Online Advertising: A Great Way To Make Money From Your Hobby

Are you trying to make money online as an online advertiser? If so, have you found many successful niches that bring you income? Many marketers have found that they do best with niches they know something about. Even better, if you have a true passion for a hobby, you can often turn that passion into cash by developing it into a money-generating niche.

It makes sense that when you are passionate about a hobby, you want to share it with others, especially people who share your passion. Let’s say collecting antique bottles is your hobby. You have hundreds of bottles in your collection and you understand a thing or two about how to evaluate them and what makes them valuable. Could it be something you can promote online?

Why not start a blog about the antique bottle collection? Perhaps you could include individual blog posts about your most valuable bottles. You can include photos of each bottle and perhaps tell a story about where you found them. You can explain the steps you take to determine the value of a bottle. People who share your passion will find this information very interesting.

Whenever you are blogging, try to keep the human element at the forefront. For example, it is not enough to show photos of bottles with prices below. Tell funny stories about your searches; Talk about the places you have traveled to find bottles. Explain the mistakes you have made in the process. Include photos of yourself and her family members on one of your road trips. Keep your posts interesting and your readers will keep coming back for more.

Now, how can you monetize your blog? Obviously, you could put some of your bottles up for sale. If so, put them aside in a blog section created for sales only. You can check out these sales pages in your blog posts, but don’t try to outright sell any of your products in your actual posts.

Another way to earn money can be to write a book or make a video series on collecting old bottles. You can explain in the book how you first became interested and then give helpful instructions for someone new to the hobby. There may be affiliate links to other companies that sell vintage bottles, or you can use Amazon links to sell books on the subject. Adsense can be another way to generate income with your blog.

Building an email list is a great way to keep in touch with your readers and let them know when you post a new page on your blog. People who are as interested in your hobby as you are will want to know when you post more information, especially if they find it entertaining.

As you can see, online advertising is a great way to earn money from your hobby. If you have something that you are passionate about, why not consider it as a niche to make money and start your own blog on the subject.

Read Also: How YouTube and Pinterest Can Boost Your Online Sales

Online Advertising: Why Content Matters

Blame it on Google, a panda and a penguin.

While PageRank (Google’s algorithm that measures how many links link to and from a site) was its initial primary ranking system, content has become king.

Panda became the keyword for changes to its ranking algorithms by which it ranked sites using text and keywords found on individual pages. Essentially, this meant that a text-heavy page that included the keywords a person was searching for would rank high in search results. It sounds logical, but it failed.

People would take advantage of that system and place large amounts of keywords on their sites. Someone selling used cell phones, for example, would put the words “used cell phones” hundreds of times on a single page, on many pages. Another popular way to cheat became scraper sites. By scraping the web, they would basically steal content and copy it, creating duplicates. Ads would then be included. These sites could be created automatically by the thousands and would fool the search engine first and then the visitor who would then click on the ads, giving the scrapers income.

Google quickly realized that and adjusted panda again. Now they were looking for full articles and were ignoring the obvious cheaters and duplicators. However, soon spun content appeared, which means that a program would develop a nonsensical article that included the keywords. Since Google search spiders are just robots, they wouldn’t know the difference between real articles and a spun one.

Recently, Google changed its policy again, this time incorporating artificial intelligence. They would use and study human test subjects while browsing sites and ranking them for quality, reliability, speed, design, etc. The Pandas learning algorithm would detect the similarities these test people found, and thus could learn to recognize products made from real items, bad sites from good sites, low quality from high quality.

In September 2012 a penguin arrived. Along with a new panda update, this new algorithm from Google declared war on sites that violated its webmaster guidelines. Fake articles, link schemes, keyword stuffing, scraper sites, and other black hat practices are now recognized and ignored.

Thanks to the panda and the penguin, Google now only respects sites that are legitimate. That means that to get a good ranking, a site must have genuine information on the topic it is trying to advertise. Or at least genuine content that contains the keywords written by real flesh and blood writers. The more actual articles and blog posts with keywords, the higher the respect and ranking.

This has created a need for webmasters and site owners to update their sites with content. Lots. While it is more work and expense for webmasters and writers, it is a very fair arrangement for the end user.

After all, all we want to do is type in a keyword and get a decent response.