financial independence

The most common game plan for bloggers and site owners when they think about making money is they think: "I will write piles of good content and put adverts on it. The get rich."
Sadly this does not work very well for the average blogger.
Why not?
To be honest it is because the return per article is tiny - arround $0.04 per hour or less for the first year or two rising by as little as 10% year on year after that.
Writting good or even great content every day is very, very hard. Even reasonable content daily is a challenge.
What is needed is to have the time and skill to pour into a site where for the first year or two you earn nothing but spend every spare moment (after the day's article writting) making friends with other writters and bloggers.
However, what would also help is to have a better plan on how to get a revenue from you site. Adverts are the last thing you should be thinking about.
I detailed the top 5 methods in "Little Known Ways to Monetise Your Blog" at the lordmatt.co.uk back in February so rather than repeat myself I will give you the sort version and letyou read the full version only if you wish.
The short version is: Sell your own stuff.
Now this does not have to be a product you make or even ever touch. For example at this site you can pick up a reseller package for just a small sum each year and intergrate the sales directly into your site. (This reseller package allow you to sell domains and hosting plus related products)
If you site has a related topic or a topic that can become related then the click through rate will be the same as your adverts would have been (or better sometimes) and although the clicks no longer earn you any money the sales of products do earn.
So no rather than earning $0.01 for a click (and a lost reader) you might earn $5 to $50 for every reasonable glut of clicks.
Best yet you don't shed your readers and with a bit of customisation link them back to the regular site should you wish and you get the repeate custom which could be worth $1 to $1000 for no clicks at all.
This is not for everyone.
A website about making your own deckchairs is going to have a hard time selling webspace, podcasts, blogs or domain names. They would be far better advised to sell a print on demand book of the first year's best articles.
A website about making money online might be able to chang topics to cover the setting up of one's own site. But the topic area may or may not bend willingly. If it's a no then a different product may be more suitable.
A website giving away PHP scripts would do very well selling the hosting for the scripts.
A blog about knitting would need a very technical audience to be able to encurage readers to set up similar blogs and podcasts and so would be better off selling books.
However the point of all this is (in case you forgot) that adverts are not always your best friend. You work hard to get your readers so don't work too hard to drive them to competitors sites.
Written by Lord Matt as a guest article.