If this isn’t the first time you’ve visited our site (thank you!) you might notice a few more changes besides the adorable Boogie Santa (our Christmas mascot!) mentioned in the last post.
If this is the first time you’re visiting, I’m talking about the increase in the number of ads that are currently showing on-site. Making money from online advertising is something I’ve been wondering about since I started reading about pro-blogging and the amounts that the bigger professional blogger sites can pull in…how do they do it? Starting and running the Life Coaches Blog is part of the test and measure to find out how this model works.
When I first surfed Steve Pavlina’s blog, I thought that this guy sure has a lot of ads on his site! But when I read his announcement that he made over $4700 in income from it in a month, 98% of which from advertising I realized, of course! Why not? After all, he’s doing something extremely important, he’s asking for the sale and he’s making it easy for the client to buy (in this case making it easy for them to click).
I’ve thought about increasing the number of ads in the past but always stopped myself because I figured it might be seen as too money-grubbing from our readers, intrusive to the reading, and just plain fugly.
But doing the Million Dollar Experiment, and further provoked by Steve’s post Open Your Money Doors, made me think that if I want to make more money, then I need to ask for more money. If I want to make the sale, I have to ask for it. And the easier I could make it for people to buy, the easier it would be to sell.
And I wondered if the belief I had that if I were to add more ads then readers would be turned off even though we were still writing good content was a limiting belief that was holding me back. Who knows, maybe some of you will still stay with us even though we’ve gone ad-crazy!
But why ads? I wanted to create a space for us Life Coaches to discuss, share and develop the many tools and tricks we’ve learnt and created through our collective coaching experiences (over 1000 people together), and share them with people who would find them useful in improving their daily lives. And as you can read from our content, we haven’t held anything back.
At the same time, I also wanted to create extra value for the Life Coaches, like Steve mentions in his Overcoming Limiting Financial Beliefs post, I wanted to bring in value for the value we create. At this moment this site isn’t making a lot of money, which is a tad disappointing but, like we say, I take responsibility for my results.
And an action towards change is the addition of more ads. At the very least, my goal is to make enough money to cover the hosting costs so this site supports itself and we can continue to have a platform to share.
I’m curious, how do you feel about the ads? Now that I’ve gone on a limb to test and measure, are my limiting beliefs proven true or do you have a different take on it?
December 19th, 2005 at 1:40 am
Well at least we’ve broke the sub-200,000 ranking in technorati and wow…lost some serious steam in terms of alexa. The implication is lost on me.
Once in a while, I wonder if there are really readers out there. Coz not many people commented on our posts. I also wonder if it’s the tone that I set in the posts that I write that irks people off.
I’ll say this Alvin, even if it’s left to just the few of us sharing our thoughts online, so be it, I’ll still be posting here.
People will click if it’s relevant to them, maybe we have provided enough content that the readers don’t see the need to go elsewhere.
Maybe we just have to wait for the big break. Maybe, we just have to change our style. Maybe, if we gone off to blog on depression and erectile dysfunction, we’ll get some revenue from adsense.
So, we take responsibility, LCB has a steady following and it’s a staple to some people out there. We have time, we post. We have idea, we post. IF we make money from here, we post more.
Is more what our readers want? Until and unless we get more voices from people telling us what more we can offer them…I say we keep going at it. There ARE real live people who benefit from what effort we put in here.
We can litter the whole blog with suggestions to click and link our posts all over the place, in the end, the value of what we do here is not tied to the $$ we make off this…or is it?
Is it too difficult to sustain? Until it becomes not viable to keep this up, I’ll keep posting
December 19th, 2005 at 6:36 pm
Hi Coaches,
I just want to say it again, keep the posting going. No comments doesn’t mean no reader! I for sure is constantly learning new things and ideas from this blog, the reason is simple because i am getting information from 5 differents source at one time. Where else can i find that kind of high quality articles at one place? Thank you to all and have a Happy Christmas and Merry New Year.
KC
December 20th, 2005 at 12:21 am
Thanks KC!! I’m asking for comments coz other readers will learn about how you may have internalized your learnings.
We want to encourage a culture of sharing and thanks again for the booster.
December 21st, 2005 at 1:32 pm
Thanks KC! Again echoing what Pete said. Would love to hear more feedback from you guys on what you like and what you’d like to see more of.
And Pete, yep, even if it’s just the few of us posting and reading here, it’s interesting enough. Maybe we should become more controvesial and provocative ;D
December 21st, 2005 at 11:28 pm
provocative and intermidating.. I love it.