Stitting down at lunch today I ended up in a convestation with Jake Ludington, a very successful blogger.  Because the information was So….ooo….oo good, I decided I had to share it with you.

Jake Ludington is a successful blogger that makes over six figures on his MediaBlab blog.  His blog income is derived from the following sources:

40% AdSence, 30% Affilate revenue and the rest from the sales of his two ebooks on Podcasting and creating a child safe home office (he sells them for $17 and $20 each) of which he sells several hundred a week, and Paid Search Ads

Jake does full text RSS Feeds and his blog is focused on technology enthuisists; in fact, he was very proud of the fact he traveled with a bag that about the size of  video camara case with his compact laptop/tablet, and audio recorder and camara.  I asked him if the bag also contained his clothes….. I don’t have to answer that one.

Jake sends out a newsletter that I just signed up for; maybe I’ll buy one his ebooks also as Podcasting is an interest of mine too (I don’t need to make my home office child safe anymore since my son is 13 years old).  I also subscribed to his RSS feed and many of the Blog Authors I spoke with over lunch were of the strong opinion that all RSS Feeds should be Full Text only.

Jake had some really interesting ideas on how to generate traffic and he told an interesting story.  Over the Christmas - New Years Holiday he was visiting his family in Iowa, where he grew up.  XBox 360 just came out and Jake wanted one badly.  He heard that WalMart would carry just 8 XBox 360’s per store and assumed they’d all be sold out for sure.   But he wrote in his Blog that he was going to try to find a couple of XBox 360’s anyway and drove all over parts of Iowa to each Walmart to see if he could find any.

It turns out he found 3 Xbox 360’s in one Walmat and 4 in another; but they were the base unit without any additional memory.  It turns out that people in Iowa wanted the unit all souped up and so they passed on the base model.  

Jake could have kept the 2 XBox 360’s but decided to give them away instead, and generated ALOT more traffic (and profit) by doing so.

"I ran a contest for the affiliate or site that sent me the  most qualified traffic".

He was careful the traffic was the type he wanted, and based on links to his site that were from good neighboorhoods (SEO term).   As a result he got a tremdous lift in traffic right after New Years.

Jake Ludington was very easy to speak with and very open and enthusiatic about the technology he writes about and promotes on his blog.  I’d give it a visit and susbscribe - and buying one of his ebooks.