How to Make Money from Blogging
Learning the process of making money from your blogging takes a good deal of knowledge and application of that knowledge before you see any benefits.
Far too many people are touting the belief that it's easy to generate an income from the Internet with little effort or time invested in achieving that.
Of course that belief is seriously flawed for many reasons. But while not wanting to put anyone off trying to do this for themselves, I also don't want anyone who reads this blog to think that making money from blogging is an easy thing to do and that anyone can do it.
Ok, lets set up some definitions before I go any further.
How It's Done
How much money you should expect to make from blogging is an important factor. If we're talking about just making a few dollars here and there, maybe enough to cover the cost of hosting and maintaining a self-hosted domain with a blog on it, then I will concede that this is far easier to do and very achievable by anyone with a reasonable level of intelligence and common sense.
But a few dollars here and there does not constitute the means to quit your job or become self sufficient, which when I talk about making money online I am more concerned about. Then you have to weigh up how much income you need to derive from your blogging to sustain at least a basic level of living in the real world. That means paying your rent or mortgage, buying food, clothes etc, paying for transport, health care, renewing appliances as they wear out, leisure and entertainment etc.
All those things cost different amounts depending upon where you live and what your expectations of your lifestyle are. In the US, you should realistically aim to derive at least $5k a month give or take a few hundred depending upon which state or which town you live in, whether you live in a city or in a small town as costs vary from place to place.
In other places around the world, this figure will also vary widely, so you have to sit down and figure your own costs for yourself and then work on your income accordingly.
So to how it is done. How to make real money from writing a blog and to make enough to provide yourself (and your family) with a living.
How to Make Enough
The first notion you are going to have to get out of your head is that if you write lots of interesting and well written articles on your blog that lots of people are going to come running and click on all your ads. That will not happen. It will not happen because people will not know about your blog for starters. So the first thing you are going to have to do is set about telling people about you and your blog. How to do that?
You need to figure in the search engines index for a well searched term, or keyword, then search traffic will find you. So how do you get your blog to figure in Google when it doesn't currently appear anywhere inside the first 500 results? And why can't you just post your blog on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit etc?
The social media can provide your blog with a lot of traffic, that much is true. But it has been proven that traffic from social sources rarely, if ever click on ads in a blog. The reason for this is that they are generally seasoned surfers, who probably own blogs of their own meaning they are hardened to the sight of ads and tend to simply ignore them through familiarity.
Also, if they have PPC ads on their own blogs, they are conditioned NOT to click their own ads as this will cause them to lose their account. So when they show up at yoru blog, they will not click yours either. This means that you may see a huge flow of traffic which is next to useless to you as far as making money is concerned.
I'll continue this article in the next post…
Originally posted: October 28, 2009
How to Make Money from Blogging: Part 2
How to Make Money from Blogging: Part 3
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