When Is A Blog Not a Website?

Posted by Paul B | July 31, 2007 .

When it comes to making your fortune online there are plenty of people who’ll tell you that you “don’t even need a website”. What they are talking about here is PPC affiliate marketing. You pay for clicks using an advertising network such as Google’s Adwords and then redirect the potential lead onto the website of the person selling the product you’re promoting. Sounds easy right? Well I’ve made money that way, but it also comes with it a big risk, you’ve got to spend money to make money, and for beginners I think there is a better way.

If you want a low risk way of making money online then you’ve got to be looking at having at least 1 website or blog. I look at this way, a website is a bought domain with paid for hosting. A blog (what I’m talking about), is a free account on somebody else’s domain e.g. Blogger or WordPress. I know that’s not technically right but from here on in that’s what I mean when I talk about Blogs or websites. Your Blog could be your website (like this site) but that just confuses things

The way in which I decide how to publish my content comes down to 2 factors, how much do I know about the subject and how much money do I think it will make? If I don’t know a huge amount about a subject then I go down the website route. It’s not hard to put together 6-7 pages of content to act as a base site and then maybe add a new page every few weeks when I’ve got something original and new to say. Because I’m not updating every day it’s not a big hassle to add extra content to a static website in this way. But to do this I need to think about roughly how money I’m going to make, a domain name costs me around $7 a year, a basic hosting account on which store my website costs me around $20 a year. Other than my time that’s my total ouTLAy for my new website (I know people who’ve lost 50 times that much on their first day of PPC affiliate marketing). As long as my new website can make more than $27 a year then I’m in profit and making money online, woo hoo! To date I’ve set up 15 websites like this and they all make a profit, some much more than others but they all cover themselves and then some.

If you decide that you know a lot about a subject then a blog could very well be the way to go. A blog is like an online diary, or more specifically a list of published articles stored in chronological order. The thing with a blog is that you need to update it on a regular basis. People read a blog just like a diary, they expect to see something new on a regular basis, people view a website as something less personal and much more static. The main advantage a blog has is return visitors, if you can write a compelling blog your visitors will come back again and again. This is much harder to achieve with a static website. The other advantage is that you’ll find plenty of services that will host your blog for free, and you can’t beat free! Whilst you may not be able to customise every option of your blog there are still plenty of ways to monetise a blog on the Blogger or WordPress systems.

For my money I see a better return from creating websites rather than Blogs, but the potential is there to make serious amounts of cash from blogging, you’ll just need to have plenty to say, update daily and put in the work.

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