YugaTech | Philippines, Tech Reviews Blog

This is supposed to be my interview on professional blogging for Rickey but since he claims he is not a problogger, I changed the title of the entry.

Given that, half of the questions here might not be appropriate for him. However, since Rickey’s blog has been consistently on top of Pinoy Top Blogs and he monetizes his blogs with Adsense/YPN, Amazon and BlogAds, I’d still consider him to be a professional blogger (see my official definition here).

Let’s move on with the interview…

• How do you define problogging?

  Blogging for the sole purpose of making money. This of course disqualifies me since this is not what I do. I just happen to have ONE popular website (which happens to be a blog) with Google Ads that a tiny percentage of my readers click on — this doesn’t make me a “professional” blogger. I had Google Ads on my blog for two years earning nothing and then one day, I earn $10, and then all of a sudden I’m a pro. That doesn’t make sense.

• When did you start blogging? When did you get into problogging and how did you realize that there’s some money to be had from it?

  I started using Blogger.com in 2001, but I was making online journals since 1996. I have never gotten into problogging, but I realized that I could leverage my blog traffic when sometime in 2004, I got 15,000 visitors and earned $3 from one Google Ad.

• Which blogs are you writing for and which blog networks are you affiliated?

  rickey.org
  pinoy.rickey.org
  live.usa.ph (Basang Sisiw Show)

  I am affiliated with the rickey.org blog empire network (evil laugh)

• Are you problogging part time or full time? Do you see this career as a part time gig or you are looking into going problogging?
  

  Again, non-problogger here. I only blog part-time like everybody else and keep a job during the day. Recently however I have been possessed by the entrepreneurial spirit and would like to start a new website.

• How do you monetize your blog? Which ones bring in the most revenues? How long did it took you to significantly earn from your own blog/s?

  Adsense, YPN, BlogAds, Amazon Associates … and the most lucrative, selling t-shirts. However, since I have no new t-shirts to sell this year (yet), I get the most from Adsense. My blog started to pay for part of my rent early 2005 when I added a Google leaderboard at the top of my home page.

• How long before you got significant revenue from your blogs? How consistent are the revenues and what affects it?

  I don’t remember when, it just happened. Weekends are slow. Website traffic is a major contributor to AdSense earnings. I think it is more stable to go for direct advertising, which requires a lot more work in marketing (and has nothing to do with the act of blogging).

• How much time do you spend on blogging? (in est. hours/day or hours/week)

  I think I blog 24/7 — at least it seems like it.

• What other benefits do you get from problogging?

  Rickey is not a problogger! Gifts from my Amazon wishlist. Friends. Fame.

• What’s the most significant event/moment you had in your entire problogging career?

  I don’t have a problogging career. I don’t do SEO, buy links, link-bait, etc. and all these tips and tricks supposed probloggers do. The only SEO I do are use relevant titles in my blog posts and link to a site high on a search term I want to move up on — do these little tidbits of information make me a “professional?” I’m just a lowly blogger that found my audience. Technically, I’m just running a website.

  My blogging life however from the past two years has been good. The most significant moment I’ve had as a blogger was identifying myself as a Filipino after years of obscurity.

• What personal tips can you share with bloggers who want to try out problogging?

  I am not a problogger! I cannot give any tips on the subject. Just go to Darren Rowse’s site and help cement his position as the #1 problogger on Google forever.

  However, some tips for general blogging success:
  1. Write clear, value-laden posts everyday. To establish identity, narrow your topics considerably.
  2. Establish a meaningful and lasting friendship with Marc Macalua.
  3. When your blog reaches critical mass, seize the moment and don’t let go.

It would seem that Marc’s SEO advocacy has greatly influenced how Rickey defines a problogger, thus the angle of the response.

I would like to clarify though that SEO and problogging are not exclusive to each other. You may not know anything about SEO and still be a problogger like our previous examples with Gloria, Ruth, Stef and Jayvee.

Most of the independent probloggers I featured here did not actually expect they could successfully monetize their blogs. It just happened. And these are their personal blogging stories.

Noemi writes about Blog monetized by Google Adsense?. The Filipino Librarian emailed me and Marc a few weeks back about the same. Since I believe Marc has still a lot of backlogs in his Inbox, I’m taking this one for the meantime.

For the uninitiated, projecting the prospects of your blog to earn from AdSense is close to impossible because of a lot of factors involved. As a point of reference, when we talk about a good prospect from AdSense, it means that you regularly (read: monthly) receive a cheque from Google. That means, you ought to earn at least $100 by the end of each month to be able to say your blog is doing good.

For the regular 8 – 5 office employee, this amount may represent somewhere between 10 to 50% of their salary. Let’s just say it’s 25% — that figure is still significant. (Read my “Has Adsense been good to you?” for some classic examples of these.)

Going back to the topic, when we want to compute the “prospect” of a blog (or even a website like a forum or portal) to significantly earn from any contextual advertising programs like AdSense, we look at several major factors and inject them into this formula:

Potential Monthly Revenue (PMR) = {average daily pageviews} * {click thru rate} * {cost per click} * {revenue share} * {30 days in a month}

The average daily pageviews is self-explanatory with the assumption that this is also equivalent to your ad impressions (how many times the ads are viewed by the visitors). However, if you have two ads placed on a single page, you get 2 ad impressions per pageview…. and so on and so forth.

The click thru rate is the ratio between the number of clicks on the the ads over the total number of ad impressions (or pageviews). The average for blogs here is between 1% to 3% (based on experience). This figure is influenced by ad placement or how you blend your ads close to your content, ad relevance or how the ads are related to your content and your niche or what type of people are visiting/reading your blog. The more internet-savvy your visitors, the lower the chances they’d click on your ad. Additionally, regular and repeat visitors do not frequently (or not at all) click on ads while accidental visitors (those who found your blog thru search engines) are more likely to click on them. Thus, it’s good to know how many of your visitors come from search engines.

The cost per click (CPC) is more complicated to determine because it depends on type of ads that appear on your blog. A good rule of thumb here is that if the ads are for products or services that are expensive, then the cost of the ad should be high as well. So, an ad about flower deliveries that costs $20 may have a CPC of say $0.20 while an ad for digital cameras might go as high as $2.

Up until now, there has been no clear statement as to how much is the percentage share between Google and the publisher (you). A recent article in New York Times puts the figure at 78.5% (something which I highly doubt). My hunch is that it’s just in the proximity of 10-20%. (How else can one get a $0.01 click?)

How about we plug in the numbers? Say a very optimized digital camera blog with 5k pageviews:

PMR = {5,000 pageviews per day} x {3% CTR} x {$2 CPC} x {20% rev share} x {30 days/month}

PMR = $1,800 (nice figure huh?)

Let’s look at your regular personal blog with 1,000 pageviews/day:

PMR = {500 pageviews per day} x {3% CTR} x {$0.20 CPC} x {20% rev share} x {30 days/month}

PMR = $18 {does your blog comes close to this number?}

You will notice that the two most significant elements in the formula are the CTR and the CPC but of course one cannot also ignore how your traffic comes into the equation.

Use this formula and see if it holds true for your blog. Please note though that it’s against Google Adsense’s policy to reveal details fo your revenues (except total monthly earnings).

A very insterested and new reader of my blog texted me this afternoon asking how I got started with my blogging fame and Adsense. I have no clue about the fame part but we chatted over SMS while I was waiting in line at the bank to deposit my StudioTraffic and AdSense cheque.

Our conversation mostly revolved around blogging and how to find your own niche. Then, when he asked about the Adsense part which caught me thinking a little bit more than just saying I signed up and pasted the codes in all my web properties.

I was actually thinking of that “$100 Moment“. Yes, almost anyone can sign up for AdSense and all but not everyone will succeed in it. Hence, the term “one-hundred-dollar-moment”. It is that time when you yourself realized that AdSense is really something, not because you heard it from someone else but because you got your cheque for only a whole month’s earnings. That means breaking the $100-barrier on monthly AdSense revenues. I would look at it as a rite of passage into the AdSense world.

Why a $100-dollar blogging moment? From my conversations with Filipino bloggers who are monetizing their blogs with Adsense, I can only count with the fingers of my hands those who are getting them monthly cheques (just bloggers mind you, don’t include those with other web properties such as free online services like forums, galleries and portals). This brings us to the realization that there are types of blogs, however popular or sticky they are, that are still hard-pressed when it comes to monetization via AdSense. Is it just the implementation? Partly, yes. But that’s one of the many other factors to consider which we will discuss in my succeeding posts.

So, when did you had your “One-hundred-dollar Blogging Moment?”