The following post has been submitted by Shane Pike from Three: Twenty Interactive.
The secret to becoming a professional blogger in half the time is … doubling your current revenue.
Thank you very much. You guys have been a great audience. Enjoy the rest of the blog.
(Oh. You want to know how to double your revenue? Oh, allllllright.)
What do you think is the fastest way to double the revenue from your blog?
(I’ll give you a minute to think about it.)
(Seriously. Answer the question before you read on.)
(Did you really answer it?)
Alright. Show of hands. How many said a) doubling your traffic or b) finding higher paying advertisers was the fastest way to double your revenue?
If you did, you’re in very good company.
Too often, we get so close to our blogs that we develop tunnel vision. Everything is in place, and we think if we can just keep generating enough content, and growing our readership, and if we can just find some higher paying advertisers, surely, somewhere down the road, we’ll get to the point where we can quit our day jobs and do what we really enjoy. We can see the progress, slowly, day by day, so we know we’ll get there eventually.
Quite likely, though, we’re so close that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Let’s take a big step back for a minute.
What percentage of your readers performs a revenue-generating action? 1%? Half a percent? For the sake of our discussion, let’s suppose that it’s 1%. That’s probably a pretty fair guess.
Now, how easy would it be to raise that 1% to 2%? That’s not a very big jump by any means. Quite likely, you could jump to 2% or even 3% by doing nothing more than tweaking your AdSense colors, ad size and/or placement. Little tweaks. Tiny tweaks. Nothing major at all.
Let’s say you make a few tweaks and get to 2%. What just happened to your revenue? Well, if you go from 1% to 2%, you’ve doubled your revenue—just that easy. Twice the revenue from the same amount of traffic in maybe 30 minutes’ worth of work.
Not bad, huh? In less time than it takes you to go grab some lunch, you’ve suddenly cut the time it will take for you to become a professional blogger in half.
Does it work? Man, yeah. In fact, the last three sites I’ve worked on saw revenues triple or more. And it was never more than just a few minutes’ work.
Better yet, I didn’t lose anything. The users who clicked away were evidently going to leave anyway, because click rates on the rest of the elements of the sites stayed consistent. So, by giving them some options for leaving the site, I actually got paid when they left, rather than just losing them for nothing.
I wish you the best of success in your journey to becoming a Professional Blogger. If you have any questions, please feel free to use the contact form on my site to drop me a line!
Shane is a jack of all trades and master of…well…one or two. He is the founder and principal of Three:Twenty Interactive, a full service Internet consulting firm, and has been providing web development, traffic generation and site effectiveness services since 1995.
