It has been almost 2 years since my last post on here. In November, it will be 5 years (!) since the launch of my blog. I originally stared this site as a place to share my thoughts on personal finance, which is what I did for a while. As I got settled into the blogosphere, I was exposed to the MMO world. With dollar signs in my eyes, I announced my first intentions to monetize my blog with my blog goals for December 2006. At that time, earning $50 in one month seemed impossible. But I was excited about the prospect of being able to make income from something that I was already willingly doing for free.

Come January 2007, I began exploring the world of making money online. I religiously followed the popular MMO bloggers of the day, taking most of their advice to my detriment. I finally started to get burned out on blogging over the summer of 2007 and the site went dormant from September 2007 to April 2008. It didn’t take long before I started getting burned out again. I was in it for all the wrong reasons. Anyone who has started a blog and stuck with it knows that you really have to be interested in what you are talking about to stick with it. I have no doubt that 95% of long-term bloggers do it because they love it, not because of the income that their site may generate. After my initial burnout in 2007, I was only in it for the income.

Because of that, I decided to go a different route and try my hand at affiliate marketing. I did a post in July 2008 showing off my results. I got extremely lucky with a direct linking PPC campaign to an e-mail submit CPA offer. I never posted the results of my best month:

Market Leverage Earnings from 2008 (click to enlarge)

Pretty good, eh?

Over the rest of the year I grossed just north of $50k between Market Leverage and Azoogle.

2008 CPA Earnings (click to enlarge)

I can’t remember what I spent on PPC that year, but it was somewhere around $20k. So my first 6 months doing affiliate marketing, I netted about $30k. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

The problem is, I just got lucky.

In 2009, nearly every single campaign I tried flopped. It was around this time that Google really started cracking down on its AdWords policies. I either couldn’t get new campaigns approved, or the ones I did get approved weren’t profitable.

I continued to try PPC for the next several months, but finally gave up around June 2009.

I decided from that point on, I would learn SEO and try to build income from free traffic. That’s the road I was on when I made the last post on this blog nearly 2 years ago.

In the time since, I have been learning the ins and outs of SEO. I have built dozens of niche sites and a few authority sites. My primary monitization method has been AdSense:

AdSense Earnings (click to enlarge)

$3,613.37 in earnings. Again, not too bad. You can see towards the right side of the graph that I was just starting to have some decent days. In fact, the last day on that chart shows $23 and some change.

“was” starting to have some decent days was the key operative in that sentence. Why is that in the past tense? That leads me to my next point.

What Inspired Me to Start Blogging Again?

2 days ago, my main earner, a blog in the health niche got slapped hard:

Google Hates Me (click to enlarge)

The site was really starting to take off. Google seemed to love me. With each Panda update, my traffic would climb. I was actually really excited about the site. The niche was interesting, my content was good and earnings were just starting to take off. Then Monday, June 27th, I got hit with the -950 penalty.

If you’ve never heard of the -950 penalty, it’s about the worst you can get outside of your entire site being de-indexed. Every single one of the keywords I was previously ranking for is now on the very last page of the SERPs. From what I understand, this is a manually applied penalty. One of Google’s minions likely reviewed my site and gave it the thumbs down for some reason. It’s also possible that I triggered some kind of automatic filter, but I don’t think that this is the case since I haven’t changed anything on this site nor done any link building for several months.

Something like this is a big blow. It isn’t so much about the income lost. I have no doubt that I can start a new site from scratch and replicate the success of this site. It’s more of a blow to my confidence. I felt like I really knew what I was doing now. I had a plan, I executed on the plan and I was seeing the results that I expected.

Now a monkey wrench has been thrown into the works. Now I have doubts. Sure I can build a site just like this one, but what if it get’s slapped too? What did I do get penalized in the first place. I wasn’t doing anything blackhat. Heck, I wasn’t even doing anything whitehat. I was just publishing content.

Nevertheless, I press on. Maybe this was a wake up call. Maybe this will be the impetus that leads to greater things.

So What Are My Plans for This Site Now?

Like I said above, I am over the whole MMO blog. I think the vast majority of those are full of worthless junk. I don’t care if a single person outside of myself ever visits this site. I don’t care if Google banishes it into oblivion.

My entire purpose for this site is that is will be a place to organize my thoughts. A place where I can put my plans to (electronic) paper. A way to keep me focused on the goal. A place to share my thoughts on personal finance and other topics that relate to financial and time freedom.

The goal is to build sustainable passive income.

That means I whatever avenues I pursue will be to build something that can sustain itself with minimal maintenance.

It doesn’t even have to be what is considered a traditional online revenue model. I am open to anything (well anything that’s not immoral or illegal.)

This is the start of a journey. Welcome to my journey. Welcome to WallerBlog 2.0.

When I started this blog a year and a half ago, I didn’t really have any intentions of making any money with it. Though, I guess you could say I’ve had a change of heart.

There’s lots of opportunities out there, but few that will work for low-traffic blogs. One of these programs that does work, however, is payperpost. Back before I went AWOL on my blog, I did a few PayPerPost opportunities and made a little cash on the side. For a blogger that’s making pennies on programs like Adsense, PayPerPost can be a goldmine.

How Much Money Can I Make?

The majority of PayPerPost opportunities pay between $5 and $20. In fact, I’m getting paid 20 bucks to write this now. Some people will say I’m whoring my blog out. I say, I don’t really care. I’m getting $20 for 30 minutes of my time. If you’re an active blogger, these opportunities can really add up. Blogger Robert MacEwan made $2,500 in one month from PayPerPost alone!

Most of PayPerPost’s more lucrative opportunities are reserved for blogs that have a PageRank of 3 or better. This tends to be somewhat of a flawed system as greater page rank doesn’t always equal greater blog. This really gets out of hand with some of the top paying posts. As I type this, the top paying post nets the blogger a cool $135, but requires a pagerank of 7. 7? Problogger.net, with over 45,000 RSS subscribers is currently sitting with a pagerank of 6. So you’re telling me that a blogger with hundreds of thousands of visitors making a six-figure blogging income doesn’t qualify for a $135 opportunity on PayPerPost? A little ridiculous. But I digress…

The bottom line is that PayPerPost is great for the low-traffic blog, but can quickly be outgrown as your readership increases.

If I didn’t just talk you out of it, check out the button at the top of this post to sign up for PayPerPost.

This is part 3 in the series of “How to Succeed in 2007.” This series is about my thoughts on the CNN Money Article “How to Succeed in 2007.” You may want to start with part 1 and part 2.

Jeff Goodby
Co-founder, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Remake Ad Campaigns for the Digital Age

“Our campaigns are a lot more work now. Our “Got Milk” campaign was based on the fact that milk made you sleep better and rebuilt muscles. So we created TV commercials where aliens came and abducted cows and took them back to their planet, because their bones were weak and they needed more sleep. Then we made a website for angry farmers, Cowabduction.com. We put up notices around the city about the missing cows. And we made another website promoting the aliens’ point of view. The campaign was such a success that we’re releasing it in theaters.”

This one just cracks me up. I loved that commercial series.

While this may seem totally unrelated to finances, I promise you it is. [Read more →]