Extreme Income

Crazy Egg is a script that shows you where people are clicking on your site. Using Crazy Egg will help you improve the design of your site. You can very easily find out which regions of your page receive the most clicks, and use that information in your ad-placement strategy.

Here are some useful resources you might want to read after creating your Crazy Egg account :

• 5 Insightful Site Optimization Analyses You Can Peform Using CrazyEgg
• Crazy Egg Details

When you switch from a convential job to an activity like professional blogging, the most important change you will notice is that there is no such things as schedules or deadlines anymore. Nothing is organized for you, and while this newly achieved freedom can feel very exciting at first, it is also the sign of a greater responsability. When you work in an office, and more generally in any kind of conventional job, your work hours and activities are scheduled. The main reason for that is because working on schedule highly increases your productivity.

One of the beautiful things about being a professional blogger is that you have absolute freedom of choice when it comes to actually planning your work schedule. Some bloggers will prefer to take care of the largest part of their work during the morning, and keep some free time in the afternoon and evening. Others will plan to do a certain number of hours, and will then perform those hours of work as they wish throughout the day, without using a pre-chosen pattern. Some bloggers will prefer not to work on weekends, while others might think it is necessary to work on their blog every day of the week. This is a matter of preference. What is important on the other hand is to find a type of schedule that works for you, and stick with it for long enough to appreciate it’s benefits.

Here are a few quick steps that may help you find the best schedule :

1) Volume. The first thing you need to do is to evaluate the number of hours that you are willing to spend on your blog(s) every day. This includes all activities related to your blogging life - writing, online socializing, promoting, analyzing, optimization etc. In my case, I chose to spend 5 hours per day on my blogging activities. It was important for me to keep it reasonably low so that I would have enough time for my other activities.

2) Morning Vs. Afternoon ? Decide whether you are willing to do most hours in the morning or in the afternoon / evening. Once again this is all about preference: some people have problems staying concentrated in the morning (even with enough sleep) and this can severely reduce your productivity, even if your motivation is high. These people will usually prefer to do most of their hours in the afternoon. I personally feel like the amount of energy I have is higher later in the day than in the morning.

3) The 70/30 split. If you are a morning person and decide do to most of your work before noon, then you need to do 70% of your working time in the morning, and the other 30% will be done in the afternoon. If on the contrary, you have chosen to work mostly in the afternoon, you will do 30% in the morning and 70% in the afternoon. In my case, this means I split my 5 hours of daily blog work the following way : 1.5 hour in the morning and 3.5 hours in the afternoon.

If you are in the right frame of mind, you can get a lot of work done in 5 hours. This is why you need to find that period of time throughout the day during which you are likely to be the most productive, and take advantage of it by working during those hours.

4) Intervals. What you can do now is split your morning and afternoon hours into smaller intervals, and assign each of these intervals to a specific blogging activity. Maybe you would like to spend the first 30 minutes analyzing your traffic, and then use the next hour for promotion work. However you can only write down this kind of detailed schedule if you are running a blog that requires the same kind of activity everyday. As you can imagine, the number of hours required by each activity (writing, socializing, promoting, analyzing, optimization etc.) will vary depending on many factors. For example, a popular blog that has been alive for a few years and has already reached a certain amount of success might require less work in terms of promotion than a younger blog. I personally have chosen not to split my schedule into intervals assigned to specific activities. The main reason for that is because my various blogs have not yet reached the state where I know I can safely assign the same designated amount of time to a specific activity everyday.

5) Alternative patterns. Nothing stops you from planning 1 or 2 hours of work in the evening as well. If you are the kind of person who is comfortable with late evening work, you can also consider a 60/20/20 split as opposed to 70/30. This means you would be doing 20% in the morning, 60% in the afternoon (assuming you are an afternoon person) and 20% again in the evening.

6) The 2 weeks experiment. Once you have made these choices, write down your schedule for a normal day’s work. In order to see the benefits of your new routine, you will need to experiment with it for at least 2 weeks. It might be a good idea to take 5 minutes every evening to write down the main results of your day’s work. This way when the first two weeks are over, you can look back and compare your newly achieved productivity with your productivity during the weeks before your experiment.

I personally have experimented with various ways of planning my days, and I have to say I found this one the most effective for me. The advantages of having a fully programmed schedule for your blogging activities are multiple. First it stops you from losing time with any kind of procrastination. The second advantage you will notice is an enhanced motivation. You feel organized, you feel inspired, you feel good and this feeling increases over time, for as long as you stick with your schedule.

If, like me, you are not only a professional blogger but also try and make a living out of various sources of income, you will need to organize your day even more thorougly in order to have time for each of your activities. The chances are you will not have time for as much of each activity as you want, and this is where it gets tricky. When defining your priorities you will have to take into account various questions such as what do you prefer to do, what is most beneficial to others on a global scale. I will soon be posting an article on how to organize your day if you have to run several different activities everyday.

There are many things you need to think of before engaging in the blogging adventure. The first is to decide whether you REALLY want to be a full time blogger or not. If you are reading this article right now, it’s most likely that you already have your own blog and are trying to monetize your efforts. Or maybe you are currently thinking of launching your first blog. You have probably read a few success stories from A-list bloggers, all containing the typical « Everyone can make a living out of blogging, just like I do » kind of message.

While this sentence might be true, in no way does it mean that any person who attemps to monetize their blog will be able to generate a decent income from it. In fact, only a very small percentage of bloggers will be able to do that. The reason why the others will fail is that they are not completely into it, for various reasons (see my “3 seasons why most bloggers fail to generate a decent income” article).

* Admit to yourself that your main objective is to generate income. If you are going to attempt to monetize your blog and eventually want to make a living out of it, you have to really get in that frame of mind. Forget about the casual blogging activities you might have had previously, and accept the fact that from now on, your goal is to bring your blog to a level where it will generate enough income to live from. If you feel like it isn’t right to earn money online with a blog, then don’t do it. If you want your blog to become a full-time activity but still have doubts about professional blogging being a valid and respectable source of income, then you will most certainly fail to reach your objective. These kind of doubts are likely to slow you down so you will need to chase them away before you even think of starting your income generating blog experience.

*  Think like an entrepreneur, not like a blogger. A good blogger is someone who has interesting things to write about, unique ideas and more importantly someone who loves writing articles and is able to do so on a regular basis.A good entrepreneur on the other hand is a person who knows the ins and outs of a certain market and has the ability to seize an opportunity and to bring together the resources necessary for success. You can see how thinking as an entrepreneur and thinking as a blogger are two very different things. The skills required to be a good blogger are the capacity to create unique and interesting content, the motivation to put regular effort into your blog over a period of time long enough to build a reputation for yourself. The average blogger’s main task is usually to transmit information. The main task of the entrepreneur is to promote the value created by that.

In order to achieve the level of success for your blog required to earn a living as a professional blogger, you need to fall into BOTH of these categories. Agreed - someone who is simply a good blogger and doesn’t want to spend time promoting his blog could consider hiring another person to promote his blog. It is a fact that if you want to build yourself a reputation and drive a successful amount of traffic to your blog, you’re going to have to develop your entrepreneurial skills at the same time as your blogging skills. Some blogggers think all they have to do is to write interesting articles, and traffic will start flowing immediately.

* Giving up too soon. This can happen for many reasons. Maybe you have other projects running and feel like blogging is taking on too much of your time. Maybe you were a little too hasty when searching for a subject for your blog and then lost motivation to write about this particular subject. But the most common reason for giving up is that you might have expected to see a large increase of income and what you received so far did not live up to that expectancy.

You need to keep in mind that no matter what amount of work you put into writing articles and promoting your blog, the results will never be seen immediately. Successful bloggers. The only way that you can ever hope to be a successful blogger one day is if you keep working on your articles and promoting your blog. Not in a blinded way, but by paying attention. Regardless of what might have caused this loss of motivation, you need to take some time to think about what YOU really want.

* Choosing the easy way. Some bloggers think all they need to do is to place some ads on their pages. While this could work You have to stop thinking as a blogger. This is one of the main things that seperate amateurs from professional bloggers. An occasional blogger will write whereas a professional blogger needs to work actively.

* Choosing the wrong place for your ads. There is a lot of thinking to do before placing ads on your page.

When I first started visiting blogs and reading about different the ways of earning an income online, I used to stumble accross a certain amount of bloggers who spent most of their time bragging about how their blog generated enough passive income to earn a living, and sometimes a lot more. Some bloggers insisted on the fact that they make a healthy six figure income just with one blog. At the time I didn’t know exactly what they were talking about, and I also had no precise idea as to where the money they were bragging about actually came from.

I spent a considerable amount of time collecting information on the professional blogging activity, out of curiosity and also because for a while before that, I had been trying to find solutions that would both bring value to people and generate income at the same time. After several months of research, a few simple facts became obvious to me :

* Search deep to find the right information. The first thing I learnt is that most often, Professional bloggers are only willing to share limited amount of information about their sources of online income. They will tend to keep some secrets for themselves. If a person discovers a gold mine, it might be tempting for that person to keep it a secret for as long as possible, until most of the gold has been used. This can apply to the blogging world aswell.

* Versatility. There are many different ways of monetizing your blog. For the average blogger, the most common way is by placing Ads on your pages. Google Adsense is considered like the most powerful ad engine, both in terms of usability and income revenue. Selling Text Links is also a good way of receiving income simply by adding text links to your pages. Nothing stops you from using several sources of income on your blog. One of my next articles will consist of a full list of the different techniques you can use on your blog to generate income.

* Traffic. The key to start generating more income is simple : You need to build more traffic ! The more visitors you have going through your blog every day, the more likely you are to receive clicks on your ads. The fact that you have to spend some of your time advertising your blog means you will be spending less time on writing articles. This isn’t an easy sacrifice to make especially if you enjoy writing as much as I do, but it is absolutely essential if you want to start driving more traffic to your blog. There are many advertising techniques that can be used to improve your traffic without loosing too much time, but my guess is that you will need to cut approximately half of your writing time and do advertising instead. Traffic itself is not the only thing to take into account, but it is the key element you will want to place your efforts on.

* Choosing a subject. Not all blogs have the same potential for generating income. There are certain subjects and themes that will automatically bring more interest onto your blogs and thus will bring more money. For instance, articles about Personal Development are very likely to bring a large amount of visitors to your blog, because this happens to be a subject that many people like to read about. This doesn’t mean you have to create a blog about Personal Development. In fact, there is a lot of thinking to do before choosing a subject for your blog. For those who enjoy writing and are thinking of starting a blog, I will be posting an article very soon with some general guidelines and a few tips.

* Patience. It is very unlikely that you will start making a large income over night. Even after your blog is launched and if you have taken the necessary steps, it takes time before you can even start noticing the results of your work. Every single professional blogger out there who makes a decent income from their blog has spent - and still spends - a large of time in the making, marketing, and analyzing of their blog. Most of these bloggers consider this as a full time activity.