Blogging for Profit - Advertisers Calling in Month 3?

In the days when I operated static web sites, it was a challenge getting new visitors, let alone advertisers. Sure, there are affiliate programs you can join, ebooks you can sell on your site, add Google Adsense, but a niche big-name advertiser can enhance your brand and put you in a totally different league.

To this day, I still don’t know how Outside Hub (Outdoor niche advertising network for Chevorelet, Orvis, Eddie Bauer, etc) found me but I know when your traffic goes up, many good things happen along with it. As Steve Pavlina, world-renown blogger on Self-Improvement said, “The essence of blogging for profit is traffic. No traffic, no money. Lots of traffic, lots of money.”

Just applying one of the Web 2.0 technique on my blog posts, I saw my traffic go over the 1,000 mark and even hit 2,000 on one of those days when all the stars lined up.

Now you may think hitting 1,000 unique visitors in one day is nothing to shout from the roof about. But my blog, www.JoyOfCamping.com is only a few months old, so pardon me if I get very excited with my little successes. Yes, I want to shout from the roof top that my blog had 12,914 unique visitors last month.

Other good things that drifted in with the traffic increase? Google. It is mind-boggling to me that my site appears on page 1 in Google for these competitive terms: campfire recipes, camping dinners, how to choose a tent, Eurika tents, how to choose a camping stove, just to name a few. My static web site, which was very pretty, mind you www.BaliSerena.com never made it under page 38.

Now how to keep that traffic coming back? That’s another reason blogging has worked for me versus static web sites. With a blog, you can ask readers for comments, votes, add video and audio, provide easy ways for readers to share or spread their favorite posts to their friends or their social bookmarking sites - WITHOUT being a programmer. Those features (the technical term is: plugins) are provided for you, free, thanks to the generous folks at Wordpress, my blogging platform.

According to my stats above (Pages/Visit), my visitors really stick around my blog. I know I've got cool videos and humorous blog posts, but that's still a staggeringly high pages/visit. No way could I have accomplished that with my static website.

I can't explain why blogs outperform static web sites. Like I said, I’m not a techie. But there’s this free 64-page Web 2.0 book that is being passed around on the net that explains it much better. That’s how I got started building www.joyofcamping.com and the video companion: www.joyofcamping.tv

Hope you enjoy my site, come back often, stick around, drop a comment.