I can see you guys shaking your heads now. You're either thinking there's no way to make money off blogging or "Are you serious! Another blog!"
Well, lets get those two concerns out of the way first. YES, you can use Blogging As An Income stream, and quite a healthy one at that. Second, YES Another Blog (for me this makes...uhmmm...a lot!?, I don't really keep count) about making money blogging or using blogging as an income source.
See here's the deal...I've finally started getting my head around this blogging thing. A few days ago I wrote about How blogging is like Morse Code and sudoku on Life in the Internet a few days ago. The premise there was that you have to be looking at the big picture and not get wrapped up by the little pieces. I'll try another analogy here.
If you intend to use blogging as an income stream then you have to treat it like a job...no, a business...maybe both (that sounds like good fodder for another post, hmmm). Anyway, making money from blogging is complicated. It is very difficult, neigh impossible, to create a blog, slap a couple of AdSense units on it, and sit back to watch Oprah on TV. Oh you can do that, but you won't make money blogging that way.
If you're trying to work a puzzle, you do a couple of things first. Turn all the pieces face up, find the border pieces and try to get the outline started...and look at the picture on the box. While you may spend some time on specific parts of the puzzle you have to go back to working the whole puzzle from time to time to refresh your point of view.
To be successful using blogging as an income stream, you have to do the same thing. You can't sit back, writing one post per day on one blog and plan on being a millionaire. To make money blogging, you have to work the puzzle. You need backlinks from other sites...who says the other sites can't be your's too? To gain Google juice, you need backlinks from sites ranked higher that you so if you're just getting started, that means visiting other sites and commenting, building blogger networks, submitting guest posts, etc. In other words...you need to work.
And to go with those backlinks...
But don't despair, the work does pay off. I've tried a couple of methods to try to establish blogging as in income in my portfolio, one of which is keyword sniping. Keyword sniping is to making money blogging as network marketing is to off-line sales. It is simply finding out what people are searching for and creating sites to fill that need. Court wrote a great post on this in Keyword Sniping - Finding and Choosing Profitable Niches and I followed his advice.
I picked a phrase that had over 200 searches a day and less than 10k results. From a blank slate I created some content (which still amazes me be because I know NOTHING about this topic! NOTHING!) I just wrote and rambled on for a while giving a healthy sprinkling of keywords throughout all the posts and a few days later, I'm on page 1. Still there for most of the keywords I'm sniping.
So What
Why is that important you may ask? Well let me tell you. In my total inventory of blogs, I spent a grand total of about two hours working on that blog. That's it! And that INCLUDES the time I spent finding the keyword. The payoff is that I get traffic EVERY DAY to that blog and at least one click on an AdSense Ad EVERY DAY. Now, 21 cents a day isn't great, heck $1 day isn't great...but it does prove a point. If you build it (correctly), they will come.
Now What?
I've just read back over this post and I know what you're probably thinking right about now. He doesn't know what he's talkin about, he's even contradicting himself! Well, I guess I am in a way but I did warn you that this is complicated. Let me try to clear that up. You CAN create a blog, slap on a few ads and sit back to watch Oprah...and go broke. OR...you can create a COUPLE OF HUNDRED blogs, slap on a few ads and watch Springer (lots better blogging material on Springer!) and do quite well for yourself. The choice is yours. I'll tell you this. The instant you create your second blog for making money, you will be twice as far down the road as 90% of your competition. DO you want to have Blogging as an Income? Then act like it and get to work!
