Can independent blogging turn into… a real job?

Meet Adam (made up name).

He’s a smart individual with a general interest for life and all that stems from it. He likes to voice his own views and knows how to word them efficiently. He’s computer-savvy and knows his way around with such open source superstars as PHP, MySQL and WordPress.

He has this plan of getting quality information “out to the world” so he buys up a good domain name, sets up his own hosting account (or home server, whichever), installs the WordPress blogging script and launches his very first independent blog.

The word -independent- is very important, here. It means that Adam, our “example buddy”, will be able to manage his blog in any way he pleases.

He’ll be able to tweak his blog with any plug-in he wishes and will also be able to integrate pay-per-click advertising alone or alongside with more “traditional” banner placements (ideally bringing in a monthly revenue).

So Adam publishes his first 25 posts and already, some Google users are starting to notice his high-quality work. Let me insist on -quality- because without true uniqueness and added value, end-users will not waste time coming back to Adam’s blog, let alone bookmark it.

Like in all other aspects of life, sustained quality drives long term revenue.

Fortunately, Adam believes in his blog enough to continue investing time in it, even if the advertising revenue isn’t quite that spectacular, yet. At least, it’s not enough to live by. At this point, maybe Google AdSense brings in around $100 per month for pay-per-click “contextual” ads and the banners ads (let’s say there are 4 at $100 each) bring in another $400. It’s a good start but more work needs to be done.

Adam therefore continues to blog about what he loves but mostly, about what his users are looking for.

In a perfect world, a blogger should seek to either provide uniquely valuable information or, more to the point, solve one or many problems, for the end users. Doing that will built up a “reputation” for the blog as being “useful”. It will also significantly drive the traffic up.

Since good blogs usually have at least a 10% click-thru rate for the pay-per-click ads and that each of these ads pay out (an average of) 20 cents, if Adam’s blog gets 1,000 visitors daily, it can safely be assumed that it will generate around $20 a day, which translates into about $600 per month. Add that amount to the banner revenues which, at this point, may have doubled to $800 and you rise up to $1,400 in monthly revenue.

While that’s not enough to book that two week trip to Bali, it’s significant enough to be able to make ends meet — for a while, at least.

Now that Adam, our fictional blogger, has probably gone from a PR0 to a PR3 within roughly one month of hard work, his goal will probably be to reach (and stay at) the PR5 level, within a few more months.

To achieve this, Adam can simply leave “educated comments” in other blogs which happen to be well-regarded by both the end-users and the search engines. This will -naturally- enhance his own blog’s visibility, at no cost (other than his own time). Also, other smart people could, in turn, notice Adam’s blog (for the first time) and be compelled to leave a comment, too. These comments have the power to greatly enhance Adam’s blog value, for all further visitors who will see the post as having more depth… and influence.

From this point on, it should be fairly straightforward for Adam who simply needs to keep adding quality posts to his own blog -and- highly valuable comments into other blogosphere properties.

As the number of visitors crosses the 10,000 mark, on a daily basis, Adam can pretty much bank on a $200 a day revenue stream from his Google AdSense pay-per-click ads (for about $6,000 monthly) coupled with perhaps 12 banners generating $1,200 per month for a total of $7,200… month after month.

It goes without saying that Adam, our typical yet imaginary blogger, enjoys a nice life, financially speaking but also from a professional standpoint as he’ll likely be doing what he likes best, from home and on his own terms.

As time goes by, Adam may hook up with many other quality bloggers, advertisers and other “movers and shakers” who will keep turning out “new unforeseen opportunities” for him to better his blog.

This “fantasy blogging” scenario is made to follow real life metrics so it’s pretty clear that if you follow in Adam’s footsteps, you too could end up being able to make a (good) living off blogging.

As long as you focus on uniqueness, true value and long term revenue generation approaches, things should turn out just as you’d expect them to — akin to what happened to Adam.

Tags: make money with your own blog, blogs, bloggers, blogging, revenue generating blog, blogging as a career, blog job, working from home, working on your own terms, working without a boss, value-added blogging, quality blog posts, unique blog posts, online revenue, google adsense, banner advertising, monthly revenue, pay-per-click revenue, ppc advertising

The .me suffix is all about speculation

While domainers may be buying into the speculative hype about new domain name suffixes like “.me”, prospective buyers are looking for true (and trusted) value plus, whenever possible, natural revenue.

It’s going to be a long, long time before .me gets enough traction to command a price which is higher than the normal $20-or-so acquisition price, even for so-called “premium” domains.

The main problem comes from the very fact that ICANN is trigger happy nowadays and all sorts of “dot-anything” are scheduled to hit the market. With every new dot, lots of inexperienced (and sometimes experienced) domainers rush to land quality names… with a largely worthless suffix!

So the registrars are taking in insane profits in very short periods of time as a new wave of domainers try to secure the names they feel will become hot, over time. Just about every single generic word is a candidate for registration, under these circumstances but for a name to be worth anything, it has to bring some kind of added value to the end user, which is usually -not- the case with .me domain names since, as they stand, most of the registered names point to pay-per-click landing pages!

So thousands of domainers are stampeding for the .me names, okay. Good for them! For those who have been “in the game” for a while, sticking with the .com is the way to win big, even with seemingly silly made-up names because, at the end of the day, people type them… and remember them, easily.

Granted, names like “blog.me” or “for.me” will probably net 10 (or 100) times their acquisition cost but that’s still a far cry from their .com counterparts. And if the ICANN continues to spin out new “dots”, it might not even be 10 times because people will grow tired of the “dot madness” and intuitively fall back on the “dots with the most value”, and that’s .com, .net and some country-level suffixes, like .co.uk, .us and .ca.

So if you come across a domainer putting hard-earned money into .me names, wish him good luck but be kind enough to point them to this article, before they’re all out of cash.

One or two .me domain names —for fun— is cool but betting the whole farm on such new ICANN suffixes could either prove to be the smartest move ever or, which is more in line with reality, a (very) long shot that’ll break the bank before it turns out 1 penny of true, natural revenue.

Tags: .me, dot me, me domains, me domain names, buy .me, buy dot me, buy me names, my .me, my dot me, my .me name, finding my domain, finding domains, domainer, domainers, domain names, domain name portfolio, new icann domains, icann domain suffixes, buying domains, acquisition costs, money, revenue

Google Chrome enters the browser war

It can look deceivingly simple.

The planet’s search giant launches —yet another— web browser.

Is that supposed to be noteworthy?

Consider that Google has launched the beta version of Chrome, their own flavor of web browser, which is a MS-Windows software set to make browsing the web as pleasant an experience as searching it, using the Google Search web site.

For the average user out there, that’s the kind of argument that will send shockwaves out to Microsoft’s seemingly stagnant Internet Explorer developers who have, in many ways, failed to make their browser significantly more user-friendly. Even in their Beta 8 release. Yikes!

But what’s wrong with Firefox (open source superhero), Opera, Safari or Camino?

Nothing, they’re very functional and serve countless netizens very well, on a daily basis. So why would Google spin their own browser, amid a healthy selection of other quality browsers? Because the -real- target isn’t just the web browsing part, it’s the “operating system” part.

That’s right, folks!

Google has been talking about it for many years and it seems Chrome is the software foundation through which they could eventually take a shot at managing —part or all— of the OS itself.

Now, this is -major- news and if Microsoft wasn’t paying attention about the browser part, they’re definitely tuning in for the OS part because that’s their business’ core bread and butter.

And Google seems to have a plan so the Redmond folks better move quickly or risk missing their window of opportunity to cash in on the next big paradigm shift that could turn the OS foundation upside down as the Mountain View search giant marches on in front of the world open source parade towards another score.

It all seems complex but it’s not.

Google wants to grow and it appears, among other alternatives, leading the browser war to get a software foundation in place for a shot at delivering the very OS that makes PCs work, makes good business sense.

So Google Chrome is available for download and as usual, it’s free!

Firefox is still the open source crowd’s favorite but the browser war just got hotter with the introduction of Google Chrome. These are very interesting times…

Tags: google chrome, free browser, google browser, browse the web, mountain view browser, map browser, anonymity browser, anonymous browsing, the next os, google os, google operating system, microsoft, ms-windows, pc, ie, internet explorer, ms-explorer, redmond, browser war, browser features