Little Known Ways Darren Rowse Makes Money Blogging

Before Dar­ren Rowse became “the Problog­ger” we all know as the face of the Blog­ging tips world, he was a  full-time blog­ger earn­ing a six-figure income. 

Today we are going to talk about how he earned a full-time income from blog­ging before he became the famous blog­ging authority.

Dar­ren Rowse “Problogger”

No mat­ter your opin­ion of Dar­ren Rowse as the most influ­en­tial blog­ger in the blog tips niche, every­one must admit he is the branded author­ity for this topic.  When Darren’s name is attached to some­thing it does two things, suc­ceeds and sells.  He is a trusted author­ity for any new blog­ger and an old friend to many advanced bloggers.

His blog’s range from the ulti­mate in blog­ging tips to cool tuto­ri­als and Twit­ter news.  Here are the pro­files of his most well-known projects and blogs.  These blogs are all cre­ated since 2005 and sur­pris­ingly all of them but Problogger.net have been cre­ated after Dar­ren made six-figures.

When Problogger.net (Darren’s sig­na­ture blog) was launched in 2005 it was not more than 9 months before Dar­ren became a legit­i­mate problog­ger who made six fig­ures — $XXX,XXX.  The arti­cle where Dar­ren announces this mon­u­men­tal event can be read here - Dar­ren Hits Six-Figures

Here are the pro­files of Darren’s most well known blogs:

Problogger.net

Since 2005, Darren’s most influ­en­tial blog has pro­vided impor­tant tips and top­i­cal news to encour­age and edu­cate blog­gers.  As the face of Darren’s brand online, Problog­ger has become more than an income stream and far more as a resume for Darren’s author­ity as the problog­ger. - Problogger.net
Pageviews per day: 27,975  / Total Pageviews: 29,649,731 (in 5 years)

Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy School

Started in 2006, Darren’s fun and tuto­r­ial rich pho­tog­ra­phy blog has excelled at dri­ving traf­fic and get­ting lots of sub­scribers.  In addi­tion to the tuto­ri­als and blog posts, dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy school is unique because of its inter­ac­tive forum com­mu­nity.  - Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy School
Sub­scribers: 345,030  / Alexa Rank: 7,156

Twitip

A recent addi­tion to Darren’s arse­nal, Twitip fea­tures awe­some arti­cles on how to use Twit­ter to drive traf­fic to your blogs and sites or how to use Twit­ter as a stand alone social media plat­form for net­work­ing.  The blog just had a recent redesign and is look­ing good and get­ting more con­tent posted every day - Twitip
Alexa Rank: 17,112 / Sub­scribers: 33,183 / Twit­ter: 81,102

Problogger.com

Problog­ger read­ers have long begged for a chance to have a forum on Darren’s blog­ging tips blog.  After hav­ing a very suc­cess­ful mini series to make blog­gers bet­ter, Dar­ren decided to give it a try. So far the project has been a suc­cess with lots of posts, active mem­bers, and a full-time mod­er­a­tor — Problogger.com
Mem­bers: 2,080  / Total Posts: 15,000+

The most impor­tant point in this arti­cle is this.… Dar­ren became a six-figure blog­ger before his books, before Problog­ger had more than 700 sub­scribers, and before his widely pop­u­lar TwiTips and Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy School blogs.  Dar­ren was a Problog­ger from other blogs.

Those blogs and his strat­egy are what we are going to explore today.  Too often blog­gers try to emu­late Darren’s strat­egy by cre­at­ing a huge tips blog and becom­ing an author­ity on one site.  While this may work, Darren’s trusted strat­egy.. because it obvi­ously worked is far bet­ter.  First lets look at his income sources at the time of his six-figure income.

Note: Problogger.net was very small at the time, com­ments were low, and traf­fic was no where near its cur­rent mile­stones.  Its impor­tant to under­stand this was 5 years ago and the other major blogs I listed above did not exist.

Six Fig­ure Blogging

Darren’s income can be traced [with a bit of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism] back to  a vari­ety of blogs com­ing from 2 major domain names.  The two domains are breakingnewsblog.com and livingroom.org.  If you go to the main page of either domain you can see very basic graph­ics, lim­ited text and no mon­e­ti­za­tion.  So how did he do it?

The key was each of these domains had many sub-domains.  Each sub-domain was very tar­geted to spe­cific top­ics like dig­i­tal cam­eras, print­ers, cam­era phones, and even unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles.  The blogs were then very key­word spe­cific and adver­tis­ing inun­dated.  The blogs brought in lots of search engine traf­fic and if you look at them today they are still bring­ing more traf­fic then 80% of other blogs even though many have not been updated for years.

Does this sound not only inter­est­ing but weird?  Yes the blogs are not pretty, the designs are gen­er­ally bad, and some are not even on word­press (oh no!), but this gives us a great exam­ple of mak­ing money online.  Here’s a visual for how Dar­ren was doing it:

Darren’s Strat­egy

The 3 major pil­lars in Darren’s strat­egy that I can tell from look­ing at the blogs and review some of their sta­tis­ti­cal infor­ma­tion are these:

1.  Key­word Rich Con­tent — Arti­cles on site about print­ers, robot­ics, or other ran­dom top­ics are both spe­cific and tar­geted.  Post top­ics are very detailed and the reviews are pre­cisely what both search engines and users would look for on the sub­ject.  The key­words are also linked through­out the site to each other and all of his sub-domains are linked in the foot­ers of his blogs,  mak­ing his blogs search engine opti­mized (SEO).

More on Search Engine Opti­miza­tion:

• Blog­ging Guide to SEO
• Holy Trin­ity of SEO
• Guar­an­teed Bad SEO

2.   Con­tent Cre­ation — Darren’s blogs have lots of con­tent on them.  Its appar­ent quickly that even though he has not updated many of them recently, there was already a lot of con­tent to start with.  Con­tent cre­ation was impor­tant for Dar­ren to get good search engine results and lots of avenues for traf­fic to come to his blogs.  The more con­tent you have the more likely you are to have a high-traffic site.  Look at the top 10,000 sites on Alexa, they are all high con­tent sites.  Take a tip from Dar­ren, six-figure blog­gers have lots of content.

More on Con­tent Cre­ation:

• Blog­ging Guide to Content
• 18 Resources to Writ­ing Bet­ter Headlines
• Find­ing Post Inspiration

3.  Mon­e­ti­za­tion - Dar­ren found what worked best to mon­e­tize the sites he was run­ning.  Cur­rently the sites are largely spon­sored by Google Adsense and Chikita adver­tis­ing.  Besides using adver­tis­ing Dar­ren also uses a lot of Ama­zon affil­i­ate links.  The post Dar­ren wrote about Ama­zon as a top earner makes a lot of sense after see­ing his blogs on Dig­i­tal Cam­eras.  Learn­ing how to opti­mize your blog for extra rev­enue is important.

More on Mak­ing Money Blogging:

• 30 Real Ways to Make Money Blogging
• Darren’s Tips For Using Amazon
• Why Pri­vate Ad Sales Are Best

To sum up his strat­egy > Dar­ren used lots of key­word spe­cific con­tent to drive traf­fic to mul­ti­ple blogs who were prop­erly monetized.

Here’s a visual of what Darren’s income strat­egy is like:

What You Should Do

The visu­al­iza­tion helps us to real­ize to make six-figures it is much more real­is­tic if there are mul­ti­ple sources of income com­ing in from a vari­ety of mon­e­ti­za­tion meth­ods.  What this means to you is that if you want to be a six-figure blog­ger or even just a full-time blog­ger for that mat­ter you should diver­sify your income and learn from a Problogger.

I would start now by get­ting your­self a blog if you don’t have one [if you need help con­tact us and we’ll help] and then get writ­ing.  Start pro­duc­ing as much con­tent as you can for your blog and when you start to see search engine traf­fic com­ing into your blog then begin another blog and do the same.  As you build traf­fic on one blog and start earn­ing money on it, find a writer for the blog and start to pay them for con­tent and reg­u­lar post­ing.  Then all you have to do is write a post a week [based on the topic] and admin­ster the blog.

Every time you reach this point of suc­cess then start a new blog.  The writer you hire will con­tinue to pro­duce con­tent for your blog while you build up the con­tent on a new site.  This way you do not have to spend any money you do not have.  Over time the writer will put so much con­tent on your blog you will not only be pay­ing for their ser­vices but you will start mak­ing a profit.  After you have built up a few blogs with lots of con­tent, its time to ramp up the monetization.

To mon­e­tize you can check out some of these tips for mak­ing money blog­ging, or just find a great way to make money from your niche topic.  The pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less and the finan­cial invest­ment is min­i­mal.  If you are will­ing to put the time into your blogs you can be a six-figure blog­ger too, just like Dar­ren Rowse!

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