I have had enough experiences with all three of them (though limited with blog) and I would like to make my observations regarding the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. Static Website Advantages: 1) Easy to set up. 2) Have full control over the look and functionality. 3) Search engine friendly. 4) Easy to monetize as one as full control over placement of ads. Disadvantages: 1) As the name suggest, static content. Search engines greatly favor dynamic content over static content. One reason is that sustained user activity in form of comments or discussion speaks for the quality of the content to some extent. If there's some buzz going on, there must be something worthwhile. Conclusion: Great for beginners to get a feel of WWW. Forums/Communities Advantages: 1) Greater part of content contributed by members. 2) As fresh content is added regularly, search engines favor them. Disadvantages: 1) Difficult to build from scratch. 2) Takes lot of time to get rolling. 3) Less search engine friendly. 4) Requires database. Hence additional knowledge of maintaining and running databases is required. Also regular backups are must as server crashes would mean significant data loss. 5) Difficult to monetize. As there is limited control over placement of ads, the returns are very low. 6) Needs constant monitoring to maintain quality and sociability. Conclusion: Good supplement to an already successful website. To rely on it as single source of income may not prove profitable. Blog Advantages: 1) Fairly easy to set up. Depends a lot on the blogging software chosen. 2) Can be made very search engine friendly with proper plugins. This again depends on the blogging software. 3) Favored by search engines due to dynamic content in form of user comments. 4) Plenty of free themes available to get the look you want. 5) Easy to monetize as there is good control (if not full) over placement of ads. 6) Easy to build backlinks with the help of trackbacks and pings. Disadvantages: 1) Requires database. Hence additional knowledge of maintaining and running databases is required. Also regular backups are must as server crashes would mean significant data loss. 2) Needs constant monitoring of comments to prevent spam. 3) Can eat lot of server bandwidth and resources. Conclusion: I would definitely give blogs thumbs up as they offer significant advantages over static websites and forums/communities. Also, with some learning, one can easily customize a blog (like wordpress) to look like a website with static homepage, subpages, etc.
If you can do the content writing yourself, static websites are best. You can get good search engine traffic also, if you are able to write on niche subjects. Blogs and forums require databases and at some stage you have to purchase a dedicated or semi-dedicated server, once your websites become popular. So you either hire a programmer (reducing your profit) or do it yourself. I earn very little from forums compared to other websites
Hey guys, I vote for Blogs as number one. They are dynamic by nature, the more you post, the more content for SE's Then add comments to the mix, and ranking can only go up. They do require monitoring of comments, but with plugins such as Akismet, spam problems can be greatly reduced. Besides, they are fun, and you can build a community of like minded bloggers and readers. Joe
Also, now more professionals turns to create blogs rather than making a website to make money, for ex. one of the top bloggers in India Amit Agarwal, he is just amazing, almost he is making $1000 a day from his blog and last week he has been interviewed by CNN-IBM (tv channel in India) his blog http://labnol.blogspot.com his adsense earnings page http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-much-money-do-i-make-from-adsen se.html
Thanks for the links Jai! Sure they are inspiring However, if you have the talent and passion, you can make money from anything. There is no hard and fast rules that only blogs can make money. If you hate blogging, there is no way you can make money from it. Just read this interesting interview about a guy called Lee Dodd who makes a killing from forums. Courtesy Joe's blog. That was enough to send me into a tizzy
I have heard about labnol.blogspot , but it does not contain much original content. Also tech users and repeat visitors do not click much, so the CTR is probably low. $1000 a month is believable, but $1000 a day is very doubtful. If he had shown a scanned copy of his adsense cheque on his website there would be no dispute.
Quoting: pcworkAlso tech users and repeat visitors do not click much, so the CTR is probably low. $1000 a month is believable, but $1000 a day is very doubtful. I watched his interview on the tv and he says 'mostly he got earnings from the impressions of his site' while his site get around 1.25 millions hits in a month so might be to believe things and also he said in a post how he blogs and his secrets.. you can find here http://www.blogherald.com/2006/07/10/how-i-blog-amit-agarwal/ Quoting: Vishal P. RaoJust read this interesting interview about a guy called Lee Dodd who makes a killing from forums. Yes. hope you too can achieve that much with this forum... good luck man...
If you have 50 images on a page, you only need 20,000 page views to get 1 million hits. He should give Google Page impressions which are a more accurate indicator of no. of visitors
Quoting: pcworkHe should give Google Page impressions if you are asking for adsense impressions... its against google tos... also i couldn't understand the first line.. pls explain in detail...
He can give page views for his website by a program like Awstats or best he can display his Google check (which is not against TOS). There is a huge difference between hits and page impressions, use GOogle to find out the exact difference
When you are creating a blog should you always include the date with everything you write? In fact I don't know whether you can hide the date anyway - presumably the whole point of a blog is that it is like a diary. My point is that unless you keep updating the blog regularly ( ie pretty much every day) the dates on the pages will show that information hasn't been added for a while. Eventually some pages on your blog will have dates from years ago - which makes the information look old as well. The same thing happens with forums when there is not very much traffic - topics and replies are dated a long way in the past. A static website without dates can still look fresh even years later. Blogs and forums need to be added to all the time to still look fresh. Is this date thing a problem?
Quoting: Bob TurnerA static website without dates can still look fresh even years later. Blogs and forums need to be added to all the time to still look fresh. Is this date thing a problem? It involves the information of the page, for ex. if the page has reviews about a software that has been posted last year, now that software could be updated to a latest version and then the old page reviews wont give an impression to the visitor... so it all depends upon the page content... In my view, the dates should be there... it helps the visitors that how old the messages are...
Man I havent visited this forum in agaes and it's so packed right now! Hi again Vishal, and my vote definately goes for blogs, especially using Wordpress. The second is forums, preferably using vBullettin as they have cool features included. Static pages I use only for selling products with sales letters etc. I spent too much time in the past trying to develop static sites for Adsense, and now I feel like an idiot when I realized there's a much easier way to do it... CHeers!
Blogs are probably the cheapest and easiest way to ease into online business. Find a topic to write about and be as verbose as you want.
I just noticed someone mentioned using "WordPress." Right Now I mostly have my Web Site Set up (not fully completed yet), and I have my Forum set up. I tried setting up a Blog from Bl*gger.com and I can't really seem to get it. My question is, is there something out there that I can implement into my website that will "Install" a Blog for me, and I will be able to maintain it locally, something like my vBulletin Forum? Hope this isn't too off topic.... Rich, The Jerk.
Quoting: RichTheJerkMy question is, is there something out there that I can implement into my website that will "Install" a Blog for me, and I will be able to maintain it locally, something like my vBulletin Forum? You can install wordpress in your site's sub directory, say yoursite.com/blog.
Yes, but even in doing that, you still have to to to Wordpress's site to update your blog, don't you? Rich, The Jerk
Wordpress will be installed on your site and not Wordpress' site. Hence you'll be updating your blog through your site.
