Blogging for Money
Steve Pavlina (the self-help guru who used to be a game developer) has posted a great article on Blogging for Money.
It has an interesting section at the start about how Dexterity Software (his shareware company) basically made hardly any money for 5 years until he found out all about marketing and spent loads more time building up awareness of his latest game which did really well until he was making a five figure salary per month – cool!
The rest of the article deals with how to blog from an entrepreneurial point of view and is interesting reading. I personally blog for fun at the moment because my main job is game development, but I have monetised my site with Adsense – however the main type of visitors I get (developers) don’t bother to click ads 😉 haha.
February 15th, 2008 at 12:50 am
Man, Steve Pavlina rules. He has some greeeat articles, like the one “10 reasons to never get a job”. I’m a fan of him.
February 15th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Agreed. He got me started in this lark 3 years ago when I read “Cultivate Burning Desire” on his Dexterity forums…Yeah that job article is great 🙂
February 15th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
I’m sorry, guys, but this Steve Pavlina guy is… Well, think of him what you want, and admire him if you must. I think he has a rather simple business strategy: “I’m your Guru. Give me your money and I will tell you what you want to hear. Don’t begin to really think about what I’m telling, because you will quickly find out that it’s only shallow lies. But they sound good, and they attract a certain breed of desperate customers that badly need to believe in something. Especially that I’m doing great and everybody can make it. Just pay me a bit more, and I’ll tell you another fairy tale about how I waste your money at a Las Vegas Casino table while you are reading my blog.” I guess that’s basically it.
My girl-friend got really mad at me when I showed that reasons-not-to-get-a-job article. She asked me how an intelligent person like me could buy into such a pile of dung.
I rather recommend that you read this blog:
http://www.thesitewizard.com/revenue/google-adsense.shtml
He’s got a point with his note #3. I’ll send you a screenshot of your page, Gray, to show you what I mean.
February 16th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Winni: Strange that you should think that. I’ve never paid the guy a single penny. In fact he doesn’t charge for any of his advice. Following his advice, the advice of a my old boss at my last company, and my Aikido teacher, plus much stuff I have read, I have led a very successful life so far which is only getting better.
I hear you on the issue of having adsense on my blog, but I’m just blogging for fun and the adsense brings in some extra revenue (much more on my game site than the blog) so I don’t mind.