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Interview with Al Carlton, Super Blogger and owner of Coolest-Gadgets.com

Al Carton is the owner of Coolest-Gadgets.com which as you can guess is a blog about gadgets. However unlike a lot of other gadget blogs it has a massive reach (over 72,000 RSS readers at time of writing) and makes Al a good deal of money.

When Al launched his first site he earned less than $25 in his first month from Google AdSense. However 2 and a half years later Coolest-Gadgets earned $61.5k in December 2007. Not bad at all, especially when you consider that the site gets all its traffic from natural methods, Al doesn’t use PPC.

How do I know this? Well Al has a blog at Self Made Minds and he recently posted his earnings for December 2007 in which he showed his monthly earnings split by source. I immediately thought it would be good to get Al in for a chat to see how we can learn from his success.

How did Coolest Gadgets gets started? What made you create a blog about gadgets?

I’ve always had an interest in gadgets and all things tech so thought I’d easily be able to find things to write about, I must admit at the beginning I never realised there was that much competition but it seems to be working out.

I notice that even though you live in Nottingham England, the site doesn’t have a UK focus its more geared to the US audience, why is this?

The Internet is global so it made sense to report what ever gadgets are new around the world, which does seem to give us a US bias. Which has worked quite well as ~40% of our readers are from the US, as are 80% of the affiliate stores we sometimes write about.

At what point did the site reach a certain level whereby you were able to quit your day job and work on it full time?

I run numerous sites so don’t just rely on CG for my income. I quit the rat race January last year (2007), my online income had overtaken my 9-5 a while before that but I wanted to save a backup fund first, which touch wood, I haven’t needed.

At the time of writing you have over 72,000 RSS readers, how did you achieve this?

For the past year I’ve been continually promoting the feed and it has grown over. Still a long way of the 1,500,000 that Engadget deservedly enjoys though. This year I’m concentrating more on the email list.

Where does your traffic come from?

We get a healthy amount of traffic from the search engines. We also have a good relationship with other gadget blogs who link to us freely as we do them, this helps with traffic (and also SERPs in the long run). Our subscriber base is also a good form of traffic when we have news or contests to entice readers to the site.

Why don’t you use PPC?

On CG we have a low profit per visitor, so I don’t think PPC would be cost effective. It is certainly something I want to look into more this year.

What are your top tips for getting a blog ranking well in the search engines?

Be unique, original, network with fellow bloggers and always give credit to your sources. In the long run other sites will see you for what you are and if you’ve done a good job will link to you accordingly.

The blog always has anything up to 10 new posts a day which I believe you outsource. How did this come about? Where did you find people who you can trust to write content?

With CG I aim for around 10 posts per day, in the early days I did most of the posts myself but that was taking too much time so I took on paid writers out of my own pocket. I’ve used various methods to find writers (I’ve done an article on this here). CG now has a great team who I am very thankful for.

What one bit of advice would you give to somebody looking to launch a niche blog?

Be prepared for the long haul, it takes time and dedication to build but the effort is worth it in the long run.

I can see from your December earnings that the majority comes from Google AdSense, do you find that is the easiest way to monetise a blog?

On some sites but certainly not all. With my gadget blog it features a very wide selection of products, many of which people find interesting to read about but would never buy so having Adsense serve relevant ads without any extra work by us, is great. When we write about a new gadget that also has an affiliate scheme we try to push for the sale and don’t always display other ads. It’s all a bit of an ongoing experiment to see what generates the best income whilst still be pleasurable for our readers.

I also noticed that you made money from 3 affiliate networks; Affiliate Future, Affiliate Window and CJ. However you don’t seem to use some of the other larger networks like TradeDoubler and Buy.at, is this deliberate?

No it’s not I’ll check those out now, I’m still pretty new to affiliate marketing which is another thing I want to improve on this year.

When did you start Self Made Minds, and what was the reason behind it?

It’s a subject that both Scott (my business partner on SMM) and I have a passion for. With both make a healthy 6 figure income online and felt we had knowledge to share that we’d enjoy writing about. It has also got us a few gigs and contacts to generate revenue from other sources.

What are your plans for the future of both CG and SMM?

Continue to grow both sites, with CG I am starting to step back from the writing and leave it to the great team of writers whilst SMM will continue on a similar path. We have a couple of big additions to make to both sites over the year. I’m also looking at starting a few more niche blogs this year and forming more of a blog network but that is also in early stages at the moment. The next blog to launch is Coolest Toys, which is something else I have a passion for.

What are you listening to right now?

Bit of Linkin Park at the moment

I hope you enjoyed this interview that aims to give a bit of an insight into what makes a successful blog. If anybody has any other ideas of people they would like to see interviewed then please do get in touch.

What I’m listening to right now: Madonna - “Candy Shop”

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Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.