So a year and a half ago I set out to write up all my experiences in building up blogs into businesses into a how-to book. It took way longer than I thought it would, and the resulting book is rather thick. But I’m very proud of the effort and I don’t think there’s another book out there quite like it!

The book is titled How to Build a Successful Blog Business and includes three case studies from our network, about the Tuts, FreelanceSwitch and AppStorm sites. It includes graphs of our blog income and expenses, personal experiences and step by step how-to manuals on hiring, building, writing, growing and creating successful, profitable blog businesses.

If you haven’t already, visit the Blog Business sales page where you can get your copy, as well as find out what top bloggers like Darren Rowse, Daniel Scocco and Yaro Starak are saying about the book.

Sample Extracts of the Book

If you’d like to read some sample extracts, you can grab a few from the case studies over on our various blogs:

• Extract from the Psdtuts case study
• Extract from the Nettuts case study
• Extract from the FreelanceSwitch case study
• Extract from the AppStorm case study

Hope you enjoy the book!

Making money by blogging is difficult, but it isn’t impossible. If you do what successful bloggers did, work hard and give it the time it takes, there’s no reason why your blog shouldn’t make money. Here are the 13 keys to making money from your blog, according to me. Why 13, why not 20 (or 10)? Well, I couldn’t think of more (or less). If something else comes to your mind that I haven’t covered here, please make use of the comments section.

1. Focus on consistency.

In my opinion, this is the biggest reason why a majority of bloggers end up making peanuts, even after months of blogging…well, inconsistent blogging. If you don’t post consistently, you lose readers, traffic, and eventually, your blog.

Whether you post every day or once a week, you need to be consistent with that frequency. Just think about it. Would you read a daily newspaper if it didn’t get published each day? Or a weekly magazine that comes out only on some weeks? It’s the same with blogs. Posting frequency matters, and matters a lot if you intend to make money from your blog. As Darren tells here, a consistent posting frequency is important.

2. Invest some time in marketing.

Celebrated blogger Gary Vaynerchuk once famously said, “Content is king but marketing is queen and the queen runs the household.”

Content is the most important part, no doubt. If your content doesn’t impress, no marketing can help the blog survive in the long term. But if you completely ignore content promotion, even the best content won’t help you reach your goals.

Understand that blogging as a profession has come a long way in the last several years. There are millions of blogs on the internet, all striving for attention. So don’t just write and wait for visitors. Go out and get them. Promote your posts on social sites like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and contact other bloggers to introduce yourself and your site.

3. Listen to your readers.

Since you intend to make money blogging, you need to understand your visitors: What do they like to read? What are their problems? What do they expect from your blog? You need to listen to them and give them what they want.

There are various tools and methods you could use to listen to your audience. Check this brilliant article by Chris Brogan on social media monitoring.

4. Manage your expectations.

Don’t think of blogging as a get-rich-quick scheme. Have you just published your first post with all kinds of ads and pop-ups on the site, which, you hope, will start making dollars any minute now?

If so, read this post by Seth Godin on get rich quick schemes. Then see what problogger Darren Rowse has to say on the expectation of making money fast by blogging. If you still don’t get it, well, then as Darren puts it, head to the casino!

5. Read and follow.

I think one of the best things about making money from blogging is that you really don’t need to be innovative. There are tried and tested methods that work, and you just have to follow them diligently, work in that direction, and be patient. That’s it.

However, if you are too busy to read feeds and read what other successful bloggers have to say about the tricks of the trade, the path ahead will get tougher for sure.

6. Avoid “analysis paralysis.”

Wikipedia defines analysis paralysis as “over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation, so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome.”

So how can analysis paralysis prevent you from making money by blogging? It makes you procrastinate and delays content creation. And that makes you inconsistent (remember the first point, consistency?).

Don’t believe me? Read how Chris Garrett figured out ways of defeating procrastination and analysis paralysis. The point is, instead of over-thinking and over-contemplating, just take action and get things done. They don’t have to be perfect to begin with, but getting started with them is more important.

7. Network with other bloggers.

Building relationships is important in any business, and blogging is no exception. If you find networking with other bloggers and talking to them difficult or boring, then you are losing out on many fronts.

Networking with other bloggers is important. It helps you discover what works and what doesn’t. Plus, you could partner with people online and generate more income opportunities.

Check out this nice article on how to optimize your social networking for more on this.

8. Link to other blogs often.

If you’ve been blogging for some time, I’m sure you’ve heard the term SEO (search engine optimization). SEO refers to things you need to do to enhance your blog’s visibility in the search engine ranking pages, or SERPs. And one of its aspects is link-building.

Now, if you are shy in linking to other blogs, you’ll have a hard time in getting links too. Popular and established blogs can afford to do that, but not you. As a new blogger looking to make money in the long term from your blog, you should link out and link out often.

9. Never stop learning.

It’s always good to learn as much as you can about making money by blogging. So scour the internet for various monetization options for a blog or a website. Honestly, there are tons of ways to do it and you don’t have to rely on any one method.

Here are 2 articles to get you started:

• Problogger’s article repository on blog monetization.
• FreelanceSwitch’s article on marketing your services by leveraging your blog (that’s one of the ways to make money from your blog too).

10. Develop a strong work ethic.

Making a regular income from a blog requires work. Hard work. Just because you can work from home any time in your pajamas doesn’t mean it’s easy. Ask any blogger who’s made money from blogging and you’ll hear about the kind of consistent work it takes to make it happen. If you don’t have it in you, you had better look somewhere else.

Lorelle VanFossen has written an article on hard work and blogging on Blog Herald, where she talks about the various aspects of blogging like writing, maintenance, social media, and other blogging challenges. Check it out.

11. Sell stuff.

If you’ve created a small but loyal audience who read and comment frequently, don’t be afraid of selling them information products like ebooks, audio/video products, or anything else that provides value. You just need to make sure that you’ve earned their trust before you do it.

If you are wondering how to get started with it, Michael Martine’s post on basics of selling information products and consulting should help you.

12. Create an email list.

John Chow recently mentioned not having an email list from Day One as one of his biggest blogging mistakes. And most of the other well-known bloggers would agree. Mailing lists are known to convert better than other means like blog posts because people read their emails more often than the blogs they are subscribed to.

Simply put, if you don’t have a mailing list, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

13. Write from your heart.

While writing this article, I remembered a guest post I wrote for Problogger about writing from your heart. If you aren’t passionate about your blog, if you don’t feel like putting in the effort and creating content, then there’s no point sticking around trying to earn a few bucks. You might make some money in the short term but, in the long term, it’ll be difficult to sustain the profitability.

Years ago when I had more time to spare, one of my favourite pastimes was to play computer games. In particular, I rather liked those real-time strategy games like Warcraft and Starcraft, which brought hours of enjoyment, to the decline of my studies and chagrin of my girlfriend of the time.

I’ve not had the time to play one of those games recently, but now and again I do think about them, and how they relate to blogging and business. In particular they are useful for looking at the tipping point for a blog that we run at Envato called Psdtuts+, and how it went from small site to expanding little business.

Strategy Games

So in case you’ve not had the great pleasure to play one a real-time strategy game, let me outline roughly what happens in them. Generally you begin every round with a starting set of resources like gold and timber, and a few little guys to do your bidding. It’s your job to build a base by constructing buildings with your gold, use the buildings to train more guys and use the guys to harvest resources so you can then build more, train more, and so on.

Now the trick to these games is that you need to balance your growth and expansion if you want to be successful. You have to use your resources wisely and make your base self-sufficient, as your initial resources will run out quickly and you’ll be left floundering.

Psdtuts+

In September of 2007, I started a Photoshop tutorial blog called Psdtuts+ where we post comprehensive tutorials and general articles about Photoshop. My early tutorials brought lots of traffic because they were longer and more in-depth than anyone else was really writing at the time, so the site stood out. But because I work on lots of projects, I have only a limited amount of time and could only put together one tutorial each week. And while the traffic was good, there wasn’t much income from the site. From memory it was just under a thousand a month from Adsense, some affiliate links and some text-link-ads I was selling.

So in many ways, it was kind of like being in one of those strategy games I mentioned earlier. I had a little base, with a few posts going up a month, some resources coming in, and one guy to do my bidding – me! While not a bad situation to be in, I wanted to expand.

So I started spending what little income I had, and hired a tutorial writer. I also offered cash for contributions that we published and started accepting community contributions. After a few months of this we’d gotten to publishing two, and sometimes three tutorials a week, and correspondingly income had gone up. Unfortunately, so had costs. Because Psdtuts+ is and has always been popular, hosting all those masses of big images on every tutorial meant that I was serving up over a terabyte of data every month. Plus our tutorial writers cost money, because if you want the best content, you have to pay for it. And the more time I spent on the blog, the more I thought that I should be accounting for my own time in the accounts.

This status quo lasted for another three months. The site grew, but slowly. I was tied down to it, having to keep up my own work on the site. And though it wasn’t really losing (much) money, it certainly was not profitable. Without profits, there wasn’t really any way to expand, and so I was stuck.

So the question was how to harvest more resources. In strategy games, there are usually some key buildings that you need to build, that allow you to get more out of what you’ve already got. This was important because it was clear that if I simply hired more writers, built more sites, stuck more ads in, or a host of other expansion ideas, I wouldn’t really be getting anywhere.

The Tipping Point

In the end it was an idea that I’d shelved because it was too hard that made the difference. Where previously we’d been giving away the source Photoshop (PSD) file, then selling them individually, now we built a paid membership system. The system, which we call PSD Plus costs people $9 a month to join. For that they get to download the source files and we put up periodic extra tutorials that only they get to read. It’s built using aMember and WordPress, and took me a good two weeks to put together initially.

It took a little while of saving and a bunch of work to get the system up and running. But as all players of strategy games know, this is often the case in building a pivotal part of your base. And as in strategy games, it paid off when a few hundred loyal readers joined! Sure there is extra work now, because it’s really important that these readers get value for their money, but the tradeoff is extremely positive.

So all of a sudden the site went from break even, to profitability. So what to do next?

Expand, expand, expand!

The smart thing to do here would probably have been to not do too much, and build up some cash reserves. But where’s the fun and excitement in that? And besides, it wouldn’t really be a tipping point, if all I did was collect money. As we know from strategy games, there’s only one thing you can do when your resources have grown – build more!

So in the months since, I’ve hired an editor, commissioned some celebrity writers, expanded the posting schedule, and a few weeks ago built the first sister site at Nettuts+. And as these new expansions increase revenue, we can expand more, train more, and harvest more resources.

What’s the lesson here?

Well aside from learning that playing Warcraft wasn’t a waste of time after all, I suppose you could say that thinking strategically about your blog is important if you want to build a business with it. Look carefully at what you are spending versus what you are getting back. Think long term and don’t be afraid to spend money along the way – so long as it’s wisely spent. And good luck!

Since this post was written, the same principles discussed have built Psdtuts+ into a major blog network based at Tutsplus.com with close to 4000 members in the Plus program.

When I first started blogging, I remember reading a post on Steve Pavlina’s blog about how much traffic he was receiving. If I recall correctly it was around a million visitors a month, a huge number! I found myself wondering where all that traffic was coming from.

Today while I was doing my routine sifting of Analytics numbers from Psdtuts+, I thought it’d be interesting to analyse and share some of the statistics and trends we have been getting. So I’ve taken some screenshots and put it all together for your informational pleasure!

Does Twitter ACTUALLY drive traffic?

Lately you hear an awful lot about Twitter and its uses for startups, bloggers and marketers. For about 6 months now we’ve been progressively using Twitter more and more, both through my own @collis account and through the various Tuts+ accounts. So does Twitter merit the fuss?

Here’s a monthly graph of referral traffic from Twitter:

As you can see it’s looking pretty positive, with a very solid climb over the last few months. And don’t forget this is just traffic coming marked as Twitter referrals, there is a large portion of traffic from Twitter clients which gets marked as Direct Traffic (for more on this, read Yoast’s post on the subject). So it’s safe to say that those numbers could be doubled to get a realistic quantity.

Part of the reason behind this trend is that our Tuts+ Twitter accounts – such as @psdtuts – push links to every post we publish. In other words it acts as a sort of alternative to RSS for the sites. Add in ReTweets, other users, our general Twitter marketing and you have a pretty good source of traffic by anyone’s estimation.

What about Facebook?

This one was more of a surprise to me because we don’t actually do anything with Facebook (yet). So to find out that Facebook is following pretty much the same traffic trend as Twitter was very interesting. In fact seeing this graph has spurred me to start organizing a genuine Facebook strategy for Envato. In the meanwhile I haven’t the faintest clue how Facebook is producing the traffic, just that it’s coming!

Digg vs StumbleUpon vs Reddit vs Foreign Social Media

For the longest time I used to focus a large amount of energy on Digg traffic. When it comes, it’s a real rush of visitors, and to be fair Digg really helped get many of our sites going, but have a look at this graph of Digg traffic over the years:

And compare it to StumbleUpon traffic:

StumbleUpon has actually sent double the traffic and it’s done so in a much more consistent manner. Add to that the fact that a lot of that Digg traffic took effort – running Digg campaigns, experimenting with widgets, growing a Digg account to submit with, networking with top Diggers, and so on.

We recently had the good fortune to land on Reddit’s homepage, something which I’d never seen the effects of before and I was pleasantly surprised to see traffic rivaling a Digg homepage – close to 40,000 visitors in a day. The thing I like about Reddit is that it’s much easier to get small amounts of traffic with an only slightly popular entry, whereas Digg by comparison is really an all or nothing traffic monster. Here’s the Reddit graph:

In terms of other social media, Delicious sends a fairly consistent stream of traffic – about 5,000 to 15,000 visitors a month. It spikes when a post goes on to the popular page, but even on a regular day seems to send a good 100-150 visitors, presumably from people accessing their bookmarks.

However the surprise (for me at least) entry in social media has to be foreign social sites. A good example of what I’m talking about is Wykop.pl, a Polish site:

And there are others too, one that springs to mind is meneame.net which one day suddenly sent 4,000 people.

Search Traffic

While social media is a great source of traffic, nothing beats search. It’s such a steady deliverer of visitors, have a look at this graph:

How does search traffic break down by search engine?

Google: 2,400,000 Visitors
Yahoo: 66,000
Live + MSN: 20,000
… Altavista: 500

What happened to Altavista! I still remember when it was the big engine that everyone used. Oh how the mighty have fallen. I’d imagine breakdown by search engine differs for niches and countries. Celebrity blogs no doubt have a much higher Yahoo percentage, as would sites in places like Japan and Russia where Google isn’t so dominant.

Another interesting thing about search is that when I look through the keywords people use, about 1/3 of all search traffic is for a variation of the site’s name – Psdtuts, Psdtuts.com, Psd+tuts, Psdtut and so on. So really these people are actually Direct Traffic – they just use Google as their address bar!

Search vs Direct vs Referral

Examining the overall breakdown of traffic into Search, Direct and Referral traffic reveals that Referrals win hands down bringing in almost 60% of all visitors. This breakdown differs with different types of sites. I’ve noticed that our marketplaces for example tend to weigh more towards search while a service site like FaveUp leans most heavily towards Direct traffic.

Referrals for Psdtuts+ come from such a huge range of sites that it’s hard to draw any real conclusions. We get a lot of traffic from tutorial aggregators, but that’s very niche specific. We also get traffic from a lot of blogs that do roundups of tutorials that themselves make it on Digg and StumbleUpon.

Proving that it’s always fascinating to look at stats, I discovered that one of our highest referrers is a site with a name rather similar to my own – Coliss.com which appears to be a blog in Japanese (I think).

Still More Traffic Analysis via Problogger

A few months ago Darren Rowse of Problogger posted an in-depth analysis of traffic to his Digital-Photography-School blog which is a fascinating read. And if that’s not enough, also check out The Day 250,000 People Showed Up at My Blog.