Disregard on thread

Hi Amy - please excuse the observation that it's not the impression given by either your username or the blog in your sig-file, in which you purport to be an expert. I'm mentioning this not to try to embarrass you, nor to start an argument, but because it's the point here, and someone needs to explain it to you.

What you're asking here is - in one way - on a par with the people who start threads asking "How can I get more people to opt in to my squeeze page; by the way I'm in the list-building niche?", and the people who start threads asking "Is it really possible to make money online" when the site in their sig-file is called "How I Made $10,000 Online Last Month". The "one way" I'm referring to is the way that matters, because it's the way that prevents those people from earning anything online, and it's going to be your problem too, which is why I'm pointing it out: you're trying to teach people something you know nothing about.

You'd have probably somewhere between 10 and 100 times as much chance of making money from your blog if you had a blog about "how to grow grapes and make wine at home" (that's a really good niche, by the way), or about "how to decorate kids' bedroom ceilings" (that's also not bad).

But going into the "make money blogging" niche, and starting off a blog called "Retire Blogging" when you yourself don't know whether any money can really be made by blogging takes "stacking the deck against yourself" to a whole new level of desperation.

Please appreciate that I'm NOT saying this to try to be rude to you, or to offend you, but at the moment, money can't be made by you blogging - and with respect, that's the point. You're in totally the wrong niche for your skill-level and knowledge-level. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.

The type of pop-up you have at the moment is a disaster. (Many pop-ups are bad and offputting and misguided, but this one's really unpleasant because there isn't a way for visitors who don't want it to close it without waiting for its timer to close it and that takes much too long - it's going to lose you a lot of your traffic, just like it lost me! It's good to test (some) things, but respectfully, the fact that you don't know this rather tends to confirm what I'm saying above: you're in the wrong niche!).

Please excuse my being outspoken, here. I've seen hundreds of members in exactly your position come and go from this forum, not earning anything online. I've seen a small proportion of them still here a year later, sometimes even two years later, without having made any money at all, and more and more people gradually suggesting to them that maybe "make money online" isn't the most appropriate niche for them, and they don't take any notice, and they don't progress, and then a proportion of them end up believing (and maybe even announcing) that "internet marketing's a scam and it doesn't work", and all because they started off doing what you're trying to do. It's probably the single commonest mistake that beginning internet marketers make, and the single commonest reason for their failure, and you need to know this!

You can surely see that there's "something rotten in the state of Denmark", as the saying goes, when your signature-file is offering people blogging tips, and at the same time your title line is asking the same people whether it's really possible to make any money blogging?

I'm not complaining about your doing that - I'm explaining that the fact that you're doing that is causally connected with why you're not going to make any money from that site.

Too bad Lyons wasn’t a Copyblogger reader. He might have seen Brian’s post about the smartest monetization strategies for blogs and content sites, and why advertising is no longer on that list.
It’s not about trends in advertising or trends in the blogosphere. It’s about returning to a fundamental marketing truth.
If you don’t offer customers something they dearly want, whether it’s to gain some great pleasure or escape some great pain, you’re not going to make any money.
People do want entertainment and relief from boredom, but selling pure entertainment online is tricky. Right now the expectation on the web is that entertainment is free. You’ll have to get creative to escape that context, the same way musicians had to get creative to make a living when free music sharing became the norm.

Blog Cash = (Time + content * traffic - operating expenses)

There are 10's of thousands of small blogs you and I do not know about that generate over 10k per month.