"Blogging as a business is business. It takes business training and skills to make money with your blog."
-Lorelle VanFossen, "Business School for Bloggers: How to Make Money With Your Blog", Blog Herald, April 7, 2008
money
The Myth of Online Ad Revenue
Did you hear the reports about all that money to be made from online advertisements? In 2006 alone, Internet ad revenue was estimated at $16.8 billion USD. You have also likely heard of bloggers making thousands of dollars in just a short amount of time through online ads. If you believe this is another post about making money from online ads or how to optimize your site for the search engines, you are going to be disappointed. I'm not here to tell you how to make money online but when you shouldn't be making money from advertisement on your site.
When I originally placed ads on my site about a year and a half ago, I actually didn't do it for the money but to give free advice. Over the years I've had friends, relatives, and even a few clients that asked whether it was worth placing ads on their site. I honestly did not know the answer to that question and decided it was time to try things out for myself. How much money could the typical site make through online ads?
In early 2006, I placed online ads from various "advertisement" services on two of my former sites, Like that Idea and the WebCMS Forum. By the second half of the year I also placed advertisements here at CMS Report. While my first two sites are low traffic sites, CMSReport.com has gained popularity and according to Alexa is currently ranked in the top 100,000 Internet sites. Nevertheless, none of these sites are a Yahoo! or YouTube but I think they could be considered as typical sites in terms of visitors and content for most bloggers and small businesses.
10 US Presidents that were also geeks
The site, eWeek, posted a little slide show in honor of Presidents Day. The slide show lists "10 U.S. presidents who held patents, thought globally and believed in the power of the press—and macaroni". To the best of my knowledge, none of the presidents have actually managed their own Web site. What a shame for a US President to not experience the true joys of being a geek.
Actually, I'm more excited about the new Presidential Dollar coins which I blogged about on another site months ago. Yesterday, I went ahead and purchased a "coin album" for my three year-old to store each the coin for each US president. I'm excited about it. My son still thinks he's collecting quarters.
That's right my Canadian friends to the north, we're still using One Dollar paper bills down here. About a decade ago I tried using a Canadian paper dollar while in Canada and was asked "what is this?" when I tipped my waitress. It seems Canada made the move to Dollar coins a long time ago and my bank where I exchanged currently didn't know about the change. I had a very unhappy waitress to deal with that night. Not sure why, I did ask for a Canadian beer after all.
Actually, I'm more excited about the new Presidential Dollar coins which I blogged about on another site months ago. Yesterday, I went ahead and purchased a "coin album" for my three year-old to store each the coin for each US president. I'm excited about it. My son still thinks he's collecting quarters.
That's right my Canadian friends to the north, we're still using One Dollar paper bills down here. About a decade ago I tried using a Canadian paper dollar while in Canada and was asked "what is this?" when I tipped my waitress. It seems Canada made the move to Dollar coins a long time ago and my bank where I exchanged currently didn't know about the change. I had a very unhappy waitress to deal with that night. Not sure why, I did ask for a Canadian beer after all.
