Daily Cup of Tech

As some of you may be aware, I am doing DCoT as an experiment to see if I can actually support myself and my family blogging full time. I am asking you, the loyal DCoT family the following question:

How can I support myself blogging without advertising on my blog or in my feeds?

I have been getting some feedback lately about the increase in advertising on my blog and also in the feeds that I put out. This is the primary source of revenue for me from the blog. I also get paid per “advertising” blog from one company and you may see one of those from time to time.

In general, people do not like advertisements if they can avoid them. And I’m like everyone else. I fast forward over the commercials if I tape a TV show. I complain about the ads before a movie at the theater (”If I wanted to watch commercials, I would have stayed home and watched TV!”). I avoid magazines that are more ads than contents.

But how else can I generate money from my blog if I don’t use ads? I’ve tried donations but nobody donated. Nobody is willing to pay me to blog about what I want to blog about. So what else should I try?

• Would people be willing to pay for “premium content”?
• Should I sell solutions where people can enter a question and a PayPal donation to have me respond to the question?
• Should I create custom AutoIt programs for a fee?

I am turning to you, the DCoT readers, to help me with this question. Please post any insight, suggestions, etc. as to how this can be accomplished. I look forward to your replies.

If you found this post useful, why don't you buy me a cup of coffee to show your gratitude?

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15 Responses to “Help! HowTo Make Money Blogging Without Ads?”

1. jez Says:
   November 14th, 2006 at 5:44 pm

   I blog for fun. I tried putting in adverts, and I would ask my loyal readers (friends and family when travelling) to click through a few times. That was just to pay the monthly costs. Even that didn’t work

   I also hate ads. But is it possible to make them as unobtrusive as possible? I hate the ads right at the top left/right hand corner of any post, but don’t mind the ones at the end. Everyone has them on the right, to the point that I don’t even notice them anymore!

   What about pay per posts? Please disclose the fact though please! (maybe a tag??)

2. The Geek Says:
   November 14th, 2006 at 6:00 pm

   It takes a great deal of time and effort to build up a blog to the point where you are making large amounts of money from it. You’ll need to be averaging 10s of thousands of visits per day to get to that point.

   You may want to check out Steve Pavlina and ProBlogger, both of whom are now full time bloggers.

3. The Geek Says:
   November 14th, 2006 at 6:02 pm

   Oh, and to answer your questions…

   1)no
   2)interesting idea
   3)perhaps

4. Brent Says:
   November 14th, 2006 at 8:03 pm

   I don’t know of anyone who makes their living doing a technical blog. Hanselman, barely pays his costs, and is probably one of the more popular blogs.

   You are doing pretty good, I see you are getting upwards of 50-60 reads per post. I don’t think anyone can make a livingo off of traffic like that.

   AutoIt scripts aint that tough, but maybe someone would need help there, but that is more of a consulting gig than a blog living.

5. Tim Fehlman Says:
   November 14th, 2006 at 8:45 pm

   jez,
   I have to admit that I am pretty addicted to blogging. I really like the fact that I can help people with their technical problems.

   As for making ads unobtrusive, that is a good point. But, an ad that nobody sees or notices is not really generating any income. If I were to do that, I might as well not have any ads at all. I guess the flip side to that argument is that if I make the ads too annoying, people will stop coming to the site and the end net result is the same.

   The one pay for post I did, the very first thing that I put on the post was that it was a paid advertisement and I also tagged it as advertisement.

   Thanks for the great feedback.

   Tim

6. Tim Fehlman Says:
   November 14th, 2006 at 9:13 pm

   The Geek,
   I realize that my hit count right now (averaging about 5000 hits per day) is pretty low. But, I keep telling myself that I have only been blogging for ten weeks. My hope is to keep the numbers going up. I don’t know if I will ever get to the point where I can blog full time but, like I said, it is an experiment.

   I’ve been to both Steve Pavlina (this is where I got the idea to start blogging) and ProBlogger (one of the best blogging guru’s out there) and I still have a lot to learn from both of them. I really need to spend some time just reading what they have written and thinking about the advice they give.

   As for your answers to my three questions, I expected some and was surprised by others. I did not think people would pay for premium content. This is a very old model and I don’t think it has worked for some time.

   I was a bit surprised about the donate for advice option. I thought that this would be thrown out immediately as a Google Answers clone but based on your answer, this may be an option.

   I was also surprised that you thought the custom AutoIt scripts would be potentially viable. Something else to consider.

   Thanks for the feedback and advice.

   Tim

7. Tim Fehlman Says:
   November 14th, 2006 at 9:39 pm

   Brent,
   You are probably right. Technology may not have a wide enough audience to generate the traffic that is required. I’ll have to keep my eye on the numbers to see if this is viable.

   Your response to custom AutoIt scripts is more in line with what I thought people would think.

   Thanks for your 2 cents. It was worth more than mine!

   Tim

8. AutomoBlog Says:
   November 15th, 2006 at 12:52 am

   I personally wouldn’t give up advertising at all but if you had to there are a few different ways to make an income. First of all, people that read blogs are NOT willing to pay for content. Not in the open-source environment we are used to, you will lose most readers, if not all. Without advertising, the only way to really do this (IMO) is to either do something like the controversial payperpost.com, reviewme.com or blogitive.com, or go with affiliates. As in thoroughly and truthfully review products (from amazon or commission junction) and provide the affiliate links back to the product. Chances are though, you won’t keep your current readers just doing reviews and paid posts. I suppose I don’t have a definite answer for you, sorry. Ads are the best way IMO, be it CPC like AdSense, or paid text links monthly. I really like textlinkads.com, and they have a feedvertising program that has gotten good reviews. Then supplement with reviews and the like.

9. Stefan Says:
   November 15th, 2006 at 5:03 am

   Some more hints:

   - Keep your fans happy: your feed should contain full articles and no ads. Feed-readers are often bloggers themselves - and bloggers hate ads. If more bloggers like your content, they will spread the word…
   - Keep your Home page (at least almost) ad-free. You’ll never get a second chance to make a first impression!
   - Focus your ads on visitors that come through search engines. Steer search engines to your article (”permalink”) pages and place more ads there.
   - Build up your hit rate before you start adding ads to your articles. Add more content, think about SEO, keep Google happy.
   - Add your “related posts” block to each feed entry - that might be a good way to coax feed-readers to visit your site, instead of staying within their feed reader.
   - Keep on communicating with your visitors
   - Maybe start a second (a third, …) blog with another focus. You might attract different visitors there.
   - Place relevant ads! AdSense is not always a good choice.
   - A tweak that I use: Keep your articles ad-free for the first few days (when your regulars read them) and add some advertisments later (when search engine traffic comes in)
   - Create huge amounts of relevant content

   Just my 2 cents…

10. Tim Fehlman Says:
    November 15th, 2006 at 6:13 am

    AutomaBlog,
    I’m probably going to stay away from reviews. There are a million sites out there that do reviews and it can become pretty costly unless you have a sponsor that is going to pony up for the cost of hardware and software that requires testing.

    I’ll probably stick with news and unique solutions to problems. The unique solutions is where I think I can get a niche.

    In the end, I think I will probably stick with just a couple of ads on each page and one in the feeds. This will hopefully keep the annoyance down while still generating some revenue.

    Thanks for the input. It is always appreciated.

    Tim

11. Tim Fehlman Says:
    November 15th, 2006 at 6:21 am

    Stefan,
    An amazing list of excellent ideas! I think your comment about relevant content is probably the most important of them all. If I am writing about interesting things that people want to read, this will increase the number of readers. If I get a good reputation in the blogging field, this will probably lead to other opportunities to generate income.

    I guess I could think of the blog as my resume. This could get people interested in having me write about other things or speak on other topics.

    Thanks for the help! Good advice for any blogger!

    Tim

12. Megan Says:
    November 15th, 2006 at 6:47 am

    I would consider myself a typical tech blog reader. Basically I just mentally screen out most ads and head straight for your great content. If I had to pay for access I would be sad, but just move on to another blog where I didn’t have to pay (I just don’t have the money right now - my husband is out of work and we are on food stamps so that enters into it)

    Anyway, so what WOULD I consider paying for? A reasonably priced eBook that gave me in-depth step-by-step how-to information on a specific topic I really wanted to learn more about, some inexpensive nifty piece of software that would make my working life (freelance cf programmer and web designer) easier - maybe a CRM in tiddlywiki format (look at GTD tiddlywiki) that I could keep a copy of on my USB drive, or if you listed your specific skills and I needed 5 or 10 minutes of your personal time via email or IM to help me with a problem, what would you charge for that? If anything else comes to me, I’ll post back ~megan

13. Tim Fehlman Says:
    November 15th, 2006 at 10:52 am

    Megan,
    I think your opinions probably fall in line with those of other tech savvy people. I think if I were to force people to decide between their money and my content, their money would win every time.

    But, the eBook is something I have been thinking about for a while. My idea was to make create a series of posts that I could eventually turn into a good tech book. It would be available in eBook format and regular paper format.

    As for technical help via e-mail or IM, in general this is pretty ineffective. In my mind, the whole point of blogging is to get away from the whole tech support thing.

    Anyway, thanks for the input and the ideas.

    Tim

14. Megan Says:
    November 15th, 2006 at 11:41 am

    ok - cool - I was just brainstorming off the top of my head ;P ~megan

15. crackers Says:
    November 17th, 2006 at 12:21 am

    I fast forward over the commercials if I tape a TV show. I complain about the ads before a movie at the theater (”If I wanted to watch commercials, I would have stayed home and watched TV!”). I avoid magazines that are more ads than contents. source

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