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I choose the long and hard way to monetize my websites and blogs. This way consists of writing quality articles and establish a user base. This is a long term strategy. It’s benefit is it is like renting your home. You have to buy or built a house from scratch and then give it to rent. This way, you can have a decent income afterwards, without having to do too much to keep that income.

On the other hand, some may need to have their blog monetized instantly. This can be fast and bring you a relatively less income however this is a method anyway.

To achieve this, you have to mimic blogs like boing boing. This imeans, you will become a news blog. By news blog, I don’t necessarily mean a political one or a blog about finances, that’s not necessary. You have to have editorial skills and you have to pick posts and articles, images, videos, any interactive thing that may interest people and then post about them. By “about them” I mean that you will not copy and paste them. You will select a blog post, and blog about that post. You will select quotations from that post and use them in your own post and comment on them a little bit.

That’s what boing boing does and they are very successful. They are successful in their editorial skills. They choose wisely, they don’t choose randomly. And remember, there are around 30 posts on boing boing every day.

If you believe that you have this editorial skill and you can also make wise selections around the blogosphere and the web, you may quickly establish a user base and a little profit by doing that. I assume you have already made the optimization about where to put ads. I am not going to talk about this here because that’s another story.

By blogging about blogs, you are going to build backlinks and they will help you grow in your search engine visibility. It will be much better if you keep this meta-blogging in a vertical manner. For instance, you can only choose to blog about blog posts that are about parenting. Or only about cars or only about gadgets. Get it?

Since you are going to post about 30 times in a day, this would bring quick attention for search engines. Search engines love updates.

Other blogs that keep this strategy are: kottke.org, the blog of Matt Mullenweg (he is not doing this for monetization purposes but he is a good example for what I am trying to tell here anyway), and many other blogs about web 2.0, widgets, themes, etc.

There is one other advantage in this. Such meta-blogs do not exist for a variety of topics. There isn’t any famous one about recipes, flowers, art, etc. which means there are already niches out there.

A drawback of this strategy is that you have to put content everyday. Because what you do is not time-less. You will be about actuality. You cannot say after six months, “that much content is enough for me to post less from now on”. That’s not possible. You will see sudden drop in your traffic and thus in your advertising revenue.

I can’t suggest this strategy for myself but this doesn’t mean that it is not working. It does work, I have done it in the past and I was successful. However, for myself, I want to build an hotel now so that people come and go and pay their rent… endlessly.

21st century started with contextual advertising and since, many people are trying to gain an income from that. Sometimes it looks like snake oil business, sometimes it looks like treasure hunting. Some people / companies made great money from it while the majority of people could not pass a certain level of income.

If you dream about having some extra dollars or finally go solo with the help of your website / blog then you have to know and understand a couple of things and you have to be patient. So what are those key points?

When it comes to programs like Google Adsense, blogs look like very successful and people usually think that they should have a blog to achieve the material success from such programs. That’s irrelevant. The success of blogs come from sustainability. Successful blogs keep themselves updated several times in a day and this brings search engine visibility. Why? Is it because they update regularly? Not only that. If you update any website regularly and add meaningful articles to it that doesn’t only mean that you are updated but also means that you are growing in quantity of articles. The more pages you have, the more search engine visibility you will gain. This is simple to understand. If I have one page on a certain topic and it is usually found from search engines with certain keywords than this means I can have a decent traffic. If I have a couple of good pages than I would have several decent traffic. If I have thousands of pages in my website, than it is near sure if not hundred percent, that I will have at least tens of pages which would get quite well amount of visitors from search engines.

However, I am not talking about a random success. I am just telling that you don’t know exactly what will attract your visitors and you have to be willing to track your successful pages about why they have attracted so many people. Is it the topic? Is it the advantage of low search engine competition in that area? Is it because you have used good keywords in an optimum level of quantity? You have to look and think about those factors.

And what about page rank? I have a blog post that is #1 in the search results among 4.810.000 results. The page rank of the blog is 3 and this single page’s page rank is 1. What about that? The moral of the story is, don’t get obsessed with page ranks. This is not the only example that I can give you. I have many single pages that rank within the top ten results on Google and most of them have a page rank of 1 and others do not have any page rank assigned at all.

Moreover, what do you imagine when you hear the word page-rank? There are tens of Google search pages in tens of different countries with domains accordingly. This is one factor, a variable. Another variable is that any web page can be found in search results via very different keywords. Example: you reach this page on Google while looking for successful blogging and you are in France, using Google.fr and somebody else is searching for page rank effect on contextual advertising income and finds this page and she is in China. Another reader does a search for “success” and don’t come up with this page because it will be the 18th million result.

So, can you get that? Imagine a web page with a page rank of ten and that doesn’t mean it will show up in search results in every search related with that page. Therefore, don’t get obsessed by page-rank.

Let’s go back to income / search results relation. The page that comes first among 4.810.000 results do not have any effect on my adsense income (I didn’t create a channel for this single page, maybe I should create and check but I know this because said blog is not very profitable either. This is because of the low traffic). Because there aren’t any related adwords client to evaluate this page. Thus, people come and go to the web page and they don’t really see a hundred percent related ad on the page. If they would see, they would most probably click on them.

So, success comes when:

1. You have a meaningful article on your page.
2. You can be found among search results and you are in a relatively decent position, let’s say your page comes up between #1 and #50.
3. The search terms are related with your topic of your article.
4. There are enough adwords clients that need to show their ads on such a page when it is found with such keywords.

The above scenario is the most profitable scenario for keyword advertising, in my humble opinion. Of course, you would also make money when a user comes to your page via some different way (that is not with the help of a search engine) and clicks on your ads. The more ads and the page are relevant in context the more you will earn.

Other scenarios would include that there are several web sites linking you properly on the subject of your page and people come from those links. At this time, it is also important how they link and what the linking page is about. If your page is about flowers and it is linked from a web page which is about bees then this would not be as profitable as a related search engine result.

Then how do I go about creating profitable pages on the web? Find something that would help people doing their job in hand. You can write how-to articles about anything you can be sure of yourself. If this helps people than you will gain visibility.

So, keep in mind that what I tell you here is not about being a famous blogger or web author or content creator. This is about being found via search engines and thus getting clicks on your ads because everything is in harmony: search terms, the subject of your article and the advertisers subject. So, being Robert Scoble is something else, it would create a benefit, an added value when somebody reads Scoble writing about a web conference and while reading he or she finds an advertising about what she needs and clicks on it. Because in this scenario, there is fame included. The advertiser know that quite a few people with a need and want to buy a geeky product would read Scoble. See that this is also something contextual but in that case, Scoble does not need search engine visibility. He can also gain page impressions via direct traffic (that is somebody opens her browser and types in his blog’s address). Also, be sure that Scoble made this fame by working hard about blogging. His blog is full of useful information if not knowledge.

These are some key factors that you have to understand if you feel like trying problogging.

Look for the following qualities in terms of knowledge and practice: Your web designer must have an understanding of web standards. Web standards basically means that your website is going to be visible on almost all devices. You may ask which devices are they? Today, websites can be visited not only from web browsers on a pc but also browsers from handheld computers, cell phones, sony play station, HDTV’s, iPhone, and many other devices which are not compatible with ordinary web browsers. A web designer who knows standards will be able to design and develop a website for you that can be seen virtually anywhere.

You can look for online web design services. Today, you can easily choose a reliable web designer online. There are a couple of websites for you to do just that.

Your web designer should not necessarily be an expert on website advertising but he must be able to keep that in mind. He has to keep in mind that the website he is going to design and develop is going to be targeted on many levels, both general and specific.

Your web designer should also know about contemporary content management systems like Drupal, WordPress, etc. Today, CMS’ can be used for virtually any purpose and using them means that you don’t have to develop a network security system for your web site from scratch. Those content management software usually publish updates in time and you will not get into trouble worrying about security, archiving, etc.

Of course, a free-lance web designer should not be jack of all trades. It is reasonable that he or she can do your graphics on his favorite graphic editor and then put pieces together via CSS and XHTML. Don’t look after a photoshop expert for an ordinary, successful corporate website.

For complex systems on online sale, you may have to hire someone for maintaining your online business. Online sale services always need technical support. If your customers are clueless, they may choose shopping elsewhere. And those tiny but important technical details aren’t parto of your web designer’s job.

In the final analysis, choose somebody who pays attention to knowledge and practice equally. Try to feel that he loves his job and is determined to stay in the business for a long time. Pay attention to e-mail conversations. Don’t go with im and take his time.

As with the fees or prices, an average web designer who has those qualities is working for around $50 per hour. Less than that is an alert for decrease in quality. After all, you are paying for a website which you will use through all media and for a very long time.