RandLife Review

I referred to Randall Cornett’s blog, RandLife, in my post, How to Make Money Blogging: What Would John Chow Do?. Well, Randall has entered the ranks of bloggers who run contests to gain reviews of his site with his Here’s your chance at winning a easy $100.

Since I write a blog about making money online, I could hardly pass up an opportunity to make an easy $100. Competition is fierce, though, with the likes of Jane May involved.

On with the review! RandLife is a blog about many topics, including affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, blogging techniques, and, in his own words, “my ever so boring ramblings”.

One of the things I really like about RandLife is that it’s a blog that includes topics about making money blogging, and Randall is actually making money blogging. That’s a significant accomplishment, and testifies to Randall’s perseverance. He says he made $55.78 in May by putting Google’s Adsense ads on his blog.

Now, before you start to say something about that not being much money, let’s put it into perspective. Randall has put a very discrete ad block on the top of his home page only. The ads don’t show on individual posts. This is classy, and very respectful of his readers. Nevertheless, this means that people following links directly to posts won’t see ads.

The sort of ads that show on RandLife are typically those about making money online. Let’s say Randall gets $1 per click on those ads (I don’t know exactly how much he gets, and he can’t tell us, but keywords about making money online are typically expensive). A 3% clickthrough rate on ads is average, which means that only 3% of the people who see an ad click on it.

Let me get my high school algebra text book out…that’s 55 people clicking on ads in May, I make that at a little over 1800 visitors. Some of those may be repeats, but that’s still a good amount of traffic coming through the blog. Don’t let the relative scarcity of comments fool you, RandLife has readers.

While some of the posts on RandLife are derivative, you can’t really fault Randall for that. The culture of blogging means that some topics are duplicated throughout the blogosphere. The recent acquisition of Feedburner is a great example of this. By the time I’d seen it appear for the fourth time in my RSS reader, I’d begun to tire of it.

Some of his other posts, though, are just plain interesting. His recent post about the Website Grader is an example. I’d never heard of this tool before, but it’s useful for anyone running a website. Randall gives value to his readers with lots of blogging tips.

If it sounds like I’m a fan, I am. While I cover far more than how to make money blogging at Online Opportunity, I think that’s the way that is most accessible to just about everyone. And I admire anyone who sticks with it long enough to build an audience, and who provides interesting original content.

Good job, Randall!