You are probably wondering if you read this right. 7500 dollars in one
month for poetry? Poetry? The art that no one pays for? Well, I've seen it
happen personally. It's real, it works, it just takes a little bit of
creativity. The prime example that comes to mind is someone we shall call
Julie.
Julie was a poet--she
mostly wrote love poetry. True it might be sappy, love poetry certainly isn't
original, and maybe people won't go out to the book store to buy volumes of
it. But on the Internet? You wouldn't BELIEVE how many people search for them
when they are in this mood or that mood--same reason why so many love songs on
the radio become greatest hits. At first, Julie just started a simple free blog
to post her poetry. She tagged it properly so it would show up in search
engines and after only a month or two she had thousands of people viewing her
work.
That's not even
remotely close to where it ends though. People started writing to her in
response to her poetry--some people started showing her poetry of their own. So
she decided to open submissions for some poetry that she would post on her
blog--the submissions came pouring in. It was around this time that she signed
up for google adsense--in case you haven't heard of it yet, it's a program that
bloggers and website owners can use to place advertisements on the sidebars of
their websites--for every click a reader gives on one of the ads, the owner of
the blog/website makes a few cents. And google adsense is just one of many
that can do this. For the first couple months, the adsense only came out to be
a little bit--but it was still some extra money.
It was around this
time that Julie noticed Feb was only a short period away--we all know whats in
Feb--Valentine's day--the time when love poetry is most desired. Julie went to
a free printing service called lulu--put together a collection of her own
poetry that she poised to set up for sale during valentines day. Beyond
that--she set up a contest offering a modest prize in the form of a gift card to
the winner for those who would send poems for her blog and she used a free
polling service to post the finalist poems she selected and have her readers
vote on it--the voting would only be open the week before valentines day and
the winner would be announced on Feb 14th itself. She also assembled an
anthology of love poetry based on the poetry she had published on her blog from
other writers (with their permission of course) and posted dozens of her own
poems and their poems on the blog as free samples.
It gets even better.
Flowers are very popular during valentines day--arrangements, stuffed bears,
etc are all the rave and people want to send them to their loved ones. Julie
found out that some websites that offer delivery service also offer affiliate
marketing--that is, she signs up for their program and posts direct links to
specific packages on her blog in the sidebars--and if anyone who orders the
products through her site she gets a portion of the proceeds. Knowing just how
many people would be coming to her blog, and knowing that the poetry would put
people into lovey dovey moods, she set it up so that it would only take one or
two clicks for them to purchase her book, the anthology and any of a number of
arrangements.
The bottom line? Her
website had over 35,000 hits in the two weeks before Valentine's day and the
combination of sales from the two books and the affiliate marketing from the
flowering websites brought her in over 7500 dollars. Not bad for one month's
work. Now I know one could argue that it took her at least 6 months to set up
the blog in a position in which it could drive this home--but the key to
remember here is that it was only the month leading up to Valentine's day that
Julie even put all that much work into what she was doing. The rest of the time
she was just doing what she always did best--writing her poetry and sharing it
via a well positioned blog with the rest of the world.
And here is the point
to remember--lots and lots of people have similar set-ups like this. It's far
more common than one would think. There’s no giant hidden mystery for the
formula—in fact it’s very straight forward. I’m not going to say that anyone
can do it—because we all have different levels of dedication, time, ability,
etc etc. But anyone SHOULD be able to do it—if they are motivated enough, write
enough and are dedicated enough to getting their work out there—then there are
literally no walls up that should prevent them from doing so—and making a
profit from it at the same time.
No comments:
Post a Comment