Can you make money online today?

Posted on January 21, 2008
Filed Under Making Money | | Written by Gary Reid

While I was reading the Performancing blog today I noticed an article about link buying.

The story is a bit of link bait in itself with its ‘5 princilples…’ title but hey, this is what’s happening today. In fact the article is a real example of the problem.

Making money online is becoming more and more difficult, the attention economy and Google have changed the nature of the game, they’ve killed off the web economics that worked 5 years ago.

It would be naive to think that blogging is all good. In fact good blogging, link baiting, blogrolls have all added to the nightmare of online marketing for anyone who sells stuff. The better the blogging in your market the more difficult it will be to sell your wares - if you sell stuff online then good blogging is evil.

Where once you competed for peoples attention to buy your world beating dog brush against other dog brush makers you now have thousands of bloggers competing for the same peoples attention to try and get them to consume advertising.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that us bloggers are some group of utopian philanthropists looking to impart knowledge and wisdom out of the goodness of our hearts, no, no, no… we want eyeballs, attention, adverts clicked and consumed.

As search is the lifeblood of your online business the only real conclusion from all of this is that you need to blog. If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em - BUT.

The blog itself may not just be a marketing tool to compete for peoples attention. Once you blog you become a publisher, the blog becomes a publication, something that stands in it’s own right.

Once ‘blogged’ you may need to re-think your business model - is selling dog brushes the most profitable use of the attention you have gained?

People who want to find out how to groom a dog for show may not want to buy your brushes, but they’ve arrived at your article on the ‘5 principles of show grooming a Dachshund’ - do you monetize that attention or not?

What’s greater - the profit you make from sales of dog brushes or the income you can get from monetizing attention using adverts?

You have the answers not me. Me, I’ve got a foot in both camps, I sell products and I monetize attention, I’m an evil blogger and a poor retailer - poor in every sense of the word

Comments

3 Responses to “Can you make money online today?”

AdSense on January 22nd, 2008 6:27 am

There are tons of ways to make money online, you just have to pick one and stick with it. Making easy money online is possible but needs work based on the right information.
Gary Reid on January 22nd, 2008 6:54 am

Making money is never easy, sometimes it may be simple, but never easy, anyone who tells you it is usually has a large bottle of snake oil to sell you.

Like on your site, where your adsense screenshots don’t add up, because 8898.30 + 139.46 = 9127.76 not 9127.75 but that is made up for in the calculation above it which is 1 cent out the other direction.
Garrison on February 10th, 2008 11:40 am

Can I make money online today? Perhaps not, but I’ll have a shot tomorrow, and the day after!