Make Money Blogging

My first attempts at making money online were based on an e-book a friend gave me that talked about how great it can be to make money blogging.  The premise is fairly simple, write a blog, amass a huge following to your blog, and the riches will flow in from advertising revenue.  Reality is this works for very few people, mostly for the following reasons:

1. Keeping a blog updated takes a significant amount of work.  Most people just can't commit to all the writing required.  

2. Garbage blogs with spun content are not what people are looking for. The whole Micro Niche Site, Made For Adsense, and Autoblog market is about producing crap that nobody wants on the internet.  Don't waste your time here.  If you really want to waste your time with this garbage I can sell you a number of garbage sites I have that never made any money, so you too can have sites that aren't even worth the domain renewal.

3. If you build it, will they come?  You can be the worlds greatest writer, but without luck, cheating, or an insane amount of effort in doing Search Engine Optimization, you are likely to get minimal traffic if any. Think you can buy traffic to your blog?  Well think again, as paid traffic will just get your Adsense account banned.  Anything you read that promises a "method" to make $XXX dollars a day from Adsense, well it probably won't.

4. Google hates you.  Really, they have a personal vendetta against the entire Make Money from Home market, so right from the start you are looking at an uphill battle.

5. Keeping a blog updated takes a TON of work.  Most people find that the amount of work required simply isn't worth the prospect of making pennies a day. It takes a very long time to build up a follower base, and most simply give up.

That said, I am expecting a check for $368 for last month's Adsense earnings nearly all from my Gaming niche blog, so it is POSSIBLE to make money blogging, it's just really HARD.

If you want to get started blogging, you can actually do it without investing a penny by creating a blog on blogger.com.  Many experts recommend choosing an "exact match domain" and using the Wordpress blogging platform for building revenue generating sites.  Personally I think these experts are full of it, exact match is an SEO trick that is being increasing devalued.  You can make just as much blogging using a blogger blog as you can hosting your own.  

If you go the Wordpress route you are looking at the following costs:

1. Domain ($10-$20 per year)

2. Hosting ($5-$20 per month)

The upside to using Wordpress is the myriad of plugins available that are basically a swiss army knife that can be used to add a ton of features to your website.  Also you own the site, control the content, and get to keep 100% of the ad revenue generated (less taxes of course).  Going the blogger route, there is somewhat less flexibility and Google does a revenue share on the advertising placed on the blog.  This revenue share is largely offset by the fact that google does place higher paying ads on its own blog network.

The basic method is simple.  Pick a subject you know a ton about, and every day make a post about that subject.  These posts should be lengthy, well written, and on topic; then with a little luck your post will get syndicated, discovered, or go viral and you will make money blogging.