The Realities Of Blogging For Income

July 29, 2009 | Filed Under Blogging

by Matthew Paulson

In the last few years the number of people who are trying to blog for secondary income has increased dramatically. People think that if they can write some letters into a word document and get approved by Google AdSense they’ll make some money. It’s a lot more complicated than that, there’s much more to it than just writing, this is why so many blogger’s only last one or two months. If you want to start a blog for some secondary income, here’s what it takes.

Regular Quality Content - This is where you should spend about 80% of your effort. Your blog won’t be successful unless you regularly provide good quality content for your readers to consume. If you do everything else right, and don’t write quality content on a regular basis, your blog will not be successful. You should really post at least once a day, if you want your blog to grow at a reasonable rate.

Marketing and Promotion - You can have the best articles in the world, but it doesn’t matter unless you actively work to let others know that your blog exists. You have to submit your articles to blog carnivals, tell all your friends and family about it, put it on your email signature, make sure Google knows about it, comment on similar blogs, and so much more. This will be the second most time consuming part of your efforts.

Passion - You have to actually enjoy what you’re writing about, and not just care about the money. If you’re only focused on the money, you’ll give up long before your blog becomes reasonably profitable. If your heart’s not in what you’re writing about, it’ll show up in your work and your readership will suffer because of it.

The Backend - If you’re a beginning blogger, you probably won’t worry about this too much, and will just go with a Blogger or WordPress account. This works fine for a while, but if you get more than a couple of thousand visitors a day, those free services just won’t work for you. You’ll need to find a good hosting solution for your blog. This requires some research and some technical expertise to setup the blogging software in most cases.

Page Design - There are some really ugly blogs out there, and if you want to be successful, your blog has to be somewhat aesthetically pleasing. You’ll need to find a good existing template which is available for use or better yet design your own.

Patience - Nobody becomes an instant success blogging. It takes a while to build readership, to get Google and other search engines to notice your site, and for other bloggers to recognize you and promote your website. It can be up to a year or two before your blog gets any reasonable amount of traffic. It’s going to be a while before you make an serious money at it too. You’ll be working for pennies an hour when you start out.

Community Participation - Blogging is not a one person activity, for every category of blog there’s a web-based community around it. For example, all of the big personal finance bloggers have a forum in which they chat, they comment on each other’s blogs, and regularly communicate and work together. You have to get involved in whichever niche community you fall into so that the other sites will recognize you over time and send readers to your blog.

Optimization - Once you get a reasonable amount of traffic going to your website, say 1000 viewers a day, you’re going to have to start playing with things to make some more revenue.

This could mean changing the page design a bit, moving your ads around, and doing all sorts of experimentation to make sure that you’re getting the most money for your visitors. You’ll also have to optimize your HTML so that it loads in a timely manner, and make sure that search engines are seeing your blog and that they’re sending some readers over to you.

Blogging is certainly not an easy way to make money. It takes time, dedication, commitment, and some serious amount of work. It can be a good hobby at first which doesn’t pay much, but might turn into a nice part-time job as time goes on. Good luck.

About the Author:

Matthew Paulson is a dynamic and truthful writer on the topics of work at home and business building. If you would like to learn a secret step by step proven successful method for making money from home don’t hesitate to checkout The Niche Blogger Review. Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory

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