Bloggy Conference Wrap-Up (Part 3)

I’m sharing some things I learned from the Bloggy Conference I attended last month in Cincinnati, Ohio. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Time for part 3.

Nathan Engels of We Use Coupons shared a lot of great tips and helpful information to help us monetize our blogs. He went beyond that, though. When one of the speakers got sick and had to cancel one of the breakout sessions, Nathan stepped in and offered to hold a session on YouTube.

And I’m so glad he did. I gleaned so much information from that session, and I was able to take good notes because Elisabeth was napping at the time.

I’ll start with what I learned from his first talk, which he called – Show Me the Money! Great way to grab our attention with a title like that! Let’s dig in.

1. In order to earn money blogging, you need to have content. Good content brings traffic, which develops into readers of your blog, which leads to income from your blog.
2. Blogging is hard, and making money from blogging is even harder. You need to be in it for the long haul to be successful and to make an income from your blog. In Nathan’s words, “Don’t expect to hit the jackpot!” Think of blogging as something long term and not as a fast way to make money.
3. You can make money from your blog with both passive and aggressive strategies.
4. Passive ways to make income: Google Adsense, ad networks, and text placement ads (Kontera would be an example of this – sidenote – I had the chance to meet and spend time with two of the ladies from Kontera while I was at the Savvy Blogging conference. They were so nice and friendly. My sister and I ate with them and two other lovely bloggers at lunch on the final day of the conference. The Kontera ladies took brutally honest feedback from the bloggers who had used their ads before, and they impressed me with their desire to truly understand what is and isn’t working in terms of their ad use on blogs.)
5. Ever wonder why sometimes your Google Adsense ads show up as white space on your blog? Google Adsense allows you to have only 3 image/text ads per page. I never knew this.
6. Also, never, ever, ever, click on your own ads. Ever. Google will ban you from using Adsense, and it will be difficult to get reinstated.
7. Ad placement is important. Test to see where on your site certain types of ads perform the best. Think about your readers and where they are likely to see and interact with an ad.
8. Active ways to earn income: Private ads, sponsored posts, and affiliate offers. Some of Nathan’s favorite affiliates were Amazon Associates and Commission Junction (CJ).
9. It’s hard to make a full-time income blogging, and most people make far less than a full-time income. But if you keep your focus on your readers and aren’t looking to make a ton of money, blogging can be fun and very worthwhile. You might even develop some deep friendships with people you would have never met otherwise.

Nathan’s YouTube session

I loved the tips that Nathan shared during the impromptu session he volunteered to put together. Honestly, this was one of my favorite sessions. Here’s what jumped out to me:

1. If you are not on YouTube, get there. YouTube is huge, and it’s growing.
2. Video is exploding.
3. Create a YouTube show, and brand your channel.
4. You can have an entirely different audience on YouTube than you have for your blog, and YouTube audiences are loyal.
5. YouTube videos should ideally be between 2-4 minutes in length.
6. Use a monopod to avoid ‘camera shake.’
7. Create and ‘intro’ and ‘outro’ for your YouTube videos. I had no idea ‘outro’ was even a word. 🙂
8. Tag your YouTube videos and give them a great description. Treat your YouTube videos like you would posts. Think about the words you are using to describe your videos.
9. Tell people to Subscribe! Encourage them to hit the ‘subscribe’ button. The more subscribers you have, the closer you get to being accepted into the YouTube Partners program where you can start earning money with your YouTube videos.
10. iMovie (on a Mac) is great for editing your videos, and you can use Windows Movie Maker if you own a PC.
11. Use annotations in your videos. You can do this right in YouTube, but you can also do it in iMovie. I don’t know much about annotations, personally, but I want to learn more.
12. You can find royalty free music for your YouTube videos at AudioJungle.net.
13. You can find royalty free video for your YouTube videos at VideoHive.net.
14. Add ‘Subscribe’ links to your actual YouTube videos to encourage viewers to subscribe to your channel while they are watching your video.

After the session, I was more ready than ever to start investing time in my YouTube channel. Feel free to check out my channel and subscribe to it. I have an idea for which direction I want to take my channel, I just need to start executing it.

Do you have a YouTube channel you want to share with us? Feel free to leave a link to it in the comments.

I know I said I was going to do 3 parts for my Bloggy Conference Wrap-Up, but I think I’m going to squeeze in one more part with everything else I took away from this conference. I’ll get that post up next week.

Some of the links in this post are my referral links.