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This is a guest post by blogger and roller derby girl, Lauren Morrill-Ragusea who founded Higher Ed Underground.

My blog, Higher Ed Underground, was conceived after a particularly rough week at my day job. I was tired, frustrated, overworked, underpaid, and just generally burnt-out. I needed to do something in my line of work that was fun, if for no other reason than to remind myself that such a thing existed.

After several years spent working in and around college campuses, plus an advanced degree in higher education administration, I started to have faith in my ability as an expert. Yes, there are people with more experience and more education, but those people tend to be older and boring. They also tend to be people than can barely text message, much less blog. Thus, Higher Ed Underground was born.

It hasn’t been all daisies and roses since I started the site. I’ve made quite a few mistakes along the way (and am probably still making mistakes as we speak), and I’ve decided to share them with you in hopes that your website dreams don’t come crashing down around you.

Starting my blog for the wrong reasons

As I mentioned, Higher Ed Underground grew out of a particularly tough workweek. As a result, my initial motivation was to grow a web presence large enough to rake in the cash, quit my day job, and love life.

Yeah … fantasy.

You see, launching a site thinking you’re going to make a good living off it is the same as sitting down to write your first novel and thinking you’re the next John Grisham. Making money off your site is HARD. So hard, in fact, that if money is your only motivation, it’s going to be damn near impossible to put in the effort required to see a single red cent.

I’ve been blogging for a while on my person blog, Derby Girl, about my life playing roller derby. It’s been easy to keep up with it, because I do it just for myself. I do it because I genuinely enjoy hitting the “post” button each day. That blog has just over 2,000 pageviews a month, which isn’t too shabby, and that was with zero effort or promotion of any kind.

What’s the difference between Derby Girl and Higher Ed Underground? I started Derby Girl because I loved derby and felt like sharing it. I started Higher Ed Underground to make money. Which one do you think is more fun to maintain?

Thankfully, not long after I began working on Higher Ed Underground, this realization smacked me in the face. I threw out the serious, boring, advice-driven content and got back to what I like best: snarky commentary. The content was easier to come by, the daily posting was easier to maintain, and my pageviews jumped considerably. I also abandoned the sheer desire to monetize the site, and am having way more fun with it. It was right about that time that I made my first ten cents from AdSense.

The moral of that story? Find your voice, then blog.

Researching too quickly

If you’re really serious about growing a small business from your blog, you need to do the legwork up front. Research the market. Find out what sites already exist in your niche. Figure out how you’ll be different than the existing market, and if you’re the same, how you can do it better. Figure out what keywords are leading people to sites like yours, and see if you can maximize those keywords to drive traffic. I did all this, but I did it over the course of about three days. This probably wasn’t enough research, especially since I keep stumbling across sites in my niche.

Launching too soon

I still have my day job, and my day job is fairly demanding. There’s not much time to sit around surfing the internet during work hours, much less create meaningful, valuable content. When a site is new, it’s important for it to have strong content that updates frequently. I should have aggregated several weeks worth of posts (at a minimum) before I kicked off, so that when my paying job got crazy, I had content to fall back on. Nothing loses readers faster than infrequent posting or throwaway content.

Buying a theme

Let me be clear: I absolutely love Thesis Theme. It’s easy, customizable, and professional. But the truth is, I could have gotten by for at least the first six months on a standard WordPress theme. WordPress has some great skeleton templates that I could have taught myself to customize over time, and it would have saved me $89 during the whole site setup. This is another example of me diving in to the deep end before I quite knew how to swim.

There’s no need to spend money on your site (other than the domain name and hosting) until you’ve started to see a little bit coming in. Sure, you want your site to look professional, but until you’ve got a readership that demands professional, there’s no reason to put out any money to get there. The look of your site, though important, is not what will keep readers coming back. Invest your effort in producing quality content, and the rest comes later.

Monetizing too much, too early

Don’t clutter your page with ads. Yes, it’s hideous and distracting, but it also makes you look like you care more about money than content. Once you have a dedicated readership, they’ll understand why you put ads on your site. They won’t mind, because they’ll be conditioned to pay attention to your kick ass content. But if the only thing readers see when they visit your site for the first time is an AdSense banner, affiliate links, and those stupid in-text links, you’re pretty asking them to click away. You look like you’ve created your site to steal their money, and they won’t stay, much less come back.

So there you have it. Feel free to let me know of other mistakes I’m making. One thing I’ve learned from entering into the world of blogging is you have to have a thick skin. You’re going to post silly things, make typos, or simply draw the ire of a reader or two. And guess what? Someone will probably send you a nasty email. It happens to the most well-intentioned blogger. So if you don’t think you could put all your mistakes out there like I did … well, then blogging just isn’t for you.

Lauren Morrill-Ragusea is the guru (ha!) over at Higher Ed Underground, where she blogs about college life, admissions, news, and academic success. She also blogs at Derby Girl Blog and is a roller derby blogger for Skirt! Please hire her so that she can quit her job, write, and play roller derby for a living.

Top secret FYI: Roller Derby Girl, Lauren Morrill-Ragusea, posted a blog post of mine on her education blog, Higher Ed Underground. It’s about making money on the Internet, and it’s geared towards college students. We swapped posts, and, I have to admit, it was fun :)

Sometimes, the most valuable part of your Web site is your name itself – particularly if you have a keyword rich domain name that’s only a handful of letters long. That’s how domainers make lots of money. People like the “Domain King”, Rick Schwartz started buying up valuable domains in the mid-1990s, and he was quickly able to turn those domains into dollars.

Interestingly, he didn’t do it by filling his Web sites with content. He did it by waiting for users to type in Web addresses directly in the address bar (circumventing search engines altogether). Inside the industry, this is something known as “domaining,” and it’s a multi-billion dollar industry.

Domaining can tell us a lot about what people search for online, too – that is, if the owners of the domains are willing to share their data. Turns out Rick Schwartz is pretty generous with his stats. In a recent blog posting titled “Welcome to over 36,000 new Readers! Welcome Consumer. Time to SoundOff,” Schwartz talks about how much type-in traffic he gets. As I reprint these stats, remember that the people visiting his sites aren’t doing it because of his content, they’re simply typing in a web address to see what’s there:

  •  Porno.com 33,000 Web site visitors type in porno.com every day.

  •  eGold.com: 1,500 Web site visitors type in egold.com every day.

  •  Homemade.com 400-500 Web site visitors type in homemade.com every day.

  •  Specialities.com 75-150 Web site visitors type in specialties.com every day.

Combined, Schwartz is getting 35,000+ visitors to those sites every day, just by virtue of owning them. It’s the sort of traffic most Web publishers dream about! It’s evidence of just why keyword-rich domains sometimes sell for thousands of dollars+, and it’s evidence that you might want to pay for more a premium domain if you’re truly serious about making money online.

In many ways, domains that generate type-in traffic are like having a powerhouse PR firm on your side. You can focus on your content, and people will find your domain on their own. Check out Moniker.com, Great Domains and Sedo to find premium domains that might boost your brand new site’s traffic just by virtue of a name.

To learn more about domainer Rick Schwartz, visit my post, “What is Domaining and How Can It Help Me Quit My Dayjob?“

If you’re at all interested in making money off your Web site or blog, you should have a good idea of what you can expect to make. Some of the most successful bloggers and site owners have been pretty forthcoming about their income:

One of Frind's $900,000 checks from Google (Click to see a bigger image).

1) PlentyofFish.com, $3.6 million+ per year. Marcus Frind, the founder of dating site www.plentyoffish.com, entertains 900,000 visitors a day. That makes his site more popular than giants like eHarmony and Match.com in the U.S. (presumably because his services are free … at least for now). Frind wrote his own code and handles all technical support. His only employee? His wife who answers customer emails. Starting in 2009 he plans to hire a database administrator, and more support staff as mentioned on his blog, The Paradigm Shift. (Original source: JohnChow.com).

Shoemoney's biggest Google check ($132,000+). Presumably, he uses direct deposit now.

2) Shoemoney.com, $1.6 million+ per year. Regarded as the most-read Web site on making money online, Shoemoney.com has captured 20+ percent of the industry market share (followed closely by JohnChow.com). See the pic at left for an indication of how much he’s made on Google ads in the past. He’s branched out now, though, and makes a large chunk of his income off his own internal marketing of Shoemony Tools. (Original source: JohnChow.com).

3) JohnChow.com, $360,000+ per year. JohnChow.com is run by an Internet entrepreneur who makes it his business to tell others “how to make money online.” I’ve based my $360,000 figure on Chow’s October 2008 “Blog Income Report,” when he made $34,000. I averaged down to $30,000 and multiplied that number by 12 months. In all likelihood, his income fluctuates up or down, so the figure is a rough estimate. According to his report, the bulk of his money comes from affiliate ads.

How likely is it your site will be raking in that kind of cash? Not very, of course, but it’s helpful to know what’s possible. In all reality, monetizing your site will depend on a number of factors, which I’ve ranked in order of importance below:

1) Powerful, targeted content. Yes, powerful, targeted content is more important than high traffic. When I interviewed “Domain King”, Rick Schwartz, he said he’d buy a domain if it got six hits a year, so long as they were the right kind of hits. He used the example of one of his low-traffic domains, www.cubiczirconia.com. It doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but the people who type that domain into their browser know what they want, so they’re likely to click one of the cubic zirconia-related ads he serves up. For one thing, his audience knows how to spell cubic zirconia. And, more importantly, when they buy cubic zirconia, it’s not cheap. That means the money he gets when he ads leads to a conversion is quite substantial. If you’ve got powerful, targeted content, you can offer relevant ads, and that’s the surest way to get clicks and conversions.

2) High traffic on a sticky site. We’ve seen that low traffic is OK in some, highly-targeted instances, but if your blog or Web site is geared at a general audience, say gamers, you’re going to have to compete with a lot of big-budget sites. Slowly and surely building a large audience should be your primary goal. As with any form of advertising, it’s a numbers game, and in the online realm, you’re doing exceedingly well if you can 5% of your visitors to click on an ad. Most sites get about one half of one percent of visitors to click-through. The stickier your site (meaning the longer people stay) will also determine how effective your ads are. If a visitor swoops in for 10 seconds and swoops back out, you’re just throwing away bandwidth.

3) Ads with pricy keywords. This is one of the most important factors in monetizing your site, and, unfortunately, it’s a factor noobs tend to ignore. If your site is about rubber bands, then the ads you serve up need to be related to rubber bands. If one of your rubber band ads results in a sale, you might get 10 cents to add to your bank account. If your site is about diamonds, and someone buys a wedding band through your ad, you could have $50 or more to add to your bank account.

One of the first sites I built in an attempt to make money online was a holiday gift guide. I filled 10 Web pages with 100 of the hottest gifts for the holiday season and linked out to other sites like Amazon.com. Then, I bought Google ads to generate traffic (at the ridiculous cost of $2 per hit) and waited to see what happened. Even with that highly-targeted content and lots of traffic on Cyber Monday, I still ended up with just a four percent conversion rate. That’s when I realized that you can’t expect to buy traffic and convert it all to sales (especially when you go after a broad audience). You’re going to get visitors the old-fashioned way: with great niche content, innovative marketing, and a lot of work.

If you’re not happy with your current ad conversion rates, just visit one of your competitors sites — one that gets more traffic than yours. Chances are, they’re doing something (or a lot of things) better than you, and nothing’s stopping you from using their ideas … so long as you don’t pilfer their content. Genius, after all, is the child of imitation.

To learn more about domainer Rick Schwartz, visit my post, “What is Domaining and How Can It Help Me Quit My Dayjob?” If you’re already up and running, don’t neglect the power of blog titles in driving traffic to your site. Check out my post, “How to Write Blog Titles that Get Clicks; Confessions from a Former Journalist.”

Blogs are often written by one- or two-person teams with little professional editing or oversight. Newspapers, on the other hand, are staffed with droves of editors. In fact, some of the biggest papers in the country push stories through eight editors or more before publishing them on paper. Somewhere on that totem pole of newspaper editors sits the noble copy editor.

In a former life, that was my job at the Dayton Daily News in Dayton, Ohio. Responsibilities? Lay out stories on the page (we were using Quark at the time), edit stories for length and content, and write headlines in the space allotted for each story. That last part about “space allotted” is key. Sometimes in a newspaper, you’ve got room for five-word headlines, sometimes 10, and sometimes two. In the parlance of the time, it was our job to make the headlines “pop” no matter what the length.

If I wasn’t able to write a headline I was happy with, I’d lean over to one of my coworkers (many of whom had been in the industry for 20 years or more), and ask for help. Sometimes, there would be a group of us standing around a computer screen trying to figure out the best headline for a story featured on page A1.

I tell you all this to stress the eternal and undying importance of headlines. Newspapers have this figured out in their particular niche. Bloggers often don’t. Your headline isn’t just a descriptor of what’s inside your story, it’s a call to action. It’s a flag that tells the reader something important lies inside, and they’d be remiss if they didn’t check it out.

Of course, newspaper headlines and blog headlines are different machines with different goals. In a print product, you don’t have to convince the reader to buy your newspaper, since it probably showed up in their driveway that morning. Bloggers need to sell themselves with each and every headline. Newspaper headlines are hampered by design goals. If you can’t fit five words in a headline, you’re going to have to make do with the space for the two words you’ve been allotted. Bloggers have more space and flexibility to say the things they want … and that means their headlines should be BETTER than anything they read in print.

As newspapers struggle to make the transition to the online world, one of their biggest failings is to capitalize on the power of headlines. Too often, they simply take the headline they used for print, retag it for the Web and run. Big mistake. The rules have changed. It’s like getting drafted by a professional baseball team and showing up for practice with an aluminum bat.

It takes time to make the transition, though, and some newspapers ARE reworking the way they approach headlines in the online world. For instance, I tromped over to the New York Times and looked at their “Most Popular” stories. One headline in particular jumped out at me, “Heaven for the Godless?” I followed the link and found an opinion piece on a new survey that showed that 70 percent of Americans believed you could make it heaven by “following a religion other than their own.”

Contrast that headline with this particularly repugnant one: “Bob Herbert: Stop Being Stupid.” I haven’t clicked through to figure out what “Stop Being Stupid” is about because I don’t want to be told I’m stupid. My guess is no one else wants to either.

So, we’ve come to a crossroad: what makes the first headline better than the second? For one, the first headline probably appeals to Americans more than any other nationality. We’ll always choose the path of least resistance to get a grand reward. So, if there’s a way to get to heaven without having to practice a religion, well, I’d like to know about it.

Perhaps the most important thing that makes the first headline better than the second, though, is the fact that it’s controversial. It presents a paradox that feels like it’s daring us to learn more. There is no wiggle room for free thought when you’ve got a headline that says “Stop Being Stupid.”

That brings me to the reason for this post, a guide to writing good headlines from a guy who spent two years doing it five days a week:

1. Intrigue the reader with the promise of more knowledge. We read for one reason: to educate ourselves. It doesn’t matter if we’re seeking info on the gravitational pull of Neptune or the hip gyrations of Shakira, we read because we want to learn more about a particular topic. If you promise readers they’re going to learn about something they’ve never encountered, then they’re far more likely to click your link.

2. Don’t make the reader feel stupid. Of course, this applies just as much to the content of your post as it does to the headline, but readers don’t want to be berated about anything. It’s like a teacher who believes humiliation will help slow learners. You’re more likely to produce the opposite effect. Positive headlines are always more effective than negative ones.

3. Accentuate the controversial. We live in a postmodern world. Nothing’s cut and dry anymore, and it’s easy to find two sides to any story. If that’s the case, don’t shortchange your readers by choosing one side of the story. Find the gray area of the pool and dive right in. That’s where the juicy stuff is.

4. Stay away from puns. I’ll never forget when I was a cub reporter at a small daily paper in North Carolina, The Rocky Mount Telegram. One of my co-workers wrote a military story he was particularly proud of. It had something to do with a soldier recounting his days on the battlefield. After he turned the story in, he came over and said, “I hope the copy desk doesn’t write a cheesy headline for my story. I think it’s one of the first stories I’d be willing to put in my portfolio.” When we finally saw the headline, he groaned, and I started laughing. It read, “Tanks for the Memories.” Puns are the easiest ways to trivialize any topic. If you’re afraid you might be dancing on the line of propriety, you need to pick something more direct.

5. Choose words that “pop.” OK. I’m not a big fan of the word “pop,” but it gets the idea across. Your headlines need to use powerful, active words in the present-tense. Sometimes, all this takes is a trip to the thesaurus at Merriam-Webster. Replace lackluster words with words that punch your readers in their bellies. Another way to find intriguing headlines, is to go to the New York Times Bestseller lists. The books that stand out there not only have unique content, but they often have unique, brandable titles, too. Books like Barack Obama’s, “The Audacity of Hope,” or Artie Lange’s, “Too Fat to Fish.” Both of them use words that don’t crop up that often (”fat” and “audacity”).

6. Accept that you’re a writer and words are your only tool. Too often bloggers look at things in terms of numbers: how many posts they can produce, how many readers they can get, how many clicks they garner. But you’ve got to remember that first and foremost, you’re a writer. I’m going to repeat that again, you’re a writer. The only tool writers have at their disposal are words. So since you’ve chosen to be a writer, you’re going to have to use words properly. Writing a headline in a hurry means you could end up with typos or missing prepositions. There’s no better way to get ignored than by posting something that looks like it was cobbled before you collapsed in bed. Take time to craft your headlines. Newspapers do it because they realize that headlines are the single most important entry point to any story. Bloggers would be well-served to do the same.

Just getting started in Web publishing? Check out my post on picking your domain name, “How to Pick a Domain Name that Ruins Your Web Site.” Your domain name is the only that might be more important than your headlines. Contact Fred Marion at fred(at)webpublishing.me.

In March of 2007, I was fortunate enough to drive to Boca Raton and interview Domainer Rick Schwartz, one of the industry’s heavyweights and the founder of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference and domain auction. At the time, I was a reporter and technology columnist for the Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla. I didn’t fully understand what domaining was, but Schwartz’s blunt explanations made it clear: being a domainer is a lot like being a real estate mogul. You buy up Web domains, and you fill the pages with ads, then wait for people to type in your domain name and click on the ads.

One of the original 'domainers,' Rick Schwartz is among the few willing to talk about what he does.

That is what domainers do. They own lots and lots of keyword specific domains, and they fully circumvent the process by which most Web users find Web sites: search engines. Instead they rely on type-in traffic; people who type a Web address directly into a navigation bar in order to find information or products they want. A good example of this is someone who types in televisions.com, when they’re thinking about buying a TV. They might not know what’s on televisions.com, but they can be pretty sure it’ll point them in the right direction (indeed if you navigate to televisions.com, you’ll find that the page is filled with ads — and the owner probably makes some decent money off the click-throughs).

Rick Swartz himself owns more than 5,300+ domains. He’s so well-known in the industry, he feels comfortable calling himself “Domain King” or “Webfather.” There’s even a “Webfather” name plaque sitting on the desk in his office. Among the gems in Schwartz’s portfolio? Candy.com and Tradeshows.com. During my interview with him, he likened himself to William Tell. “I am for a domain and get it.” Indeed, he’s not afraid to pay large sums for quality. Three years ago, he bought Property.com for $750,000 (a domain he sold recently for an undisclosed sum to Foreclosure.com).

Schwartz bought his first domain in 1995: Lipservice.com. When it returned enough to pay for itself, he realized there was a future in the Internet. He started buying domains with abandon, focusing first and foremost on the adult industry. “The porn industry,” he said, “is the innovator in every field, from VCRs to telephones to the Internet. Follow it, and you’ll make money.”

Among his more modest domains is Porno.com. “It gets 25,000 to 30,000 visitors every single day of the year,” he said. Enough for him to pull in $1 million a year off it alone.

Almost two years later, I’ve only just begun to understand the impact the interview with Rick had on me. It would eventually lead to me buying my own domains, throwing up content, and trying to understand all of the pieces that add up to a successful site, and I’m learning today.

Rick’s advice? You’re going to have to pay for quality, but there are still lots of great type-in domains for sale at auction with prices that hover around $500. Learn more about domaining on Rick Schwartz’s blog. If you’re thinking about buying your first domain, check out my post, “How To Pick a Domain That Ruins Your Web Site,” or return home at WebPublishing.me.