Your Spinoff Services Will Beat The Ad Dollars
I have long said that ad sales is not a valid goal for most bloggers. Don’t get me wrong, you can earn some extra money selling ad spots on your blog, but to really rake in the cash you need a big audience. What you can do with your not so big blog, however, is get spinoff results. I didn’t have that many readers when I got my first freelance gig (for The Blog Herald incidentally, coming full circle now, aren’t I?), and I certainly didn’t have great numbers to lean on when Syntagma signed me up for redesigning their network templates.
The lesson here is that you can get spinoff from your blog way earlier than the ads are starting to pay for your coffee habits.
Do you see any ads here on tdhedengren.com? No, you don’t (if you do then I’m hacked – or have gotten a wicked offer I just couldn’t refuse). That’s not because I despise ads or anything, I just don’t think I’m getting enough value out of them for this site. A couple of bucks each day, that’s nothing compared to what I earn when doing design work, my other spinoff service that helps pay the bills.
That asks an interesting question, by the way. Am I a problogger by definition?
Let’s look at that one. My blog makes $0/month in direct earnings, actually, it just costs (hosting and domain). However, I do get frequent design requests, and I’ve got more freelance writing offers than I can nor will want to handle, with my editorship at The Blog Herald as well as Devlounge being the most outstanding ones.
I’m not making money out of my blog, but without it I wouldn’t be making the money I am today. Problogger or not?
Spinoff services is the key to a serious income using your blog, in my opinion. It won’t make your blog successful, but just sitting around waiting to break the $100/month barrier, so that you can move on to the $250/month goal, and so on, isn’t going to pay the bills now is it?
Ads are fine, but think spinoff services as well. If you are good at what you’re doing, you’ll find yourself getting clients and customers at a much higher rate than the Adsense dollars are trickling in.