How to Make Money From Your Blog

StevePavlina.com was launched 19 months ago. 12 months ago it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $200/day. I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there. Would you like to know how I did it?

This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe). I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog– you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful: How Selfish Are You? (It talks about how to find the right balance between your needs and those of others.)

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can. What if you don’t know whether or not you qualify as smart? Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I would offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy? You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. Which technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

• blog publishing software

• HTML/CSS

• blog comments (and comment spam)

• RSS/syndication

• feed aggregators

• pings

• trackbacks

• full vs. partial feeds

• blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)

• search engines

• search engine optimization (SEO)

• page rank

• social bookmarking

• tagging

• contextual advertising

• affiliate programs

• traffic statistics

• email

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list. Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know exactly what you’re getting into.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you will probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. Plus I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. So I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month. Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require decent web savvy to understand.

This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of mental processing goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them fairly routinely.

Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. But I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to utilize several of them.

Thriving on change

I would say that your greatest risk isn’t so much that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that could have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

The blogosphere changes very rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and figure out how to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will likely be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew that if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005). And since then it’s continued to increase nicely. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to quickly say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards some kind of order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.

When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews. Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers. Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about. These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How to build traffic

Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there: How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog). If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later. That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.

There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.

Blog Carnivals. Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes. Use the easy sign-up form at Conservative Cat. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are match for your content.

In my early traffic-building days, I would do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month. You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog up to a certain level. Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff. I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore. Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic. But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start. Plus it’s very easy.

If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong? Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right. Again, making the mistakes is not the issue. Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:

Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. I think it’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

I think most mature people understand that it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from their work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 13 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service.

At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Steve. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I would remove them right away and try something else.

I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a simple donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at my 2005 traffic growth chart. I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then. For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa. You can select different Range options to go further back in time.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)

2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)

3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)

4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)

5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)

6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note: If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change. I frequently experiment with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too. Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations. My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too. It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal. So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish. It’s win-win. I’m very grateful for the visitor support. It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.

These aren’t my only streams of income though. I’ve been earning income online since 1995. With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles). And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous: VegFamily.com advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot. Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks. Some of them are small, but they add up. It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones. I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Automated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated. I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income. With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers. And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you? Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping. It’s a really nice situation to be in.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — free.

The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself. I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site. Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.

I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.

Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I recommend Pair.com for a hosting account. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.

As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS). My web server is hosted by ServInt.net. What I like about ServInt is that they have a nice upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing. I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless. The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle. I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled. As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting. Some days there were more than 100 comments. I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort. It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell. The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion. Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate. With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane. Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors). That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off. In retrospect that was one of my best decisions. In fact, I wish I had done it sooner.

If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously: Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.

Do you need comments to build traffic? Obviously not. Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments. In fact, I think it actually helped me. Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks. If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link. So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site. The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it. I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.

I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building. Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog. Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it. The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments. Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments. Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog. As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results. After doing that my conclusion is this: No comment.

Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it. Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.

Build a complete web site, not just a blog

Don’t limit your web site to just a blog. Feel free to build it out. Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it. For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc. A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.

Testing and optimization

In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you. So try everything that’s reasonable for you. If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself. Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.

A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads. It took about 20 minutes. They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account. This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month. And it’s totally passive. If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.

For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site. I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc. I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout. It works very well for me. Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par. They started out in the gutter though. You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one. This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month. Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact. Many of my test failed and even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing. If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.

It’s cheap to experiment. Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up. Often I can add a new income stream in under and hour and then just wait a month and see how it does. If it flops then at least I learned something. If it does well, wonderful. As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams. If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities. Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you. Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.

Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small

Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic. My wife runs VegFamily.com, a popular vegan web site. She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche. On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal. Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more. It’s all relevant to personal development.

Pick a niche that you’re passionate about. I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m not feeling burnt out at all. I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject. I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money. I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure. Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience. Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors. It’s all about what you can give.

A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners. If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling. But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers. And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.

Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about. Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents. In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on. I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity usually yields better results than cleverness.

Posting frequency and length

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now). That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value.

Expenses

Blogging is dirt cheap.

I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil. Essentially my content is my marketing. If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.

My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year). Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit. This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax. But the actual business expenses are minimal.

The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic. If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account. A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels. The same goes for online forums. As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I do have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.

My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet this criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.

Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are. In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass. The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person. I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week. I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it. Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.

I’m also using the popularity of this blog to setup interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about. This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed. Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well. It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.

Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.

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Liquid Cooling

written by Jonathan Dunder

Liquid cooling of computers is currently something reserved for hardcore users or supercomputing. However, it is quickly becoming something that is essential for normal operation, given the rising heat output of the new processors. Once upon a time processors did not require heat sinks, let alone fans, for cooling. The earlier microprocessors contained few transistors in a large area so heat was not an issue. That began to change around the time of the introduction of the 386 and 486 processors. The computer engineers were continually coming up with better manufacturing processes that increased the number of transistors that could be fit into a given area. Eventually fans were required to dissipate the heat and now the practicality of air cooling is soon to reach its limit. Many computer users are beginning to abandon air cooling in favor of liquid cooling. Manufacturers of computer cases are coming up with easy-to-setup systems and other companies are developing add-in liquid cooling kits that can be set up in standard cases.

A basic liquid cooling setup consists of a radiator, pump, reservoir, and cooling block, as well as piping between these components and a coolant. There are also variations and simplifications of these components, such as immersible pumps contained in reservoirs and so forth. Many systems also require fans to circulate air through the radiator in order to increase cooling efficiency.

The coolant can be anything from water to a specially designed coolant chemical. The reservoir holds the excess coolant and the pump is used to extract the coolant from the reservoir and circulate it through the rest of the cooling system. The cooling block is generally a hollow block of conductive metal with connections for piping, although some also consist of a hollow plastic container with a metal attachment. The radiator is a hollow metal block with passageways and has a very large surface area that allows the surrounding air or other medium to absorb heat rapidly from the coolant.

Liquid cooling is usually about 10 times more efficient at cooling a given computer system than a standard fan setup. The lowest temperature attainable is still room temperature since no compression is occurring, therefore the processor temperature usually hovers anywhere between 10-30 degrees Fahrenheit above room temperature, depending on usage and the efficiency of the cooling setup. Overclockers of processors commonly use liquid cooling to increase the headroom they have available for increasing the processor's speed without compromising stability. Those looking for more advanced cooling setups may prefer a more expensive refrigeration setup.

Password Recovery in Windows

written by Jonathan Dunder

If you are trying to recover a password from windows, you are in luck since it isn't terribly difficult. The best case scenario is that the windows workstation is set up with a guest account or an account that you actually know the password to. In this case, you can log in using that account and employ some password cracking software.

Modern versions of the Windows software uses the secure hash standard, which is an algorithm used to encrypt passwords that are stored on the system. Without such encryption, it would be even easier to find the passwords. The easiest method to find out such passwords is to employ an application that brute force attacks it with character and number combinations. A brute force approach essentially tries every possible combination of characters and numbers until it finds a password that works. With today's computers, this process can typically be done within a day for short passwords, but can take significantly longer for long passwords. In any case, no Windows password cannot be cracked eventually with this approach.

Some cracking applications can be found in our downloads section. The easiest to use is LCP, although the Cain and Abel program has more features. To crack a password, load LCP and select Import/Import from local computer. A list of user accounts and hashes should appear. Now select the brute force attack button and select Session/Begin audit. Now all you have to do is wait for the program to find the right password!

If you aren't able to log in at all to the Windows workstation, don't worry. All you have to do is recover the SAM file by booting up an alternate operating system on the computer. The easiest way to do this is to burn a copy of Knoppix (a port of Linux) and perform a boot from the CD-ROM with this disk in the drive. Once you are in Knoppix, locate the SAM file in the Windows directory (usually C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\lmhosts.sam) and either copy it to a USB thumb drive, floppy disk, CD, or the Internet. Alternatively, you could use a DOS boot disk.

Now that you have the SAM file, take it to another PC that has LCP running on it. Copy the SAM file into the LCP directory, boot up LCP and select Import/Import from SAM file. This will load the hashes and you will be able to execute a brute force attack on them.

Introduction to SQL

written by Jonathan Dunder

SQL is an acronym for structured query language and it is a language designed specifically for accessing databases to read or write data. SQL databases are the most popular type since it is incredibly versatile and easy to use. Most people use them for websites, although they are also used for non-web applications.

Several popular SQL packages exist, but the most popular is mySQL, which is open source. Microsoft also provides SQL server software, but it is rather expensive. For security and cost reasons, mySQL is probably the best choice if you plan to use SQL for web design.

With SQL, you can create as many databases as you like. Inside of a database, there are objects called tables. Inside of tables, there are objects called rows that have columns containing different types of information. For example, you could design a table so that each row has a column with an integer, some text, and a category. Designing a table is like designing a class in C++ or Java, since you are essentially creating variables that can be different for each individual instance of an object.

The variety of SQL commands gives the software a lot of capabilities. You can, for example, query a database and have it only return rows in a table that have a certain value for their category. This way, you can easily access information of varying types within a single table. It also allows you to create dynamic pages using PHP. Instead of hard-coding links to every single object in a table, like you would have to do in HTML, you can write code the queries the table for certain values and automatically creates links. In the end, this can save the website designer thousands of hours of work.

How To Create Secure Passwords and Prevent Unauthorized Account Access

written by Jonathan Dunder

With our lives becoming more and more integrated with the Internet and our online accounts, it is becoming increasingly important to make sure that your online accounts are secure. Some of us have learned that the hard way. When some people first get started on the Internet, they choose a simple password, not realizing that it makes them vulnerable. Then as they get more online accounts, they tend to use the same password. I have seen some people with three letter passwords or passwords that are simple words, sometimes even "password" itself.

Maybe these people are lazy because they don't realize how much of an impact a compromised password can have on their lives. Picture this scenario. You are using a simple four character password, lets say it is the last 4 digits of your phone number, on all of your accounts. Your email, bank, credit card, insurance, etc. accounts all use this password. Now picture this, a malicious individual, possibly someone you know, guesses your password. Or you enter your password in a phishing email by accident or sign up for an account at an unsecure website.

Now someone has your password. That means they can access your email and all of your accounts. They could change the address for your credit cards and order things. They could lock you out of your email account by changing your password. If you use the same password for your work account or a web server or hosting account, they could even get into that.

That is a pretty frightening scenario, and many people endure it every year. However, there are ways to protect yourself. The first step to take in securing your online accounts is to know how to choose a secure password. You can make your password much much more secure by using lowercase, uppercase, and numbers in it and also making it as long as possible. Another good idea is to use multiple passwords so even if one type is compromised, it will only impact a limited portion of your online accounts.

When it comes to password cracking, it is pretty easy to brute force crack an MD5 hash of a password that is only a few characters long. However, as you add each character it greatly increases the cracking time. Choosing a long password helps protect against brute force cracking as well as someone guessing your password. It is a good idea to choose a password that is at least 12 characters long. Some online accounts will limit you to only 8 characters (who knows why), but you can still use the same password and shorten it to 8 characters to make things easier.

As far as the password itself, it is best to choose an unintelligible mix of numbers and letters that nobody could possibly guess. Some people recommend starting with a normal word and replacing some letters with numbers, such as replacing an 'e' with a '3'. I recommend just choosing random garbage. Make sure that you are using some upper case letters, lower case letters, and numbers so any crackers would have to use a much larger character set. Obviously if you have a random password it isn't as easy to remember, but you can keep it in your wallet or take the time to memorize it.

The importance of using more than just lowercase letters cannot be understated. Think of this, you have a three digit code to unlock a door. The possible combinations is pretty large, but someone could potentially sit there and try every combination and eventually get it. There are only 10 potential numbers that can be chosen for each of the three digits, so the number of potential combinations is fairly limited. Now lets say that you add all lower case letters and upper case letters as potential digits. Suddenly it becomes very unfeasible to find the code by brute force. Entering all of the possible combinations would take a long time. Then imagine adding just one more digit, or 9 more digits. The task of guessing the code becomes even more unfeasible. That is why using numbers, upper case letters, and lower case letters in your password and making it long is so important.

Now lets talk about using multiple passwords. I think the email password is the most important and should therefore be the most secure. Why is this? If someone has your email they can usually obtain the password to any account tied to that email by using the common "forget your password?" option on most websites. In many cases, if you click that link, it sends the password to your email address or allows you to reset the password. So if someone gets into your email address, you are in bad shape. Most email providers let you use very long passwords. I would go with 15 or more characters for uber-security. Also, making a unique password just for your email is a good idea because that means that even if someone gets access to your other accounts, they can't access the holy grail of accounts, your email. Having access to your email account is also important because it is often needed to regain access to a compromised account.

A good strategy of account management would be to have a unique password for every single account, but that is pretty complicated. A more reasonable strategy is to have a highly secure email password, a separate highly secure password for your main accounts (bank account, insurance account, credit card account, etc.), and another highly secure password for all other accounts, such as forums, that are often less secure. The idea here is limiting the potential damage of an account being compromised.

Now, let's talk about what happens if you are compromised. Let's assume worst case scenario, someone gets into your email account, changes the password so you can't get in, and suddenly has access to all of your accounts. This is a very bad situation and it will take time to fix it, but its by no means impossible. First off, you need to regain access to your email and lock this person out. If you have an alternative email and/or the person hasn't changed your account info, you can probably regain access to your first email by using the typical "forget your password?" feature. Otherwise, you will have to contact support for the email provider, tell them what happened, and provide them evidence that you are the owner, such as the account information prior to the break-in and details on some of the emails that you had in your inbox, contacts, etc. Large email providers like Microsoft and Google do a good job with this, but other email providers may have no support at all.

Best case scenario is, you get access to your email again and you are able to reset your password to secure it. Once this is accomplished, you can start resetting the passwords for all your other accounts, but there is one important thing to note. You should always make sure that every account has your current email address correct BEFORE changing the password. Assume this scenario, the person that broke into your email went to all of your accounts and changed the email address to one of their other email accounts. Now you go into these accounts and change the password. One of the accounts sends an email to the wrong email address notifying that the password has been changed. Sometimes this notification email actually contains the new password. Even if it doesn't, they could use the "forget your password?" feature to find out your current password or reset it. Always always always make sure that the email address is correct before changing the password.

Once you have resecured all of your accounts, you are probably OK. If you are still paranoid, you can change ALL of your passwords yet again just to make sure. If they had access to your financial accounts, make sure that no unauthorized activity appears on your statements. Some accounts will show the last time and IP address you logged in with and you can use this to monitor for unauthorized access. If you have a web server, you can check the event log or run the "last" command on Linux to see who last logged in.

The worst case scenario would be you unable to regain control of your email account. What do you do now? Set up an alternate email account with a new unique password, if you don't have one already. Now you need to contact all of the websites where your important accounts are housed, starting with your bank and credit card companies. Tell them what happened and they will change your password and update your email address. You may lose some accounts that lack support, but the important thing is minimizing the damage.

Hopefully this article has been useful in educating you on the dangers of having a weak password and good ways to make a secure password and manage your accounts. As our lives increasingly move into the Internet realm, our accounts become more and more important to our lives. Do yourself a favor and take steps to secure your online identity. It is far easier to prevent a compromise than to recover from one.

Software Engineering Process

written by Jonathan Dunder

Numerous software engineering processes have been developed with the primary goal of increasing the quality of software created. In earlier times, and even in many cases today, software was simply hacked out without much thought given to design and testability. Today, most good software engineers practice a thorough process that helps them create software that meets the needs of the customer.

The most widely known and used process is the "waterfall method". It is called the waterfall method since the process is composed of several phases in a fixed sequence, much like how water might flow down various rocks in a waterfall. The biggest weakness of the waterfall method is that it can be very difficult to get everything right the first time.

The first phase is the requirements-gathering phase. Requirements state how the software will behave and any requirement should be capable of being tested. A simple example would be, "the software will allow the user to enter a name for an account". Requirements are taken directly from the customer or stakeholder, who describes how the software should behave. A good software engineer will gather thorough details about the product so nothing is missed. It is often a good idea to go over the final requirements with the customer to make sure that everything is correct and covered.

Once requirements are developed, the next phase is design. During design, the software engineer determines what technology (languages, platforms, etc.) will allow the creation of software that fits the requirements. Some languages are better than others for certain purposes and this is an important factor to consider. The design phase also typically consists of determining what objects will be used in object-oriented programming and developing a UML diagram of the classes with their member functions and variables. In many cases, the design phase is the most difficult phase of the software engineering process and makes implementation easy.

The next phase is implementation of the design. This typically consists of setting up the project in and IDE and writing the code. In some cases, you can derive a class structure from the UML diagram using automated programs like Rational Rose to decrease implementation time. Implementation is the grunt work.

After implementation, the testing phase begins. Tests are developed based on the requirements, ensuring that every requirement has a corresponding test case. After developing the test, the test is performed and any bugs are fixed. Although the waterfall method intends for no bugs to be present, it is highly unusual for software to go through all the phases in a linear fashion with no bugs.

Finally, after testing, the software is released to the customer. Often the customer will have complaints, requiring further design, implementation, and testing. However, ideally the waterfall process will be entirely linear, with no oversights or bugs, but unfortunately the reality is that essentially every project has bugs or misses a requirement.

Other processes have since been developed, including the iterative development process. In iterative development, small changes are made at a time to the software, followed by testing. This process is intended to make development more efficient by taking care of bugs sooner when the code is fresh in the engineer's mind. If you wait to do testing until after all of the coding is done, you may end up with hundreds or thousands of bugs that take a long time to work out. Iterative development is the basis of the Agile method.

Despite the development of newer processes, most software teams continue to use the waterfall method, simply because it generally works well as long as it is done carefully. Additionally, the Agile iterative development method does not work well with certain types of projects. It is likely that the waterfall method will remain the most commonly used for the foreseeable future.

What Is the What If?

By John Heilemann

History will record the Indiana and North Carolina primaries as the events that secured the 2008 Democratic nomination for Barack Obama—and put the final nails in the coffin of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Oh, sure, Clinton intends to finish out the remaining primaries. And she’ll certainly keep pressing to seat the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations. But the harsh attacks on Obama are almost certainly a thing of the past, and the chances of a scorched-earth march to Denver are vanishingly small. Clinton may have pushed things further and longer than some Democrats would have liked. But the notion that she’s some lunatic party-wrecker is the purest dum-dum drivel.

That the primaries in the Hoosier and Tar Heel states proved the scenes of HRC’s demise strikes me as ironic, because they were also the first time all year that she actually found her groove. In high-school gyms, train depots, and fire stations, she turned in performances that were sharp, energetic, and laced through with an antic, even madcap, populism—her vows to “go right at OPEC,” her attacks on Wall Street “money brokers” for their role in causing the recession—that drew whoops and hollers from the working-class audiences to which she was playing. Her staff was exhausted, bedraggled, shriveled; Hillary fairly glowed. “What’s got into her?” I asked one of her advisers in Evansville, Indiana, late on the night before the vote. He smiled and said, “She’s finally having fun.”

The operative word in this remark was finally. For much of the campaign, Clinton’s joylessness, her unhappy warriorhood, was painfully evident. Unlike her husband, who has always reveled in the rituals of politics like a toddler attacking a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, Hillary seemed to regard appealing for votes as a pesky chore for those who aspire to govern. It was only at the end that the stump became for her a source of vitality.

Unfortunately for Clinton, this change in affect came too late in the game to alter the final score. But it raises questions that I suspect will haunt her and her adjutants for many months to come: What if Hillary had found her métier—and also her champion-of-the-working-class, fighter-for-the-forgotten message—a year ago, instead of a month ago? What if she’d run as the gritty, scrappy battler all along, rather than coming across as the bloodless, entitled, imperious candidate of inevitability?

This is hardly the only road-not-taken that will cause lost sleep among the Clintonites once this thing is well and truly over. Indeed, the list is longer than the still-secret roster of donors to her husband’s presidential library. But herewith I offer my personal Top Ten “what ifs” as a kind of roundabout postmortem of an operation that will surely be remembered as the coulda-shoulda-woulda campaign.

1. What if Hillary had gone negative against Obama last fall?
In 2007, the Clinton campaign treated the hopemonger with kid gloves, which seemed a sensible strategy as her lead over him widened and he struggled to gain his footing. But then Obama caught fire after his famous speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa in November, and some Clinton advisers (including 42, it’s been reported) argued that the time had come to take him out, by making many of the same arguments regarding his inexperience that Hillary would deploy months later. Doing so would have entailed substantial risks in goody-goody Iowa. But then Clinton came in third there anyway—and Obama, unscuffed, was off and running.

2. Speaking of Iowa, what if Clinton had skipped the caucuses?
The idea was floated a year ago by her former deputy campaign manager, Mike Henry, who wrote, in a 1,500-word internal memo, “If she walks away from Iowa she will devalue Iowa—our consistently weakest state.” The risks here, too, were obvious enough: How could the putative front-runner forgo the first contest? With the benefit of hindsight, however, some Clinton hands concede that Henry was prescient in his fears and arguably correct in his prescription.

3. What if Clinton had apologized for her Iraq-war vote?
Her refusal to do so contained elements of both principle and calculation. But it opened the door to BHO and allowed him to argue that wisdom was more important than experience in foreign policy. And it provided Obama and John Edwards with a point of attack that drowned out Clinton’s positive message for much of 2007.

4. What if Clinton had learned the real lesson of New Hampshire?
To most observers, that lesson was obvious: Clinton’s sudden, shocking display of humanity had put her over the top against the odds. All along, there had been a running debate within her camp about softening her image and incorporating elements of her biography—her decades as a champion of the nation’s children, for instance—in her campaign narrative. But Hillary sided with her chief strategist, Mark Penn, in the view that this was sissy stuff. She was befuddled by all the fuss made over her tears in the Granite State. And she came to believe that the aggressive contrasts with Obama drawn by her campaign—in particular, by her finger-wagging spouse—had made the difference there. So instead of continuing to let her private side show through, she returned to her programmatic focus and often robotic style of presentation, a choice that kept her in her comfort zone but demonstrated a lack of capacity for growth.

5. What if the Clintonites hadn’t spent their war chest like a bunch of whiskey-addled sailors?
Of all the unexpected developments of 2008, perhaps the most astonishing is that, by the end of January, the Clinton campaign was broke—while the insurgent Obamans were flush, allowing them to outspend Hillary in the states after Super Duper Tuesday by two or three or four to one. One difference was Obama-land’s mastery of the Web as a fund-raising tool, which the Clinton people never got the hang of. But another was the latter side’s grotesque overexpenditures in 2007, a grievous error that must be laid at the feet of her former campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, an operative Clinton valued more for her loyalty than her ability to actually do the job. Recipe for disaster.

6. What if the Clintonites hadn’t ignored the other caucus states?
Arguably their single biggest tactical blunder was the decision last fall not to invest in building organizations in places such as Minnesota, Washington, Maine, and Idaho, where Obama would not only win but rack up huge pledged-delegate margins. The decision was rooted in arrogance and complacency; in the faulty premise that by carrying the big states on Super Duper Tuesday, Clinton would be able to bring the race to an early conclusion.

7. What if Clinton had dumped Mark Penn before he shot himself in the head?
No single figure was more influential in the Clinton campaign than her portly, perpetually rumpled supreme Svengali. And no one was a greater source of the instability and infighting that turned what was supposed to have been a well-oiled juggernaut into a leaky, creaky vessel. Roundly despised by colleagues, a walking catalogue of conflicts of interest, and a man with no history of successfully negotiating a Democratic presidental primary, Penn might still have been an asset had his strategic advice been sound. But it wasn’t (see No. 10).

8. What if Clinton had “divorced” her husband after South Carolina?
Bill Clinton is a man of gargantuan political talents, to be sure. But his omnipresence made Clinton fatigue an inescapable facet of the campaign’s thematics. And after the debacle in the Palmetto State, which thoroughly (and maybe permanently) alienated black voters from Hillary’s cause, it was clear to many on her team that he was doing more harm than good to his wife’s electoral prospects. Should she have sidelined him, standing up one day and declaring that she was a big girl and could fight her own fights, thank you very much? Some Clintonites think so. And even those who disagree admit that WJC’s energies should have been more carefully, productively channeled. “There was no way he wasn’t going to play a role,” says one. “But did we ever find the right role for him? I think the answer is obviously no.”

9. What if Clinton had gone magnanimous on Obama and the Reverend Wright?
The GOP strategist Alex Castellanos offers an intriguing theory about how Hillary might have reacted differently, and more effectively, to the issue that threatened to swallow Obama. “After the Reverend Wright controversy, Obama was suffering the worst press month of his campaign,” he says. “Hillary had a choice. She could have gotten bigger, more presidential, less political; she could have risen to defend Obama, saying, ‘This is outrageous and has no place in politics.’ Instead, she chose to become smaller, more political, less presidential. She diminished the value of the attacks on him by making them hers. Her instincts betrayed her. What if she had chosen to soar above a weakened Obama? That was her moment. And I believe she missed her last great opportunity to win this race.”

10. What if Clinton had cast herself as the candidate of change?
At the insistence of Penn, Hillary positioned herself from the outset as the avatar of experience, “ready from day one,” as she liked to say, to become the commander-in-chief. But this strategy profoundly misread the prevailing winds gusting across the political landscape—winds favoring a candidate representing a fundamental break with the past. It’s often said that Clinton, as a dynastic figure, would have found this impossible to pull off. But as the first plausible female president ever, why should this have been so? “There was always a powerful positive case for her as the change candidate,” says Democratic guru Bob Shrum. “Instead, she let herself become the Establishment candidate in a year of change.”

And here lies a final point worth making. In the days ahead, retrospective second-guessing and finger-pointing will be everywhere and vicious in Clinton-land—and God knows, as the list above makes clear, there’s blame enough to go around. But in the end the success or failure of any electoral venture rests mainly on the candidate herself. For Clinton, this will undoubtedly be the hardest truth to grasp. But if she hopes to do better next time—and trust me, there will be a next time—grasping it fully will be essential.