Jul15

Written by:
2011/07/15 10:04 AM 

So many people get into blogging to make money. It seems so easy and so simple. Yet in reality it is quite the opposite.

I got into blogging for a few main reasons:

I wanted to promote my website

I wanted to share my programming and design knowledge.

I wanted to learn more about this new phenomenon

I wanted to pass on that knowledge to others

I wanted to build up a network of online friends

I wanted to make money

Now these where not in any particular order, but soon enough making money from blogger soon took centre stage. The problem with that is that blogging,traffic, advertising became more important than actual blogging.

The burden

Soon enough I was more worried about how much traffic was coming into my blog? Who was reading it?

I was consumed by statistics, checking Google statistics almost every day.

Stressing out when I missed or skipped a day of writing and posting.

Gave myself headaches trying to come up with more ideas on how to make money online.

Soon enough I started to suffer.My family started to suffer. I develop websites and write programs, that side of me was taking a huge knock as well. I was not enjoying myself.

The relief

Then I had a mindset change. My outlook changed and so did my goals.

I decided to move away from trying to make money from blogging as my primary goal. I decided to concentrate on delivering quality content.

I decided to concentrate on my readers and building relationships. I forced myself not to look at statistics.

When I missed a day or two of not posting I never went into cold turkey withdrawal symptoms.

What forced this change? Well My other side of my life, actually programming and developing websites became a lot harder. My workload was increasing.

What I found was that the burden of blogging to make money disappeared. I started to concentrate on the content and the readers. My life was so much simpler now.

More importantly I started to enjoy blogging.

You can still monetise your blog

This is not to say that you or I cannot or should not monetise our blog. The point that I am making is that monetising my blog is not stressful, nor is it the main goal.

This should not stop you from monetising your blog. But realise that it is a difficult and time consuming and often unrewarding task.

There are a few ways you can monetise your blog. One should employ as many ways one can. Almost like increasing your odds.

• Selling advertising. The easiest way is to join an ad network like Google Ad sense. But this does not pay well. You have to have huge amounts of traffic first.
• Sell personalised advertising. A much more efficient way is to sell personalised and individual advertising. This would be to companies, other bloggers, websites etc. But this takes hard work on the sales part. Convincing others why they should advertise with you.
• Create a product to sell. By far the most effective way to make money is to sell a product that somebody needs. This can be  a service, it can be knowledge in the form of an e-Book.
• Paid for content. Not directly related to your blog. But you could charge to write content for other people or blogs.
• Affiliate sales. This is when you promote products on your site that you do not directly own. When a sale is made you earn a small percentage of the sale. Also relies on loads of traffic and effective marketing.
• Off site. This refers to things you do off site but can be promoted through your blog. Something like promotional speaking, reviews etc.

Conclusion

Making money from blogging is difficult and time consuming. If you get it right it can pay off well. But worrying and stressing about it can lead to your ultimate demise.

First build up a good reputation, build up your network. Then attack this slowly and systematically.

All the time you need to have other forms of income, until such time that your blog can sustain you comfortably.

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