I've mentioned several times before that part of my plan to reach financial independence is to increase my income through online ventures. This includes blogging, videos, and whatever else I can come up with to do online.
A lot of people have tried this before though, and most don't end up making any money. Not any serious money anyway. It's easy to throw ads on your blog and start making money. Anybody can do that. Living off the income from a blog is a different story.
There is really only one major difference between the guys that are making 50 cents a month, and the guys that are making 5 grand a month: Traffic.
Traffic is what drives everything online. If you have a lot of traffic you WILL make money online, regardless of how shitty your site is. If you don't have traffic, you won't get money, even if your blog is totally awesome. Traffic trumps all when it comes to making money online. You want more money, get more traffic.
And most people understand this to some extent. The problem is, it's like a recipe for elephant soup (step 1. Find an elephant) you know what you need, you just don't know how to get it.
Sometimes people's blogs will go viral, or get picked up by a big news site, or any number of other things that will gift you with a bunch of views and a nice jump start, but you can't count on that. Luckily the most guaranteed way to increase your traffic is something that anybody can do:
UPDATE YOUR SITE!
Seriously, it seems like it goes without saying, but it doesn't. Plenty of people have great ideas for websites, blogs, or videos, but they just DO NOT make enough content. And that will KILL your traffic, especially in the beginning. Once you are at super high levels your traffic can be somewhat self-sustaining (Maddox may only make a post once every 6 months and still get millions of views) but that isn't going to work for you. He has already built up a huge viewer base with links to his site all over the internet.
The bottom line is, if you are producing a content based website you have to update your site at a MINIMUM twice a week. When you are getting started it should be more like every day. Slightly less is necessary for videos, while blog posts should be on the higher end. Multiple times a day is even better.
The way the internet works helps your traffic snowball, and the more content you have, the better. Also, a lot of traffic will be based on repeat viewers. So give them a reason to come back. Even if they LOVED your last article, if they know you only put out content once a month, they aren't going to check back in that often.
Each article, blog, or video you do will get picked up by slightly different search terms, and different people, and has its own chances of getting linked, etc. That's what makes the traffic snowball. Each of your articles may only get one person to come back and check in next month. But if you have 100 articles, then your article next month will get 100 views. So maybe that article gets 5 or 10 people to come back. So then next months 30 articles get a total of 150 to 300 people stopping by regularly. So you can see how it builds. And by simply having more content you are increasing the chances that eventually SOMETHING of yours will get mentioned by another big site or blog and give you a decent chunk of traffic.
This blog is only 2 months old, and it's traffic has already surpassed another blog of mine that I just do for fun when I feel like it. But that blog has been around for 7 years!
If you have a content-based site, you are expecting people to show up for that content. So give them what they want! UPDATE YOUR SITES!!
-The Money Monk
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