Earning Money from the Blog, Not the Ads

Some people earn from their blogs through the ads they put on them. I don't. But that does not mean I don't earn at all; it's just that my earnings don't come from the ads.

You might want to read on especially if you're a newbie and you want to monetize your blog but don't have the traffic to do it through ads.

Last July, I signed up for an account in Odesk. Fast forward a month later, after taking tests, writing what I thought were pretty impressive cover letters (apparently, the buyers didn't agree), and applying to multiple writing jobs on a daily basis ... still I didn't have anything to show for my efforts.

Not even a single interview.

Then it hit me. The buyers were not interested on high Odesk test results; at least not as much as they were on experience. They wanted to see something in my portfolio. The problem was, I had nothing to show. I wasn't a professional writer nor have I taken any formal writing lessons but I knew I could write. Not that I could churn out Pulitzer-quality outputs, but I knew I had what it took to write the articles required by most Odesk buyers. So I thought, how could I show them that my writing skills were sufficient enough to cater to their needs?

That's when I thought of putting up a blog. I figured that if I could show them at least three posts, that would give them enough to assess me on.

A few days after I started including a link to the blog in all of my cover letters, invitations started coming in. I added one more post and another and another. Now I have 12 posts at Steaming Open Cup. Not much, but enough to get me a steady flow of writing jobs from clients at Odesk.

Earlier this month, when I read the book written by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett, Problogger - Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income (which I highly recommend), I realized I was headed in the right direction. In the book, Darren and Chris placed this approach under the topic Indirect Income-Earning Strategies. In fact, ChrisG takes it a step further in his blog: practically zero ads!

To date, what I've earned from writing jobs (which I still attribute to what potential clients see on Steaming Open Cup) far outweighs what I earn from the ads on my blog. To be honest, I haven't generated any substantial income from those ads yet. It's but understandable because I don't have sufficient traffic. Until I get that steady traffic, I'll just hone my writing skills, submit more posts, and hope those jobs keep coming in.

That's it. Thanks for reading this far. I hope to see you on the next post.

You might want to read Joy's post, A Not So Rude Awakening. In that post you'll get an idea why we ever thought of putting our hopes on an online job in the first place.