Bloggers don't make money online - Internet Marketers do. It has taken me a while to understand why so many of my readers just don't get it. Bloggers want to make money but they want to do it blogging. They have integrity. They want to be recognized by other bloggers. They want to be famous. They think the A-list makes the most money online.
Internet Marketers only want to make money. They use blogs but they don't blog. You have never heard of them. They make a lot more money than the A-list.
I have been telling bloggers for some time now how to make money online and it isn't working. You can only make money by getting large volumes of traffic and it has to be traffic that will spend money on something they want or will click ads in pursuit of something they want. Bloggers spend all their time trying to get other bloggers to read their blogs. Bloggers don't spend money and even if they did there are not enough of them to make a living on. Internet Marketers spend all their time optimizing pages for the search engines and getting backlinks.
You have heard me say all this before and yet you still chase bloggers.
A little perspective
The blog you are reading now averages about 2000 visitors a day - 3/4 of the traffic comes from Google. The rest are bloggers. Adsense earnings average about $100/day. Affiliate sales are sporadic at best and earn me maybe $500 a month. This is not an affiliate sales site however and could do a lot better if I concentrated my efforts on the search traffic. I also make about $100 a week selling leads (Project Payday).
Most of you would think this is a pretty good income and you will continue to build up your blog in hopes of achieving a similar income. Most of you will never achieve it because you will never get the search traffic. You will try and get more readers.
The screenshot below is of one of my statcounter accounts. The stats you see are for all the affiliate sites I have built over the past three months. Most are for products on clickbank, CJ and ROI Rocket. Affiliate products have a decent return for about three months and then interest drops off drastically. A few products like SEO Elite and Keyword Elite stand the test of time but they are an exception - they are different from all the rest because they are actually useful. Most products are crap.
I optimize affiliate sales blogs just like my Adsense blogs. I pre-sell the product and direct the visitor to my affiliate link. You will see that I have as many failures as successes. Every site on the list is or was on page 1 of the serp's but some don't generate interest, others get sandboxed and some generate a lot of traffic. This past month I generated about 300,000 page views. 1% clicked through to the sales page. About 3000 visitors. 10% of these actually bought a product - approx 300 sales (289 to be exact). My average commission is $23 for a total of just under $6700. I spent a grand total of nothing on hosting or domains. I spent nothing on PPC. The only expense I have is buying backlinks - about $750 this month but this should be divided equally between all several hundred sites that I manage - about $3.26 per site.