Monetized. The moment when your webpage, blog, or article has the opportunity to make money. It's one of the major stepping stones when moving from hobbyist to professional writer, blogger, web content producer.

Two of the most common ways to monetize content is listed on the Writer's Resource page. Google Adsense and Amazon.com affiliate programs are two of the most popular ways to get started. By adding these links to a page the page owner gets compensated a modest sum for each time a page visitor clicks an ad link. For Amazon.com there is the ability to get a small percentage of profits from sales that result from visitors to your page clicking through and purchasing something from Amazon.com.

These are not ways to get rich, however they can offset some of the costs for paying for maintaining a domain. I was able to purchase my domain name with a little extra birthday money I got from relatives. (Thanks Aunt Mary!) It is important to make investments and treat your writing as a business if the goal is to move from hobby writer to professional.

Having ads is only the beginning however. The more challenging part is the marketing. In order to make dollars instead of cents on a site there must be traffic. That is the magic X-factor that everyone searches for. What do people want to read? What will bring them to my site? What will make them come back? That is the holy grail of information that every content creator, no matter which medium they create with would love to know.

Being able to add ads to this site is merely the next step in the journey.

I was chatting with a group of writers that I network with on Facebook and we were comparing notes about which articles got the most clicks. The funny thing is it is hard to predict. We found as a group that the articles we did the most research and worked the hardest on were not the ones that got the most page views. Many times it was the article that was thrown together at the last minute on a whim that did better with readers. Who knew? Who knows the magic combination? If anyone did they'd be a billionaire because every one would want to know their secret. In the end it is just fishing. The more lines you have in the water the more likely it is that the nibbles will come. 

Going to work on getting another line in the water now and see if it gets any nibbles :o)

Ok so yeah I know there are other writers who get millions of page views (PV)  a day. My article about the Chamber of Commerce got 128 PVs in one day! Since I was previously psyched to see 20 PVs ever for a story this is a personal best. Hopefully I can build on it. This is part of the journey I was talking about as far as finding my niche market.  They say baby-steps is how things get started. So a little celebration then back to work. How can I get more views, do better, be stronger at what I do? These are the questions I need to answer for myself. 

For now though a friend has invited me to lunch and being a writer I need to defiantly get out more. Much more, so I will prepare for that and get back to more writing later. And I hope to get some of those useful links I promised up on the Home page. Those should be happening soon. 

Write, edit, repeat. Write,edit, repeat!! :)