than not, I will find myself confused when reading technical information about the iPhone. However, I know much more about the iPhone than 99% of iPhone owners. In their eyes, I am an expert.

We’re all expert at something. It sometimes takes time to figure out what we’re good at or what our special skills are, but the reality is we all have skill sets that can make us look like experts in the eyes of many.

Are you a good cook? Are you passionate about tropical fish? Do your neighbors come ask you about gardening tips? Those are areas of expertise that you can take advantage of and leverage on your own blog.

Time

Being an expert is one thing, but having the time to show your expertise is another. Blogging is time consuming and you will need lots of time if you want to run a blog.

Last year I set up a blog for my accountant. As the guy who filed my taxes, he saw how much money I was making from blogging and he thought he could just start his own blog about taxes. He sure had the expertise, but the poor man didn’t have the time.

He didn’t have the time to put at least one article up a week, and he didn’t have time to reply to comments. Basically, he didn’t have time for something that wasn’t generating income as quickly as his business. He gave up within days.

If you’re serious about blogging, make sure you have the time to blog!

Dedication

Being dedicated is very related to having time. You obviously can’t be dedicated if you don’t have time. But having time doesn’t mean you will be dedicated. You might have all the time in the day to blog, but the truth is that if you don’t feel like blogging, well, you won’t!

I am very dedicated to my iPhone blog. I write at least one post a day, every single day. I am so dedicated that I sometimes get up at 3 in the morning to cover breaking news. I buy every new iPhone coming out. I read over 50 iPhone-related sites. I answer questions on Twitter about the iPhone. I reply to people’s comments on my blog or on Facebook. I do this because I am committed and dedicated.

There are some days when I don’t feel like writing an article because I lack the motivation to do it. Well you know what? I still move my ass and write an article. That’s dedication. No matter what happens, I’m going to publish one article/day, and I’m going to be as helpful as I can to people who think I’m an expert. They trust me, they give me their time (and their money); my part of the job is to being there to deliver what they come for.

Is that it?

Can you be a successful blogger simply by being an expert, having time and being dedicated? Absolutely not! These are just the basis of a blog. There is obviously much more to it than just the three pillars but those are the foundations and support of a solid blog.

What’s your take?

When you meet someone for the first time, there is always a time in the conversation when you’re going to ask each other what you do for a living. When I was working for the man, the answer was easy. I would simply say “I’m the Vice President of Marketing for a web company that offers various services to franchise companies”.

Now that I am self-employed and that I generate 100% of my revenues on the Internet, I find it a bit harder to explain what I do in one short and concise sentence. The best answer would be that I make money online. I’ve found that telling this usually generates about 60 more questions about the possible ways to make a living off a computer and an Internet connection.

In this article, I would like to discuss the various ways I make money online, mostly through blogging, content publishing and projects for clients.

How I Make Money Blogging

To me, blogging is one of the easiest ways to make money online. The start-up cost is extremely low. All you need is a domain name, a hosting plan, and a blog set up for a total cost of about $100/year. Of course, besides this you’ll need some time, expertise in a given field, and some serious motivation and dedication.

I run several blogs but there is one that I am completely dedicated to: my iPhone blog. I’ve been running this blog since May 2008 and at the time I am writing this, it is one of the most regarded iPhone blogs out there and it gets about 1 million visitors per month. Yes, you read it right. About 1 million people come visit my iPhone blog every month. Google “iPhone Blog” and you’ll see the iPhone Download Blog up there in the top results!

This didn’t happen overnight, but I can’t say that it took me forever to get here either. I’ve invested a lot of time in it. I really know what I’m talking about. I am very motivated and totally devoted to this blog, which I update at least once a day, every single day.

This being said, here is how I make money blogging:

Adsense

Adsense is a a service offered by Google that allows you to be paid everytime someone clicks on an ad on your site. This is basically how it works. You sign up with Adsense, Google gives you a piece of code to put on your site. This code will look at what your site is about and will display relevant ads. Whenever someone visits your site and clicks on one of these ads, Google will pay you a little commission. These commissions can go as little as $0.01/click to well over $50.

Although many A-list bloggers will tell you that Adsense sucks because it drives traffic away from your site, it still is a great and easy way to generate money easily. The downside to this is that you have no idea how much Google is really making thanks to you. When they pay you $0.25 for a click, they might actually make $4 for it, keeping the largest piece of the pie.

Banner Ads

I make quite a bit of money with banner ads without having to spend time managing them. I work with a company called BuySellAds (BSA). This is how it works. I tell BSA that I have a few ad spots available on my site and I also tell them what each spot is worth. That’s my part of the job.

BSA has a huge inventory of advertisors and puts my site in front of them. When an advertisor thinks my blog would be a great fit for their products, the advertisors can look at my ad spots options (placement and price) and decides to buy an ad.

From there, BSA collects the payment and takes a 25% cut. That’s their commission for their service. After collecting payment, it will automatically display the new ad on my site and send me an email telling me I just made money (I love receiving those emails).

The benefit of using such a service is that BSA helps me connect with advertisers that I may never find otherwise. Additionally, it makes it very easy and safe to collect the payment. Finally, and more importantly to me, all this is handled without me having to do anything.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing where the affiliate (me in that case) promotes a business or service in exchange for a percentage or fixed commission of the sales they generate.

Let’s take the example of my iPhone blog. Invisible Shield is a product that helps protect your iPhone from scratches. I placed a banner for their product on my site and every time someone clicks on this banner and buys an Invisible Shield, I get about $5.

There are affiliate programs for virtually every product or industry out there. Here are 5 of my favorite affiliate marketplaces:

• ClickBank
• Regnow
• Share A Sale
• Commission Junction
• LinkShare

On my iPhone blog, I promote several affiliate programs ranging from accessories to softwares for iPhone. This generates pretty substantial revenues every month.

In-Text Advertising

In-Text advertising refers to links placed inside your text, that come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links. Once the user rolls the mouse over the link, the advertising will pop.

Although these in-text ads, also known as contextual ads, can seem annoying, they’ve been generating quite some income for me since I started using them.

I was very reluctant to include them in my blog until I realized that 1) my readers don’t mind them at all, and 2) they can generate thousands each month.

I use Kontera for my in-text ads. I even cut a pretty sweet deal with them, which is probably why I generate so much income from these ads.

Sponsored Tweets

Just like in-text ads, it took me a while to jump on the sponsored tweets bandwagon and so far, I’m not really impressed by the results. I do get people to pay me to send a tweet promoting their products from time to time, but not as often as I would want it.

There are 2 ways I go about it. The first is that I let people pay me directly via Paypal to send their sponsored tweets. That’s my favorite way because there is no middleman.

The other way is to use a service called Sponsored Tweets. It’s like a marketplace where advertisers can find tweeters like me. Although this service is very respectable, I don’t like it as much as the first method because it takes a pretty big commission, which means less money for me.

Content Publishing

Publishing and selling content is my favorite way to make money online because if you do it well, it doesn’t require much work at all and can provide a steady revenue stream.

Writing & Selling eBooks

eBooks are hot and they’re about to become even hotter. They allow anyone with a little bit of knowledge about a given topic to be published at a very small cost.

The concept is very simple: you find problematic topics and give the solution under the form of an ebook. I wrote a few eBooks on my own that I am now selling via the ClickBank marketplace.

Blog Building and Internet Marketing Consulting

I recently started offering my services to a select group of clients. From constructing a new blog from scratch, through to writing killer articles that attract more traffic and links, I help individuals and businesses, large and small, every day. Here are some example services:

• Blog building
• Blog teaching
• Social Media consulting
• Search Engine Optimization
• Content creation

More to Come

As the Internet evolves, new ways of making money online are created. I believe that what I’m doing now online has nothing to do with what I’ll be doing in 10 years.

How do you make money online?

I wanted to start a personal blog like you have done about business, life, health, politics, history.  Here’s the issue.  If I use my real name, and then connect it with my username and then link it to a blog with that same username, my real name would be exposed.  Do you think it’s a liability for an entrepreneur to have his personal and political views so openly espoused?  I have a business partner, employers, vendors, sales prospects that assuredly do Google searches on me before doing business with me…Do I run the risk of jeopardizing business because of my personal views?  And at what point does transparency become too much?  I figure that I can write in a sterile business like fashion, but that’s not me.  I’d love your insight.

You Are What You Say Online

Whatever you say or write online is a liability. There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want people to find out about your true identity. Eric’s problem is that he doesn’t want to associate his name with his political views, etc…

If you work for an employer and if you’re going to blog about hot topics (politics, religion, sex, etc…), make sure you don’t mind losing this job because it might get back at you faster than you think.

As Eric mentioned, people search more and more for names on Google. I do! When I meet someone I will potentially work or deal with, I Google them. That’s my way to do a quick informal background check.

This being said, if you work for the man and want to start your own blog about a hot topic, I suggest using a strong username.

A Username Can Be A Brand

A username for an online service or for a blog domain name doesn’t have to be something meaningless like “Eric1983″. If you want to hide your online identity behind a username, I suggest you choose one that may translate into a brand.

There are many examples of strong and smart usernames/URL that become their own brands: CopyBlogger, ProBlogger, TechCrunch, etc…

These guys chose to reveal their real identity but they didn’t have to. They could have chose to hide behind their usernames.

The Problem With Hiding Your Identity

There is a downside to hiding your identity and not being willing to reveal it. When I created my first website, I didn’t want my boss to find out what I was doing. The website, a franchise directory, was directly competing with the company who was employing me.

The problem is that the site started gaining popularity in the industry and people soon started offering me money to advertise on the site. I hadn’t created a legal entity and was just charging people with PayPal, which made it mandatory to reveal my identity, at least to the people who were paying me.

It became a little awkward when I once had to call a person on behalf of my employer and the guy on the other end of the line thought I was calling on behalf of my website.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s really hard to hide behind a username and things may really well catch up with you one day or the other.

Real Name Vs Username

In the end, it all depends on your needs and goals. In the case of Eric, I’d recommend using a username. That will prevent people from linking him to content he wouldn’t want to be associated with.

If you’re going to write a blog about the iPhone for example, then it’s no use hiding your identity. In this case, using your real name is the way to go as it will most likely help you build your personal brand.

Do you use your real name or a username online? Why? I am curious to read what you think about this.

Instead of replying to him, I thought that would be a good case study about duplicate content and how to create good content for your site.

If you have questions you’d like me to answer, feel free to contact me.

I have an attorney friend who is looking to add a blog to their site. They were wondering if there was a way to add content articles to their blog, to keep it fresh, without them adding unique content each day.

I told him that it is best to try and write something weekly, but he was hoping to have the page update with some other law related articles… Is this possible?

The Rise and Fall of Duplicate Content

The short answer is “yes”. It is possible and fairly easy to do. Simply install FeedWordPress or WP-o-Matic to your Wordpress blog and start leeching content left and right via RSS feeds. Is this a good thing to do? Certainly not!

First of all, replicating someone else’s content without their approval is called copyright infringement. While it is widely done everywhere online, it doesn’t necessarily means it is ok and you might get into trouble if you copy articles from other websites.

But now let’s assume you have the consent of the article’s writer to place their article on your site. In most cases, the author will ask you to link back to their site to give them credit, which is a common practice. You might think “great, free legit content populating my site every day/week/month”.

Well let me tell you that’s a big mistake because you are now generating duplicate content. And if there one thing Google doesn’t like, it’s duplicate content. Google sees duplicate content as a waste of space and while it might index both articles in the beginning (the original, and the one syndicated on your site), it will sooner or later realize that the content is coming from the author’s site and will start removing the duplicated articles from its index. Even worth, it might even “ban” your site and remove it completely from its index.

Think of it this way. Imagine that both the author’s site and your site are newspapers. Every time the original author writes something in his newspaper, it shows up in your newspaper the following day. Who would buy your newspaper? Right, no one would because they can have the same news from the original source before getting it from you. That’s exactly how Google sees the duplicate content issue.

You may still be a little skeptical about all this. Well, why not try it for a while. Find someone willing to share his articles with you, or use articles from an article directory such as GoArticles and you’ll see how your site will slowly but surely drop in search engines. Been there, done that!

Blogs Are About Hearing Your Voice

People or companies are always very quick at starting a blog because they read somewhere that it’s good for search engines. Yes, a GOOD blog is good for your search engine rankings. If you’re just blogging to replicate content, what value are you bringing to the table?

See, blogs are good for search engine rankings because if you have a good blog, people will comment on it, they will link back to it, and that is how a blog really helps search engine wise. People go back to a blog because they like what YOU have to say about XYZ topic. It’s all about the way YOU say things. They don’t care about reading rehashed articles from another site. They want to hear what YOU think.

On my iPhone blog for example, most people come back to it because they like how I go straight to the point without beating around the bush. They also know my voice. My voice is basically to complain about how restrictive Apple is with the iPhone. That’s my voice. That’s what I am known for and that’s why people keep coming back.

Blogging is about finding your voice and sharing what you have to say with others. It’s very probable some people will not like your voice. Who cares? You can’t please everyone. I know some people don’t like my voice and they call be a whiner. Fine, I’ll take that. I’m an iPhone whino but you know what? Even among people who don’t like my voice, many of them keep coming back to my site. I know that because they often leave comments (including their names) and after a while, I get to recognize them.

Create Your Own Content

Content is king! The best way to have Google love you and crawl your site on a regular basis is to create your own unique content. Yes, it does require some work from you but this is the best way to bring quality traffic to your site.

There are several ways you can easily create original content:

• Write a mash-up of an article you read: you just read a good article? Simply write a little blurb about it and tell us why you liked/disliked this article.
• Pay someone to write for you: you can find freelancers that can write articles for you for very cheap. The downside is you don’t really control the message or the quality of the writing.
• Create a case study: this is what I’m doing here. I took a real life example to create a blog post.

Perhaps the hardest part about writing good content is to find good topics. Once you have the topic, the writing will come quickly. I have a few tricks to find topics when I don’t know what to blog about:

• Yahoo Answers: look for questions asked about your expertise in Yahoo Answers. If someone asks the question there, it’s probably because they didn’t find the answer else where.
• Forums: just like Yahoo Answers, forums can be a good way to find a topic.
• Twitter: I usually find iPhone-related topics on Twitter in seconds. Just go to the search option and type “yourexpertisekeyword ?” If you have a blog about olive oil, search for “olive oil ?” on Twitter. You’ll be amazed to see what kind of questions people may have.
• Other social networks: do the same as I do with Twitter on other sites such as Delicious, Digg, etc…
• Ask: sometimes you can just simply ask your clients/friends/employees what they want to hear you talk about. I sometimes ask my Twitter followers what I should write about. If a similar topic comes back several times, I will write a post about it.

The Bottomline

The bottomline is, as I said above, if you have good content and you have an original way to deliver it (that’s your voice), people will read you, they will trust you, and they will recommend you. In the end you will gain from it not only in the search rankings of Google, but you might also generate new leads, maybe some consulting jobs, or whatever may apply to your industry.

If you’re not ready to make the effort of blogging and you just want to blog to create yet some more crappy content, just don’t do it. You will waste your time and money and it might hurt you more than you will benefit from it.

I feel honored that Attila came to me thinking I am a famous online figure. Compared to other guys like John Chow (he’s a total douche) and Shoemoney, I’m still a noobie though.

Attila is a gamer. He used to be an editor on some well-known site in Hungary but the site kinda died after seeing increased competition from better sites and online communities. Now Attila wants to do stuff online but he doesn’t know where to start. It seems he has huge ambitions too as he’s already looking into hiring writers and developers.

So how would I go about this? Very simple, very inexpensive!

Choose A Topic

Ideally, you shouldn’t have to look for a topic. You should know what you want to talk about online. You have to be passionate about it and be quite knowledgeable. You are an expert at baking marijuana cakes? Talk about it! You know everything about shoes? Write about it!

There are no limits to what you can talk about. If you are passionate about it, chances are there are plenty of other people like you, and these people can be your audience.

Get A Good Domain Name

First thing I would do is buy a good domain name related to your topic. When buying a domain name, it’s always good to opt for the .com extension. Avoid the .net and .info as they are often seen as spam by search engines. Also avoid numbers and hyphens in your domain name. For example, www.Worst-Domain-1.info is as bad as it can get.

A domain name is about $10/year and it is very crucial as it is going to be your branding for the years to come.

Try to insert some of your main keywords in your domain name. For example, my iPhone blog domain name is www.iPhoneDownloadBlog.com. Those are 3 important keywords. Now when you look for “iPhone blog” on Google, I show up number 2-3, depending on the days.

Get Good Hosting

Good and reliable hosting is hard to come by. I personally use DreamHost. The service costs me about $130/year for unlimited sites hosted and tons of bandwidth and RAM (more than I can use). Their customer service is not outstanding but it usually is fast and good enough.

When looking for a hosting company, it’s important you choose one in your country. For example, in the case of Attila, he should look for a hosting company in Hungary. Now if he wants his site to be global and reach people all over the world, then I would go for a hosting company in the US.

The localization of your hosting company is important because search engines (which get you most of your traffic) look at where your site is hosted and give a lot of importance to this when displaying search results. If you are searching for something in Google Hungary, Google will mostly give you results from sites hosted in Hungary. If you’re in the US, Google will mostly give you search results with websites hosted in the US. You get the idea…

Set Up A Blog

The best way to start an online venture is to create a WordPress blog. WordPress is a free software that you can easily install automatically (depending on your hosting company). WordPress is highly customizable and simple, and it is used by the largest sites out there such as TechCrunch and Mashable (that’s clearly a sign).

I always recommend people to start a blog because it is inexpensive, and low maintenance.

Don’t Invest Too Much

A big mistake people often do when starting something online is that they want to invest too much time and money into it. Some people want to have a great looking site, with awesome features, and tons of useless crap. I say DON’T! Go with the simple basic stuff at first. You won’t have readers or visitors for a while, so why waste time and money on something no one will notice.

Besides, it’s good not to invest in your site at first because chances are you will blog for a week or so and you will give up. Sorry but that’s the reality. I think 99% of people who start a blog give it up within just a few weeks.

Don’t Expect Too Much

This point is related to the paragraph above. When you start a blog, don’t expect to get tons of visitors. People who start a website always think that they are going to drive thousands of visits overnight. Reality is that it will take you months if not years to get decent amount of traffic.

My iPhone blog gets between 15,000 – 20,000 visitors per day, just after a year of being online. This is really rare and it is the result of hard work. I was lucky to write a few good articles that got me some attention but don’t expect to get similar results as quickly as I did.

Content Is King

As I just said above, I was lucky to write a few articles that got me lots of attention and visits, and that is the whole point of blogging. Content is king! People will come to your site for your good content. People will return to your site for the same reason. People could leave your site and never come back for that exact same reason too.

Write compelling and unique content. Google and other search engines like unique content. Don’t copy/paste other people’s articles. Don’t become a news site! Get your own voice! My iPhone blog is everything but a news blog. All other blogs out there (except a few) are just about iPhone news.

Why would people come to your blog to read the exact same things as they can read on 2,000 other sites? People come to my iPhone blog because they know I am an Apple hater and that I like to talk about hacking the iPhone. That’s my voice. I don’t always rant about Apple or write about hacking, but it is my main topic and it is what I am known for.

Be Social

Getting your name and content out is great. There are many ways to do this. You can use sites like Digg, Facebook, etc… Personally, I am social on one and one place only: Twitter. I am on Twitter all day, sharing content, talking to people, and helping other people out. By doing so, I am now being seen as an expert in everything related to the iPhone. People come to me to ask my advice. People recommend me to their friends. I even have famous people like Dog the Bounty Hunter and Alyssa Milano recommend me or share my content!

Another thing to do is to connect with other bloggers. Go to their sites, leave comments, touch base with them. If they notice you, they might start talking about you too. It’s not because they are “competition” that you can’t work with them. I share stuff from other iPhone blogs several times a day. I am not just out there to advertise myself. I advertise myself as an expert that can get people the best information, even if that means sending people to my competition’s websites.

Learn SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is easy. No matter what these SEO experts are trying to tell you, SEO is dead simple. The problem is that it’s very time consuming. Learning, understanding and applying the basics of SEO is very simple and you can self-educate you. Subscribe to a few SEO blogs (like SEO Book, SEOmoz) and get familiar with the terms and all the tricks and tips.

Here is a great SEO guide for beginners. Read everything and learn. Once you know more about SEO, you can apply it to your articles to get extra love from search engines.

Conclusion

Blogging is a great way to start sharing your expertise with others and can hopefully lead to generate substantial income. But it’s not easy and it takes time. Most people who start a blog today will give it up tomorrow but it can be very rewarding to those of us who understand it takes time to create a follower base and be seen as an expert. Good luck.

Working From Home Made Me Lazy

That’s true, I’m a lazy ass these days… But I’ve got a good reason why I’m lazy though. I wrote 2 ebooks, both of them in a very specific niche, and I sell them through affiliate marketing (on ClickBank to be precise). One of those ebooks works alright, making me a few hundred dollars every week. The other one actually pays my bills, usually generating one thousand dollars per week in net profits.

When I first quit my job, I said to myself that I would develop one new ebook/affiliate program every month. At the time, it seemed like a very realistic goal. Writing an ebook can take up to 2-3 weeks, assuming you know what you want to write about, and putting up a website with a sales letter takes less than a week.

My laziness started to appear when I realized that my 2 current ebooks make me enough money to live pretty well. I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to bust his ass off to make tons of money. However, if I feel the financial situation is getting tight, I will work day and night to make as much cash as possible. I suspect there are lots of people like me in this world. We’re not hard workers; we’re smart workers.

So what do I do all day? Tough question to answer as I’m not even sure myself. I pretty much spend all my day online, reading news/blogs and on Twitter of course! Not very productive at all… Occasionally, I will take a walk to the post office to send back a Netflix movie. I also go to check the surf on a daily basis, and if there are waves, I will go out and surf for a couple hours.

The Negative Health Benefits Of The Internet

I am starting to realize that spending so much time in front of my computer all day is bad for me. Physically, I’m not as healthy as I was a year ago. The most obvious symptom is that I am constantly tired. I get up at 7.30am, and turn on my computer within minutes. One hour later, I will already be yawning. I was in Costa Rica for the last 2 weeks and I just spent a few minutes a day on my computer during that time. My energy level went way up right away as I used the computer less and less.

Another symptom of the perfect “work at home dude” like me is back pain. I have a laptop and I spend most of my time on the couch. It is very comfortable but it’s not a way to work. My girlfriend bought me a nice office chair to go with my desk but I rarely use it. I constantly have this pain in my lower back; nothing a good yoga session with Tina can’t fix, but it’s still a growing problem that I need to seriously take care of.

I think the internet is also making me socially retarded! When I worked at the office, I had to go out of my house every morning, walk to work, talk to my coworkers and talk to clients. In short, I had human interactions, which are vital to your social insertion… What do I have now? Twitter followers and RSS subscribers! It seems a little pathetic to me.

Being Your Own Boss Is Stressful

When I worked for the man, I used to think that working for yourself would be much less stressful because you wouldn’t have to deal with so many frustrating situations and that you could do whatever you want. I was partly right because now that I don’t have anyone to report to and no one to deal with, I have a much less stress to deal with. However, I have a whole new stress to cope with now: the stress of the paycheck!

If you’re currently employed, you probably don’t stress much about your paycheck. You now that twice a month, you will get a nice check for a defined amount you already know. You are paid the same amount every 2 weeks, no matter what (this applies if you’re a salary employee of course, which I used to be). I didn’t worry about my paycheck before. I knew that 2 or 3 months from now, I will still be making the same amount, and it was really reassuring.

Now I stress a lot about my paycheck because it is completely depending on my results. I am constantly looking at my emails to see if I received this magical email from ClickBank with the subject line “CB Sale”, telling me I just made another $40. Sometimes I have good days where I make $400. Sometimes, like 2 days ago, I have bad days where I make only $50. The most stressful to me is when I have a series of bad days. It completely freaks me out, until everything starts working again and making it up for the last few slow days.

Give Me Some Of That Internet Money

I do 2 simple things for a living: I have my affiliate programs; and I write for my iPhone blog. When people ask me what I do now, I just answer: “internet”. This short and simple answer is usually enough to satisfy the person asking you this question. I choose to answer this because I can’t put a real title on what I do.

Sometimes, if the person is genuinely interested in what I do, he will ask me more details. Explaining online affiliate marketing to a non-business savvy person is kinda hard, even though I try to simplify it as much as I can by saying that “I sell electronic reports and I blog about technology”.

A good definition of what I do though is that “I make money online”. I try not to use this term though because I think it sounds very cheesy. When you say you make money online, people think something like “oh yeah, just like the scammy late night commercials about how I can make money online working 4 hours a day”?

My friend Kayle is funny about it and always asks me to give him “some of that internet”, just like in the South Park episode where the kids try to make money online by having a video of Butters on YouToob.

Two Weeks Later…

Well, it’s been about two weeks since I first started writing this post and things have changed a bit. First, I worked on a new website that is now live and generating additional revenues. This website is part of my previous post about how to hit different niches with the same product. This website doesn’t pay the bills, but it’s still extra money.

The second thing I did is trying not to spend as much time in front of my computer. I now get off the internet for a few hours to read a book or a magazine. I am also starting to run! If you knew me, you wouldn’t believe what I just said, but yes, I do run for a couple miles and I kinda like it. It definitely boosts my energy level.

For the last two days, I haven’t been working from the couch. I put my laptop on the kitchen table and work from there. It’s really comfortable and I get to see what’s going on outside.

Finally, in order to fight my anti-social behavior, and after talking to my therapist who confirmed I need to interact with others (duh!), I am looking into participating in a Toastmaster club. This would definitely help me meet and talk with others.

I guess the goal of this post was to bring me to realize that I can’t just sit around all day and do nothing. I have this great opportunity of making a ton of money and I should take it because it might not last long.

I started a site called iPhone Download Blog to replicate what I had done with iPod softwares. At first, I set up the blog like a store and only had products for sale. I didn’t have content per say, except descriptions of softwares. So I started creating content just so search engines could see that my site was legit. I expected to write just a few articles but I quickly got sucked into it and started blogging about the iPhone for fun.

I found my niche

I had an iPhone so I knew what I was talking about, I wasn’t just bullshitting people with some useless content. In the same time, I started hacking my iPhone and learned how to jailbreak it. I wrote mostly about this topic, and I started realizing people really liked what I was doing, and most of my traffic was coming to learn more about how to hack their iPhone and how to get the most out of it. That’s when I realized that I had found my niche.

I was spending a lot of times reporting about iPhone news; the same news that most other iPhone blogs were already talking about. At this point, I kinda stopped blogging about iPhone news. It was pointless. I was clearly wasting my time. So I really cut back on the posting of iPhone news and I didn’t notice a traffic decrease at all. It was very stable. I received a few emails from die hard readers who were pissed because I wasn’t posting news anymore so I wrote a post explaining what the situation was. I was pretty honest and told them that people were obviously not coming to my blog to read iPhone news and that writing these articles took a lot of my time (sometimes up to 2-3 hours a day). Looking at the comments I had on this post, I think people understood the situation and were cool with it.

These days, I still write about iPhone news from time to time when it’s a big deal or when I feel like it’s important but I mostly focus on my niche: iPhone hacking.

I hired free staff

In the meantime, I posted on my blog saying that I was looking for writers/bloggers to join me. I thought that even though people mostly came to my blog to learn how to hack the iPhone, it wouldn’t hurt to have other people blog about news, applications, and other stuffs. For a while, I had 3 bloggers that were posting quality content, but like most bloggers, they got tired of it and after a few months, they completely stopped writing for me.

What was really cool is that these people were writing for free. They were writing very good content, which to date still drives large amounts of traffic.

Today, I have only one guy who writes on a pretty regular basis about iPhone applications. I also have a few people applying to write for me every once in a while but it’s very hard to find good bloggers. I’m really not looking for quantity anymore. I’m all about quality now!

What about money?

When I started my iPhone blog, my only income stream was the Regnow affiliate program to sell iPhone softwares. I have to admit that it was performing very poorly. Let’s say that a $100/month was a good month at the time.

Then I set up the blog with Adsense. It was working ok, making about $10/day on average. The problem with an iPhone blog is that visitors are young and are pretty much adproof, meaning that they don’t even see the ads anymore because they are too used to them. I tried optimizing my ads but it didn’t improve things much. Then I heard about The AdSense Code, a best-seller by Joel Comm, a pretty successful internet marketer. I bought it from Amazon and implemented a few of the techniques described in the book. Results were astounding. I went from making $10/day to making between $20 to $30/day, sometimes more.

The last few months, my checks from Google have been between $700 and $800. I created a special banking account for all the money I make with Adsense and it is my girlfriend and I’s travel found. For example, we’re going to Costa Rica next month for 2 weeks and it’s all paid by Google Adsense!

I also signed up for 2 other affiliate programs: one to sell iPhone screen protectors and one to sell custom iPhone skins. The first one brings in about $150/month and the other one about $100/month. Not too bad considering that I don’t have anything to do at all for these.

The biggest move was probably to set up an iPhone store where I sell hundreds of accessories for iPhone. The best thing is that, again, I don’t have anything to do at all. It’s all managed by a third-party company. They set me up with the store integration, they add products as they come, they take care of billing, shipping, and customer service. I basically have nothing to do but sit back and wait for my monthly PayPal payment. The iPhone Store brings in another $150/month on average.

I used to be an affiliate of the iTunes App Store as well, which started working very well for me but the assholes at Apple cracked down on every affiliate that had an Apple trademark in their URL. Since my URL contains the trademark “iPhone” (www.iPhoneDownloadBlog.com), they suspended my account. I wasn’t the only one having this issue. Many other iPhone and iPod blogs had this problem and were forced to stop marketing the App Store applications. Why would Apple do such a thing? I have no idea, but all I know is that they’re leaving a lot of money on the table by doing that.

Where am I today?

Things are doing pretty well for my iPhone blog these days. I get about 12,000 unique visitors a day on average and I usually spend a couple hours a week working on it, except when there are major events such as the release of a new model, new firmware, or a new jailbreaking or unlocking method.

If I add up all the revenue streams from this blog, I make an average of $1,100/month, which is more than decent. I really want to keep growing the site without compromising its integrity. I think it’s very important to stay true and don’t be a total sell out.

Big J was clearly not prepared for this webinar and you can see it but Shoe was really on of of his stuff. I invite you to take one or two hours of your time to watch the presentation. You will find it very inspiring.

SEO

All In One SEO Pack:
As the name says, it’s a full SEO plugin that mostly works on the meta tags (title, keywords, description) of your pages. Very powerful! It’s installed on all my blogs.

Google XML Sitemap:
A must-have plugin that generates and updates your sitemap. It also automatically submits it to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Link Cloaking:
Automatically cloaks outgoing links in your posts and pages. You can also add static cloaked links manually.

DoFollow:
Selectively disable the “nofollow” attribute for comments. I don’t use it anymore on this blog but I do use it on a few other blogs.

Social Media

Digg & Reddit Me:
By simply adding [digg-me] or [reddit-me] to any of your posts, this plugin will insert the icons so people can submit or digg your posts. I have it on my iPhone blog only.

Twitter Tools:
This plugin automatically posts the title and link of your new blog posts to your Twitter account. It can also create a new blog post from all your tweets.

Social Bookmarking Reloaded:
Adds social bookmarks services’s icons to your articles in your blogs so your readers can submit them easily.

flickrRSS:
Allows you to integrate the photos from a Flickr RSS feed into your site.

Reader Experience Improvement

Related Posts:
Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. I install this plugin on all my blogs.

Subscribe To Comments:
This plugin allows commenters to check a box so they are alerted of follow up comments. Great for having people come back to your blog.

Contact Form ][:
It easily inserts a contact form anywhere you want without having to edit codes manually. I have it installed on all my “contact” pages.

Get Recent Comments:
Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

Random Quotes:
This plugin allows you to embed random quotes into your pages. It also has a spiffy management tool in the administrative console. I only use this pluggin on our yoga blog.

WPtouch:
A plugin which reformats your site with a mobile theme when viewing with an iPhone or iPod Touch. Visit this blog from your iPhone to see it in action!

WordPress Admin

WPhone:
A lightweight admin interface for the iPhone and other mobile devices. Perfect for creating/editing new posts from your iPhone!

Recommended Tags:
This plugin creates a list of recommended and existing tags when you write/edit a post. It helps you avoid duplicate tags. Very helpful if you have a lot of tags.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu:
For WordPress 2.7 and above. It replaces admin menus with a CSS dropdown menu bar. Saves lots of clicks and page loads!

Akismet:
It is the best spam protection plugin. It now comes automatically with WordPress when you install it. Akismet saved me hours nad hours of spam filtering.

FeedWordPress:
This is the plugin of choice for sploggers. It’s an RSS to Post plugin. It takes an RSS feed and creates blog posts our of it. I use it on my iPhone Blog for automatically posting my own feeds.

Multi Author Comment Notification:
By default, WordPress only emails me comments notifications for posts written by you. This plugin alerts you of new comments on posts written by other authors of your blog.

Different Posts Per Page:
This allows you to set the number of posts you want for individual pages. For example, I have it set to show 50 posts on my Archive page on this blog.

Front Page Excluded Categories:
It lets you exclude categories from showing up on the home page. I also use it on the iPhone Blog for excluding the new apps and apps on sale posts from the front page.

Ozh’ Better Feed:
Your feeds on steroids! It adds a feed footer with a copyright, “Add to delicious”, the number of comments, or anything you want to your feeds.

WP Super Cache:
Very fast caching module for WordPress. I highly recommend it if you have a large blog!

AntiLeech:
This plugin helps you protects your feed from sploggers using them. If set correctly, AntiLeech will generate fake content for blogs trying to reproduce your posts from your feeds.

These are all the plugins I use. If you use plugins that are not on this list, please let us know in the comments what they are and why you use them. I’m always looking to add new plugins to my list.

Setting up the theme was not as easy as I thought. At first glance, everything was looking great but then I realized that there was a conflict with my All In One SEO plugin: all pages were showing the same meta title: Sebastien Page, which is the blog name. Other meta information (keywords and description) were working fine though. I looked around on the web for hours in search of a possible solution to my problem without finding anything.

So in order to keep my blog as SEO optimized as possible, I had to tweak the <meta> </meta> tags in the header.php file. My meta title nows looks like this:

<title><php if(is_home()): ?>Sebastien Page<php endif; ?> <php if ( is_single() ); ?><php trim(wp_title(”")); ?></title>

This function basically tells the browser to use “Sebastien Page” as meta title if it is the home page, or else, it will use the post title, tag, category, or archive as the meta title.

I emailed the folks over at FTL to see if they know what my problem with All In One SEO may be and I hope they will get back to me, although I doubt it.

I also had issues with the javascript tags in the sidebar and I had to disable them.

I have to admit that ColorPaper is a great theme but the documentation that came with it was inexistent.

Leave a comment to tell me what you think of this new theme :)