I’m going start a shop to sell my drawing. That makes it possible to change my blog and make it interesting.
There’s a blogging saying that goes something like “It’s nice when ten people read your blog. It’s nicer when a hundred people read your blog and it’s very nice when a thousand people read your blog”.
Last week I realized that the same holds true for an artists drawings. It’s a nice feeling when a few dozen people a day look at two or three of my drawings but it’s much nicer feeling when people have my drawings on their wall.
When I started this blog I planned it to be something like Steve Pavlina meets Vincent van Gogh. I would show my drawings and write about the creation process, about my life and about my autism.
I thought that I had something new and that people would flog to read my blog. And they did. With a lot of ups and downs. But over the past few months my traffic rose from fifty views a week in May to on average 120 views a day right now.
At first it was very exciting to see the stats rise, but after a while I got used to it.
By June I figured it would be fun to offer a few ads on my site and see if I could make a little money. Although I never made very much (at this moment it stands on $6.43) it was very exciting. Every time Google reports that I had made $0.07 I went through the roof with joy.
But after a month the excitement was tempered by the realization that I actual didn’t make that much money. So I read a few sites about Adsence and got advised to take an Adwords account to get some experience with advertising.
In the beginning of July I took an Adwords account and very soon found that Google Adwords is something of a catch 22.
Google rewards ads that have a good clickthrough rate. But most people don’t click on ads. They just copy the webadres to the address bar and visit a website on their own. That seems like a good deed since I pay per click but it isn’t.
When you start a new campaign or raise the amount of money you are willing to pay for a keyword Google shows a lot of your ads and you get a lot of traffic. But since hardly anyone clicks on your ads Google makes your keywords more expensive, your ads are pushed to the bottom of the pile and nobody gets to see them. Then you can either raise your budget or start a new campaign. In both cases the high amount of traffic returns for a few days and then drops off again.
Just when I was realizing that this wouldn’t work (for me) I came across something called the Thirty day challenge. Ed Dale, whose claim to fame is that he ones sold a webdomain for $58 thousand (or million, I’m not completely sure), would give a free course in which he would teach people to get free traffic and at the same time earn $10.
It all seemed like a big marketing ploy. To good to be true.
But I’m a reasonable smart guy and I figured that I could stop the moment he started asking for money. And there is nothing wrong with getting some free traffic isn’t there? So I joined up.
In the beginning of August Ed Dale kicked off with a lot of information on ways to find keywords. Maybe for people who wanted to blog but didn’t know what to blog about?
It wasn’t until the middle of August that I realized that this course actually targeted affiliate marketers. But by that time I had learned a few useful things. For instance a method to find where your target audience is located. (I targeted my Adwords ads at the USA but it turns out that my audience lives in Australia and New Zealand.)
About three quarters in he talked about getting more traffic by starting multiple blogs. Which made a lot of sense but also promised to be a lot of work.
Having three or four blogs on the same subject should bring in three or four times more traffic. Ed Dale advised to send all that traffic to your affiliate marketing site so people could buy something and make you a little money. But my goal was to get more traffic to HenkTerHeide.com and this seemed to be a little overkill.
By the end of August Ed lost me when he started talking about creating your own product. I’m just a blogger who writes about drawing. Where on earth would I get a product?
Last week I finally got it. I’ve been looking at this blogging thing from the wrong perspective. I thought of myself as an amateur blogger who maybe could become a professional blogger and make money via Adsence and maybe at some point even sell some drawings. But I’m not. I’m an artist who uses a blog as means to show his drawings.
The blog isn’t importantent. The drawings are. So instead of looking for ways to get attention for my blog I should be looking for ways to get attention for my drawings.
In a few weeks I’ll start my own art shop where I will sell my drawings. The role of this blog will be to send customers to my art shop.
This will mean a few changes for this blog:
- I can talk about a lot more subjects. Restricting the articles on your blog to your niche market is important when you have Google ads on your blog. When you talk about a dozen subject Google doesn’t know what kind of ads to present.
But since the only ads I’ll have will be for my own art shop, that doesn’t matter any more. - The “Featured on See me draw” series will be replace by the feed of my StumbleUpon account.
For the last few weeks I had the feeling that the series was running into a few problems.- I find far more interesting art sites then I have room for on my blog.
- A lot of sites aren’t suitable for a number of reasons.
- There weren’t that many people who followed links from my blog, which is a shame since most sites are very nice.
- I’m changing the posting frequence. A few months ago I decided to post three times a week and build in a two week gab between drawing and posting so I wouldn’t feel a deadline and could take the time for the creating process.
But it doesn’t work. I still feel the deadline. Further more I always had the feeling I was posting second rate drawings since I usually feel that my last drawing is much better then the one I made two weeks ago.
From now on I will post my drawing as soon as I’m finished with them.
Ed Dales thirty day challenge indeed turned out to be something of an ad campaign. His day job is giving a marketing course that will cost you $97/month. In the beginning of September he told people that they could (not should) take a look at his Immediate Edge site. Since my pockets aren’t that deep I didn’t.
But his free Thirty day challenge site is still online and you can still do the course.
If you’re a blogger who hopes to place some ads or maybe you want to sell some paintings or drawings I would certainly advise you to have a look.
Maybe you should take the promise of free traffic and earning $10 with a grain of salt (although some did), but he will teach you the basics of Internet marketing.
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