This past year has easily been marked the year of the blog. Not only does virtually everyone keep a blog, whether it be on their own domain, their MySpace page or LiveJournal, but it is also the time where more and more people are realizing the amount of money that can be made by blogging. But here’s a tip for anyone looking to create their household income by blogging: It isn’t as easy as it looks.
There are many bloggers out there that are pulling in annual six-figure incomes. Some aren’t making as much, but quite a few are able to live a decent lifestyle by what they make through their websites. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger is one of the top people in the blogging world right now; just look at the domain name! His website is dedicated to blogging for profit and teaching others how to benefit from blogging. Amanda Harris of Pajama Mommy is another person who not only makes a significant amount of money from her website, but her business posts go into more detail on how to do so. Another one of my personal favorites is Courtney Tuttle, who is the blogging bible as far as internet marketing goes. So how are they doing it?
Each and every successful website has a webmaster behind the scenes who has spent hours upon hours (I cannot stress the amount of time enough) marketing their websites. When thinking of your new website, think of it as practically raising something. Your website needs a lot of love and attention and if you let it go for even a few days, you have potentially lost a great deal of readers.
It takes months to build up an audience for a website and when you succeed in doing that, you cannot stop. One of the drawbacks of the internet and the society we live in today is that we 1: want instant gratification and 2: have the attention span of a gnat. Your website must bring a lot to the table that appeals to a wide variety or a large group of people and always keep in mind that there are trillions of websites on the internet today–Why do these people want to read your website? What do they get from reading your work?
If you’re thinking about blogging for profit ask yourself these few questions:
- How much time can you wholeheartedly dedicate to your website?
- Does your website appeal to a large group or wide variety of people?
- What makes your website different than the trillions already on the internet?
- If this wasn’t your website and you happened to stumble upon it, would you visit again?
This is just the very tip of the iceberg but I plan to dissect blogging for profit in several steps so check back frequently!
Some very good advice for new bloggers. I wish I had run across such good advice a couple of years back. Anyway, I read Darren’s blog religiously and subscribe to his email alerts, but I was not aware the Courtney Tuttle Internet Marketing blog. I will definitely add that one to my list. Thanks for the info.
I totally agree with all of your advice on blogging. I found Courtney Tuttle through a friend and have learned some awesome new ideas from him, he’s really a genius when it comes to Internet Marketing. I would reiterate that making money online takes a WHOLE lot of time! That’s for sure. I don’t have the kind of time to dedicate to it like I would want to, as I have a regular full-time job.
“If this wasn’t your website and you happened to stumble upon it, would you visit again?”
I really like this line, and I’m going to take it to heart. Nice post.
It can take more than months to build an audience. Some people do it very quickly because they might be inheriting pagerank from another that one of their buddy’s owns or throwing money at marketing. Other than that, building a site from nothing and spending nothing is a slow building process.
Blogging seems easy at the beginning. It might be relatively straight forward for people with strong skills in developing websites but for someone new to this it can be a daunting task.
Trick is not to give up and keep on improving your skill. You need to learn the basics of website coding as well as writing good content. Persistence always pays! 🙂