May 13th, 2008
RSS Subscribers, overrated?
Well, in a recent interview with John Chow, I did get some great secrets from John on how to monetize my blogs.
I went from losing money every month on server fees to making almost $6K per month in just a month.
Now, what did I learn from John Chow?
He did tell me that RSS subscribers are the key to making money with blogs.
But I beg to differ.
It really depends on “how” you are making money online. Let’s say you do that mostly through affiliate programs and CPA deals, you will probably be better off with lots of RSS subscribers.
Now in my case, I have low RSS subscribers on most of my blogs yet I do get some good traffic, total of about 30K uniques per day as a network.
I also did research on some blogs with very high RSS subscribers, around 10K-20K, and found out that high number of RSS subscribers doesn’t always equal high web traffic.
For example, my Zedomax.com gets almost 7,000 uniques per day yet I only have 900 RSS subscribers. 99% of my readers are super bouncers and I don’t rely on my readers to make money for me, I rely on the new people that come to the site to make money.
For me, I’ve built my blogs on a network model planned to drive up web traffic, not subscribers.
Because of that model, I get about 90% of my traffic from search engines like Google. Now, I don’t have many subscribers but I do get lots of new people to all the blogs as 90% of the web traffic is new people through Google search terms.
John Chow sells lots of private advertising and lots of affiliate programs with tiers.
Now, the secret John Chow told me personally was not the fact that I need to raise number of RSS subscribers, but he said to me, “Drive Traffic and Maximize Income!”
Well, I took that to my heart and started moving around Google Adsense ads. Within 4 weeks, I went from $1000 revenue to almost now $6000. (the check should be coming soon)
With more fine tuning and optimizing my ads, I am pretty sure I can get near $10K/month range by the end of this year. Not too bad for changing and moving around your ads.
RSS is not overrated, but it is overrated for people like me who build sites for traffic, not subscribers.
The great part about building natural search traffic is that those people who use Google to find your site are also the most likely people to click out of your site using your Adsense ads.
What I’ve learned in the last few weeks is that there’s never one way to skin a money making cat. The most important thing you have to do is to spend a lot of time to adjust and try different things until you can maximize the income from your blog.
That’s what John Chow did and I just proved it to myself AND told you about it.
Now go take my medicine and try it yourself and see if you can double, triple, or quadruple your income!
