Making Money on the Internet
The Internet is not a static medium. It is always evolving, constantly changing. If you are interested in making money on the Internet you must keep up with the changes. Otherwise you will be working with what worked well yesterday but doesn’t work well today, if at all.
Fortunately, there are new exciting ways to enjoy what you are doing and with effort, persistence, and perhaps a bit of luck make a handsome income as well. Since the new ways of making money give what many folks are looking for, information, entertainment, and with web 2.0, participation, I expect that those who have a sincere interest in “working the net” are entering a golden era.
An era in which it is possible to generate a handsome income by following your passion for providing good entertaining, informative, and useful content and delivering the goods to a worldwide audience of loyal readers and subscribers. In a series of articles I will explore ways of turning your passion and Internet skills into income. This article will focus on two bloggers who have taken far different courses of action to achieve financial success with their blogs. As you will soon discover, they do have one huge common factor which has propelled them to success.
 The first blog is Steve Pavlina. Steves blog was started on Oct 1, 2004. By April, 2005 Steve was averaging a whopping $4.12 in daily income, about $124 a month. By October 2006 he was earning over $1000 a day, over $30,000 a month. That’s quite an increase over 19 months. The full story as told by Steve is How to Make Money From Your Blog As you will see when you read Steve’s blog Steve has written many well written  articles about personal development.
 His blog is pretty much a straight vanilla Wordpress variety with few graphics or images. Steve has attracted an ever increasing readership by posting a lot of great content with a personal development focus. He has relied on word of mouth and the discovery of his content by some big players who linked to Steve from their blogs which helped Steve to build a huge readership base. Useful content presented in straight text format has carried the day for Steve.
 As of March 5, 2006 StevePavlina was a PR6 site with an Alexa rating of 3,119.
The second blog in our brief case study is JohnChow.Com . John’s blog is only about seven months old and already is producing over $7,000 a month in income. This must be a world’s record for going from zero to what many would consider a satisfactory full time income. John tells his story in an article called Making Money From a Blog
John is a very interesting guy. While the main theme of his blog is about making money he writes about a wide range of things close to his heart, like fine dining and fast cars, for example. John also uses a lot of photographs and images in his blog. Some of the photos are about what he had for dinner the night before. No kidding.
What is the secret to John’s success?
It isn’t really a secret. In John’s blog we find great content and John’s ability to connect with his readers and to build a community. He entertains and he provides useful information. His style is perhaps brash for some but it is effective as he has attracted a large readership base in a relatively short period of time.
John is also generous in giving back to his community. While his contests and reviews by readers that provide them with back links may be link bait they are link bait that works and that furthers his following by a loyal readership. While word of mouth advertising has been helpful, as it always is, in addition, John has been aggressive in promoting his site with ads on Google Adwords and elsewhere.
As of March 5, 2006 JohnChow.Com had an Alexa rating of 3881 and a PR4. His PR will likely jump to a PR5 or PR6 at the next update. John, a master promoter, has lately created a lot of buzz.
There is quite a contrast in the style and appearance of the two sites reviewed today. However, both are hugely successful because they contain a LOT of useful content. Is there a lesson to be learned here? I think so.
If you sincerely want to have a successful blog financially you are going to have to work for it by writing and posting often. You are going to have to write good enough interesting articles and provide useful and entertaining information so that your readers will look forward to returning to your site for more and will pass on the good word to their friends.
 Congratulations to Steve Pavlina and to John Chow for providing what a lot of folks want to read. Content will always be king. With writing and presentation skills and a lot of persistence the kings of content will always do well on the Internet.
Keep in mind that your content must be original or it won’t count for much.
