Is there money in blogs?
 

I am just curious about this. Do you guys blog for the money or do you do it because it's in your blood?

I mean, without a doubt, blogging is a lot of work. And, if you are not making a lot of cash from it, why are you doing it? Unless, it's just in your blood. :)

I'm guessing that anyone who actually is bored enough to read my incredibly boring blog would buy anything to try to improve what must be a incredibly mundane life.

I blog efficient ;) I use the gallery2blog tool to import a FHG list from a sponsor, then i add a couple good written and unique sentences to each gallery, the result is a big list of blog post in a specific niche. I schedule this big list so that 2 or 3 blog posts appear every week on my blog(s). This way i have a automated blog, but with unique attractive text.

So twn, would your blog be considered a fake blog?

And Cleo, based on the amount of people that do read your blog, how are the sales compared to your LL?

I started blogging for money (and because starting new projects and playing with scripts is fun). I make occasional sales, but for the time invested the returns just aren't worth it, at least not for me. I think I have 9 blogs right now (all fake/semi-fake) and I only update a couple of them very sporadically.

I'm sure somebody who specializes in blogging and knows how to do it right can make decent money.

As an active blogger.. i can say for me out of 6 blogs that i juggle..only 2 make money for me, my REAL blog which is on a community site --Live journal-- and my cam blog. The rest are time consuming and really make little to nothing. Which proves to me that writing what you know and are passionate about pays more than trying to 'fake" it. But that's just what i've found after 6 years.

Ditto.

I really don't post sales articles anymore, and I don't use pictures for the most part either not enough reward for the effort. The only beneficial thing about my blog is as traffic feeder to my other adult properties, other than that I just try to have fun with it.

Given a choice of starting a new link list or a blog focused on a niche your passionate about, I think the blog would show a profit first.

Blogs are a labor of love. But I would say that it takes 9-12 months to build a blog that can financially stand on its own.

Splogs, fake blogs, etc. are in a very different category than above and you can build a network of them and do ok.

But to answer your question, I would say that if you were looking to support yourself, blogging would be a bad place to start.

Ive made money with blogging but there are different rules and variables to apply.

No, mainly because i type unique content, it isn't much, but it isn't too little, it is actually just right. When you are doing it for a while you will learn what amount of text is right and what type of sentences are doing right with the search engines. It's just like with freesites, you have to figure out how to get one without spending too much time on it.

There are actually many type of blogs, it isn't fake and good, there is a lot between those two |loony| But i always recommend to sit in the middle, you get the best of both worlds this way.

I actually don't know if my blogs make money or not, I must admit, I haven't been tracking that. The main purpose reason I started them was to create search-engine friendly text and also to have something that was a little bit sticky and linkable, bringing traffic onto the linklists where I could then make sales.

I actually get a lot of good traffic into my sites from places that would not normally link to a porn site.

It also means you can create content that gets into the blogosphere.

I got into it for the writing aspect of blogs, I have a degree in journalism I never used and this was the perfect combo of what I was doing in adult. However, a lot of my blogs that were real blogs didn't make a lot of money. It seems my network of fake blogs makes more but I still keep some of my real blogs updated by hand because I just have an urge to write sometimes that can't be satisfied by fake blogs.

It seems that nobody really started blogging to get rich. And to do a real blog, it either has to be a labor of love or you just don't do it.

Those two snippets pretty much sum it up for me too. As an example, on the XLog there's rarely any real sales text, and almost never any porn pics or movies linked to sponsors. For me it's about making a site stickier by giving surfers something besides just/only porn to entertain them. Using a blog as one part of a site means that when surfers do want more porn, it's only a click or two away on the same site.

I do it for the money but I guess I have always been the type that is okay with writing. In many ways blogs are what free sites used to be..a way to target SE hits with a bit of content.

These three posts pretty much sum thing sup for me.

I've found blogs to be more time consuming than anything else I do, that is for blogs that are updated on a regular basis like every two days or so. It's more time consuming because there is more to it, least for me.

With a links lists, for example, you check links, good not not, follow the rules, blind links, ect it's pretty much a regular easy procedure. With blogs you have to think what your going to post about, what to post, write the post, links, images, ect. It's more thinking I guess for me. many times it's tough to come up with what to write about.

I am the same as grandmascrotum, as I dont track my blogs for sales, which is dumb on my part, and should find the time. Though I do know the traffic clicks through to my sponsors pretty well.

I would say thats a very accurate analysis.

i think that it is possible to get money from any way of directions in Adult. It is possible to do job very good.

Blogging is definitely time consuming. I probably spend about an hour a day on my blogs - researching, writing, maintaining. I guess I could be making a free site in that time.

It is worth it because it suits a strategy. Through blogging I've set myself up as an expert by reporting on news about women and porn, with an occasional plug for products added. Today that's paid off because I got a nice plug for several of my sites on Fleshbot and Scanner. Nice traffic, nice hardlinks.

With the current concern over the devaluing of reciprocal links, a blog is a great way to get those much-needed one way links. But the trick is that you have to earn them, and that does take time. An advertising-rich splog won't get them, unless it's somehow really amusing.

We could try doing a trackbacking club kind of thing, to increase the links coming to each other.

Boogie suggested that a while back. I had no idea of how one even did a trackback then, ha ha.

I don't blog all that often except on my mainstream blog. I got a post doing $100-$200 per pay period, but besides that I'm not seeing much in terms of consistent sales. I hear there are some high-profile mainstream bloggers making ~$15K/mo by selling ad-spots, to get to that I'd probably need a few thousand subscribers and learn how to write... I might see a good ROI if I paid someone else to blog, but right now the main reason I blog is just to get my thoughts out there. If my objective was to increase revenue, writing a blog post would be last on my list.

This guy (ok his blog is mainstream, but so what?), on the other hand, started monetizing his blog in Sep 2006 making $352.94/mo. In Jan 2007 he made $3440.66. Having 3895 subscribers (according to feedburner) doesn't hurt either. 3K/mo isn't a ton of money, but its probably more than enough to pay for the mortgage.

http://www.johnchow.com/making-money...-january-2007/

How would that work Bill?

Well, the theory is pretty straightforward. We write posts that include permalinks to individual post pages on each others blogs.

Blogs with two many links to the index, and too few to interior pages, fit a pattern that will get them knockedback as spam (which is because they are spam ;-} ).

How to organize it is the problem - I think Boogie never felt there was the right group of bloggers around to make it work. But there are a few more bloggers now. Maybe we could figure it out.

The "trackbacking club" concept is that basically we 'buy in' by saying we'll make, say, three trackbacks to each others blogs in a month. So if there are 5 people, in a month we have to include trackbacks to other blogs about 15 times a month (that sounds too much, maybe make it two or one a month).

But, the whole subject deserves it's own thread. Maybe we can start one sometime soon.

It's not gonna work.

Cheap trackback links have very little weight SEO wise and if you get aggressive then the network becomes exposed. You need a link from a trusted site to rank high - I asked 3 bloggers link to a post of mine - one link from a TBPR 6 blog but it didn't have much impact. I asked a well-known SEO to link to me from the domain root of a few of his old, trusted sites and that boosted my ranking from 9th to 3rd.

A group of splogs linking to each other is not gonna outrank tens of thousands of recip links pointing to LLs. Why? Because you can only trump quantity with quality - so unless you're ready to publish 10,000 posts and trackback every one of them its not gonna happen. Now, you can build up link popularity that way, but higher PR just by itself won't translate into higher rankings. Plus if you have only a dozen bloggers swapping links the entire network will be flagged as spam or links devalued for excessive reciprocal linking, especially if you're blogging shit no one wants to link to in the first place. If you do it with a real blog, you're just going to piss off RSS subscribers. If you avoid that by linking less aggressively, you minimize your ROI.

It sure won't grab any top positions for good keywords.

But splogs and 99.4% of adult blogs ain't gonna do that anyway, and anybody who thinks they will is gonna be dissapointed.

Splogging and adult blogging isn't an "I'm gonna get TONS of great google traffic." strategy in the first place.

It's a long tail strategy, a low cost way to generate pages, each with a very small possibility of catching a surfer.

If you've already decided to create a few splogs, you should know this.

There are millions of "real" crappy blogs that never get a trackback, so it won't take a humongous effort to do enough trackbacking to lift an adult splog into the realm of shitty unimportant blogs that might get a longtail position.

Then, every adult blogger should have their "best" blogs, with the most original writing and flavor - and their own strategy for getting traffic to those "best" blogs. Those have an even better chance of getting longtail traffic, and could benefit from a few trackbacks too.

If your point is, there's no point in making splogs, you're right, there is no point, and everybody should stop.

If your point is, once you've made a splog, you should do nothing, stare vacantly into space, and dream about making a mainstream bizop blog and selling ad space on it, then go ahead, do it.

I imagine you already understand what's going to happen to a shitty little se domain with all the incomings pointing to the index alone.

My point is trackbacks are not gonna help you unless you do it en masse - and if you do do it en masse those links will be devalued. A bigger point is that at the end of the day, bending over backwards to please Google isn't going to win a blogger any brownie points. Build a blog for surfers - Google traffic is just cream on top. Lastly, if you want to build traffic off thousands of long tails publishing stuff no one is ever gonna bother reading, why not just buy a spam script? Even spending 30 minutes on chasing a low traffic long tail just for the sake of traffic to me is way too much work.

The real strength of a blog is what Karen said - getting organic links from sites like Fleshbot - sex blogs is probably the only "sector" in adult that's freely linking - and those are the type of links that will boost your rankings.

i am in for the money at my blog, but 2 sides here, i am building a blog make it work and have sales and sell the damn domain, thats why i only make sex story blogs, easy to make, copy and past and even for that i am to lazy to post everyday, my blog, i posted there last time in december or so, but people get back there because the other stuff i have there are updated automaticly, the sexstories, i have them purely for keywords for the ses....

You mean MSN :D

hahahahaha i knew you would say that...but msn , google or yahoo it are all ses machines and i dont care where the traffic comes from as long it gives me sales:)))) HYaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Halfdeck|boobies|never focus on one ses...because if you do and you get hit...your doomed:D

Hey, you gotta say the s word on a weekend just when I'm about to kick back and relax..What's up Stu for a sec you made me reach for my icq. |waves|

BTW, all you splog owners gotta do is kill nofollow in the comments and then leave comments on each others blogs. Simple.

Splogging is more ethically acceptable to me than a spam script. I have the rights to the content I'm using and making, I'm just using wordpress and and a few plugins to create long tail content without scraping and without creating near duplicate pages on the blog domain (unlike a spam script).

Since a splog has about the same chance of getting a link from fleshbot as I have of screwing a celebrity, it doesn't make any sense to talk about splogs trying to get links like that.

You've already said google can't tell the difference between no trustrank minor pages and notrustrank spam - splogs take advantage of that in the longtail.

I haven't been splogging for long but I'm fully in the black, and earnings can be expected to increase. I've gotten surfer comments on splogs, much to my surprise. I make the most signups on my anchor blogs, but the splogs are sending a nice stream of hits to the sponsors, and while it;s sometimes hard to tell where FHG sales came from, there are at least a couple I'm sure are from the splogs, and more that I think could well be.

But I'm totally with you on one thing, people shouldn't splog.

I must be missing something. That's certainly possible, I'm still not totally clear about the details of trackbacks, pingbacks, and that stuff.

Why is a comment better than a trackback?

Bill, I don't know why you always seem to take what I say personally. When I say crap sites, I'm not talking about anyone's sites in particular.

I said IF Google is using the TrustRank algo, then Google can't tell the difference between low PageRank quality pages and low PageRank spam. That makes longtail SERPs somewhat of a level playing field when your splog is only competing against spam/new sites with slim-to-none link profile, but I wouldn't say splogs have any kind of an edge. A splog page with a low link profile and no trusted IBLs is also no match for a page on a high TBPR site with links from places like Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ even if that page only mentions your target keyword somewhere on the bottom of the page.

When did I say people shouldn't splog? Whatever floats your boat, man. I was arguing against using trackbacks as a deep linking strategy.

- Leaving a short comment takes less time than writing a post
- Leaving a comment on a nofollow-free blog gives you one way links, whereas with a trackback, linking is reciprocal.

grin i saw you popping up on icq, but i was just bugging the board and trying to a be a bit intelligent dutch chinese talking woman:D

I don't know yet. I put one up about three days ago with a few posts and I already received about 12 google referred hits. Hmm. One targeted google hit is worth anyhere from 10 - 100 times that amount in general tgp traffic or another such source as far as conversions often go.

If one did 100 blogs with 20 targeted hits/day from SEs, I could see that as being quite lucrative indeed.

very good thread :)
nice reading

Another thing to consider:

If you're trackbacking/commenting or whatever between blog posts indexed in Google as supplemental results, those links won't mean shit.