If you enjoy history, you would have encountered the term “Alchemy” which was associated with man’s attempt at finding ways to turn base metals such as lead into precious metals such as gold or silver.

In my own journey towards financial freedom, I too in a small way am attempting to be an alchemist. To find turn my own version of internet technologies and content into literally dollars and (Ad)Sense.

Basic building blocks of blog monetisation

The basic building blocks of blog monetisation are basically [1] a blog and [2] eyeballs or people interested to read your blog.

My own attempts at blogging started out with my very first blog which was about, well, me. It was a personal weblog that basically discussed my own personal thoughts about life and featured mostly insights that are typically written in a personal journey or diary except that no-names are mentioned. Unless I happen to be Perez Hilton type of celebrity blogger or the local Singapore equivalent of Dawn Yang or Mr. Brown, I would find it challenging to attract the eyeballs to turn any web traffic into real money.

Expanding the building blocks

Starting a blog is easy. Maintaining it and attracting eyeballs is difficult. As I began on this journey into blogging. I realised that I was hardly making any money because no-one was very interested in Panzer’s self-absorbed meandering thoughts on blogger. The more I got into blogging, the more I realised that in order to monetise my blog, I had to write about areas that were more niche. Everyone is an expert in one or more areas compared to the average Lim, Ali or Muthu, hence, I begun to focus on specialisation of a niche. I was then a volunteer with the kidsREAD program and decided to start a blog on this since I did a 1 hour reading class for children from lower income at CDAC’s Jurong Student Service Centre and wrote about my experiences in this activity.

The traffic to my kidsREAD blog was somewhat better but it still didn’t have the universal appeal that attract people to read as the number of kidsREAD volunteers were not too many and even those interested in this area were relatively few and far between.

In early 2007 , the breakthrough came. I chanced upon forums discussing money and personal finance and realised, hey, that is the niche I should be writing about: Personal Finance. This was because I had undergone my own journey from investing in savings accounts to fixed deposits to unit trusts and finally into equities, treasury bills and even foreign currency fixed deposits and I had learnt a lot during that time. In addition, I had acquired my own property and also understand the true meaning of living in the rat-race.

Since then, I have further expanded on other niches such as public speaking to leverage on my five plus years involvement in toastmasters as well as my memoirs in being a reservist conscript in the Lion City.

Taking stock of it all

Having taken the last year plus as a serious blogger, I have started to see the dividends from my various blogs. I nowadays make a very modest USD amount that covers my broadband costs plus my hosting costs and enough for a nice meal or more. Thus, in real terms, I cannot quit my day job. But what I have discovered on this journey towards my own personal alchemy is that real money can be made on the net using just my brains, writing skills and my personal insights on a range of issues that find some connection with you my dear reader.

These last few months have been especially rewarding as I have basically given up watching television and focussing most of my weekend and evening hours learning how to make use of wordpress and other blogspot templates to enhance my blogs. Putting in place RSS feed services into almost all my blogs and being more proficient in tracking my AdSense revenues. In addition, I have started to really get into the groove into the blogging movement by tracking some of the movers and shakers in the global blogosphere such as problogger or mashable!

Going forward

The is one place where you truly can generate some real cash and where you can learn new technologies to make your life better. However, it requires effort, patience and a keen interest to experiment with the various web 2.0 technologies.

Are you interested to take up your own personal alchemy of turning internet opportunities into your own way to grow your means? The internet is there for you.

Be well and prosper.

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