Figure 2.1Tim Carter’s AsktheBuilder.com is a great example of someone making money online with his professional knowledge. Note the banner ad, Google search box, e-books, newsletter, and shop. Those are just some of the ways Tim generates KaChing online.
Tim posts content that explains how to put up shelves, grout tiles, refinish stair treads, and a whole lot more. Some of that information appears in articles, and some is posted in short videos that can also be seen on YouTube.
That’s valuable information. If you wanted to learn how to do these things, you’d probably have to pay for an expensive college course. If you wanted to hire someone to do these things for you, it would cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. It’s knowledge that’s taken Tim years of training and experience to build up.
Tim gives it away for free, and he uses the Internet’s revenue systems to make money from it.
Carolyn E. Wright does something similar at PhotoAttorney.com. Carolyn is an amateur photographer and a professional lawyer who specializes in the law as it relates to photographers. Her web site, which takes the form of a blog, provides articles about the law and photography (Figure 2.2).
Again, it’s valuable information. When Carolyn explains the relevance of a recent court case involving a photographer, people who take pictures, especially professional photographers, realize that they’re getting gold dust. Lawyers charge a fortune for advice. Carolyn is giving away her professional opinion for nothing.
Figure 2.2Carolyn E. Wright’s blog, PhotoAttorney.com, lets one lawyer earn money from her professional knowledge.
What does she get in return?
She certainly gets branding. When a photographer finds that a company is using one of his or her pictures without permission or is being sued by an unhappy client, Carolyn’s firm is the first place that person will turn for legal representation. But Carolyn isn’t relying on that. Her site also announces her speaking engagements, her workshops, her books (both legal and photographic), her legal packages (including trademark registration, debt collection, and consulting), and even affiliate links supplied by Amazon.
The web site alone is unlikely to be a replacement for Carolyn’s professional services. But it does allow her to create an additional revenue stream from her professional skills.
It’s certainly possible to make money online with a web site that draws on your professional knowledge.
But you can also do the same thing with the knowledge that you pick up doing what you love. Carolyn E. Wright does this as well. She has chosen a niche within the law that interests her as a photographer. That means she derives even more pleasure from her job than she might if she had chosen to specialize in real estate law, for example, or patent law. Because she’s chosen to work in a niche that interests her personally, her blog is interesting to read and people are more likely to come and read it.
Not everyone is as lucky as Carolyn E. Wright. Many people have a job they enjoy (if they’re fortunate), then do something completely different on the weekend because they enjoy doing that even more. The good news is that you can earn money online from that information, too.
In fact, this is where the Web really rolls out its golden opportunity.
Offline, it’s very difficult to make money from a hobby. Lots of people dream about becoming professional writers, designing computer games, or taking photos for a living. For the most interesting and exciting jobs, the competition is always fierce, and the number of people who want them tend to push the pay down to bargain levels.
With the Web, anyone can now make money from a hobby.
Perhaps the most famous person to do this is Darren Rowse. When Darren started his first blog at TheLivingRoom.org back in 2002, he intended it to be a personal diary that would discuss his views on life in his native Australia, politics, and the church. He didn’t expect the site to make money, but it did become popular with members of the emergent church movement in Australia. Again, he was writing about something that was important to him, so he picked up an audience who found the topic important to them, too.
The following year, Darren started a second blog, this time about digital cameras. He planned to use the site to show off some of his own images, but he also found that whenever he posted a review of a camera, his views went up by a factor of 20. Encouraged, he posted more camera reviews—and received even more traffic.
Things really took off though when Darren added AdSense ads to the blog in October 2003—although they initially took off very slowly. In his first month, even on a site with thousands of readers every day, Darren made just $1.40 per day, enough to cover his server costs but not much more. But he kept going, and he kept watching his ad revenues increase. By December, he was making $6 per day, in January $9, and in February $10. The following month his ad revenues jumped by 50 percent. Today, Digital Photography School (www.digital-photography-school.com) and Darren’s second site, ProBlogger (www.problogger.com), generate up to 100,000 page views a day and earn more than $20,000 for Darren in ad revenue each month.
And those are just two of the many blogs that Darren now runs.
Those two sites are great examples of the two different kinds of profitable sites that anyone can build. Darren isn’t a professional photographer. He’s not even an expert photographer. There are plenty of people on the Web with much deeper photographic knowledge and much better pictures. Today, Darren writes very little of the content that appears on Digital Photography School, offering space instead to photographers who contribute their own articles in return for the kind of visibility that only a successful blog can deliver.
But it’s a subject that Darren is passionate about, one he
