Have blog, but have other online businesses too

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Posted in » Advice to Businesses, Articles, Business Ideas, Personal - by Ades on November 30th, 2007

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If you notice, many successful bloggers do not rely on blogging alone for generating money on internet. In fact, their blogs are usually the secondary source of income for them.

This applies to myself as well (not that I am a successful blogger). My primary source of income comes from my long time online business, which has been around since 1999 (acquired its own domain name in late 2002). I started this website as a hobby in my university years, providing free tutorials on photoshop, dreamweaver, css, php… etc. But after some time it became popular and was driving thousands of visitors every month.

After my degree, when I was working in Web Design field, I added free website templates to my website. This too attracted a lot of visitors. After all, who doesn’t love free stuff right?

Traffic and free stuff brings business

By now, I was getting a lot of requests to design websites. Initially, I did a lot of freelancing (not all listed in portfolio). It did bring quite substantial amount of income, but it also involved a lot of hard work on my part. So, to reduce my workload, I introduced ready website templates to my website. This took huge workload off my shoulders. Because, now people who were looking for web design were purchasing my website templates directly, instead of hiring me for custom design. As a result, I had more free time for other things.

So, with my free time I decided to make my own products. Latest being the color picker tool that was launched in early 2006.

By now my hobby site that started humbly in 1999, was making money from many sources, including advertising (i.e text links, publisher programs, affiliate programs etc.) If it was not for my free tutorials, I wouldn’t be where I am now - doing what I like most, staying at home and creating my own projects and products. Of course blogging has been part of my everyday life for the past 2 years now.

Lessons learned

Here are some of the lessons that I can bring to your attention from my life, work and entrepreneurial experience so far.

  • Have more than one online business - if you have only a blog as your online income generator, try to open few more businesses. If you are not sure what kind of business you can do online, there are tons of ideas on Amazon. Just make some research and pick few ideas to work on.
  • Pursue your hobby - just keep doing what you love i.e your hobby. You never know what it might bring you in the future.

    For example, I graduated with a degree in ICT, majoring in Databases. But I ended up working in the field of Web Design. And now most of my income comes from web design related things. Not bad for a hobby that brings money, huh? If I had abandoned my interest in web design then, I wouldn’t be where I am now.

  • Turn services into products - if you can, try to turn your service into a product. This way you can put your business on auto-pilot! As a result, you will have more free time for your new projects. For example, I have turned my web design service into a product, which is website template.
  • Give away things for free - by giving away things for free you benefit both parties; the community, and yourself. I gave away tutorials (my knowledge) and website templates for free without knowing that they would one day bring me enough money to be self-employed. Leo Babauta has a good article on this too, read here.
  • Make your own products - sure you can make a lot of money by selling someone else’s products. But why not reverse the situation? You could easily become the party that provides the affiliate program. This way others would sell your products, and you would get the larger share of the profit.

    There is nothing more satisfying than selling your own products. Moreover, investing in your own products is a long-term strategy, which could very well secure your profitability for a long time to come. You have no programming skills? No problem, there are thousands of people who has. Just invest some of your time and money, and you can have your own product in no time.

  • Act on your ideas and thoughts - Don’t read all the popular business books and bestsellers just for the sake of reading only (So that you can say “I read that book”). Because knowledge that is not acted upon, is no better than not having that knowledge at all. Unfortunately, many of us simply don’t take that first step to make our ideas and thoughts a reality, to turn our ideas into a potential business that could sustain us (possibly for the rest of our lives). So if you are not gonna act, don’t waste your money on books. Instead you could collect that money and hire someone to do some project for you.

I hope you will find some of these tips useful. Please do share your own tips that have made a difference in your life or business.

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18 Responses to “Have blog, but have other online businesses too”

  1. By Sergio on Nov 30, 2007

    yeah yooure right but is difficult if you have a real job too, but ill kep trying

  2. By xbrain on Dec 1, 2007

    Glad to read these Ades..
    You inspired me since the first day I started to blog..

  3. By Ades on Dec 2, 2007

    xbrain, thank you! i am glad that you find my blog useful. i will try my best to continue providing useful knowledge.

  4. By Bernie on Dec 3, 2007

    Hi Ades,

    I hope one day, I’ll be able to attain the freedom to do what I love and generate income from it too. The thing is, sometimes it takes a bit of luck for things to go smoothly as well (not to mention the correct kind of interest).

    Anyway, thanks for the great post, keep it coming.

  5. By Ades on Dec 3, 2007

    Hi Bernie,

    You are right, sometimes it’s not so easy to make money with your hobby. I guess in some cases you just need to be patient until the right time comes.

    Thanks for the comment, and good luck!

  6. By randy bragg on Dec 4, 2007

    There has to be a better way???

  7. By Emmanuel Oluwatosin on Jan 2, 2008

    Hi Ades,
    Your tips are priceless. The challenge is that a lot of us have many great ideas but we fail to do anything about it. We rather want to hold someone else responsibility for what happened to us

    This is the time to turn our passion into money. Nobody can do this for us. We, therefore, hold ourselves this. One thing I have discovered is that we can make money in many ways even we are in a paid employment. It only takes a personal commitment from us.

  8. By Ades on Jan 3, 2008

    Hi Emmanuel, exactly! If you don’t act on your ideas, someone else will. It’s really action vs thoughts, when we compare the rich and the “non-rich”. Rich takes risks, seizes opportunities… while non-rich looks for the perfect, safe opportunity and situation.

  9. By cell phone on Feb 15, 2008

    Soon I will start more than one online businesses.

  10. By bhanu on Feb 19, 2008

    very nice article Ades.
    Your ideas are really priceless and helping lot of people to make their online business.Yo help me in lot of things as i am new in this so i learn from you lot of things . keep writing such useful articles and i have a request to write an article on How to make your site popular and improve Page Rank.

  11. By Tom Beaton on Mar 2, 2008

    Some great tips. There is also the added safety net of having your income coming from multiple sources.

  12. By Flimjo on Mar 12, 2008

    I think the best scenario is to build up a successful blog with a lot of readers. Then you can start online businesses, one by one, and drive signficant traffic to those businesses by blogging about them on your blog.

  13. By water 4 gas on May 1, 2008

    Yes i agree with you.
    I also get a good amount of money from adsense but i dont totally dependent on blogs and doing affiliate marketting as well as seo consulting.

  14. By Eva White on May 30, 2008

    Very well written. A lot of useful information.

  15. By Secret Affiliate Code on Jun 10, 2008

    I have a few websites in a few different niches and one of the easiest ways of getting traffic is through using blogs. They’re also great to funnel traffic through to your main sites as well.

    People who get to your ’sales’ site via your blog are much more likely to convert since they have already seen some of your content and know a bit more about who you are.

    So many times, my blogs don’t make me money directly, but they can be a great source of targeted traffic for my real websites

  16. By Platform Beds on Jun 24, 2008

    Having other kinds of business, online or not, besides blogging is a good idea. That’s another way of generating more income. The question is what kind of business is good and would become successful. Good that there is Amazon. They do have tons of ideas on what kinds of business you could put up.

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