As a follow up to my weekend question, I wanted to take a look at the main reason that the majority of bloggers are not making money – and how you can make sure you are part of the minority that do! If you were anything like me, for the first couple of years that I started blogging, MAKING MONEY WAS HARD! It is quite disheartening to see your traffic increasing and your subscriber count on the rise, but your income was going no where. Isn’t it obvious that as a blog grows in popularity that it should start making more money as well?

There Is No Correlation Between Blog Popularity And Blog Income!

I think that the first blogging myth that we need to break is that traffic or ‘popularity’ is the main ingredient for a money making blog! Because it is not! There are plenty of bloggers (even within my niche), who are getting a lot more traffic to their blogs than I am – yet are not making 10% of what I make online. Now I am not saying that to boast, I am just trying to break the mentality that you need a lot of traffic to make money!

In this post I want to highlight where the majority of bloggers are going wrong when it comes to monetizing the blog, and how you can jump ship and join me and the minority who ARE making money from their blogs! read this entry »

This is a guest post by James King of BetterStartBlogging.com. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Are you blogging for money? Do you blog with burning ambition to aniline every blog that crosses your path? Are driven to monopolize the blogosphere with your content? Whatever your ambitions are blogging needn’t be so competitive.

Misconception of blogging

Billions of blogs exist on the internet. Many perish from the lack of: enthusiasm; interest; abundance or financial gain. The glamorization of blogging makes the medium attractive towards selected “entrepreneurial wannabes” that assume making a colossal sum of money is attainable in record time.

Reality of blogging

Successful bloggers realize that competition is guaranteed. It is crucial to focus on your reader’s needs. Blogging is about developing and serving communities rather than worrying about competition. The successful bloggers focus their efforts on solving problems. Answers to problems are more valuable and readers will acknowledge great content.

The significance of an online community

The online communities created by bloggers have little boundaries. A strong online community can provide a variety of benefits including:

• An environment that encourages learning and sharing ideas

• An environment that has no boundaries geographically

• An environment where people can network and develop lasting relationships

• Opportunities to find work or participate in a project

The selfless blogger is the successful blogger

Selflessness is a trait to becoming a success. Blogging is about creating trust and rapport with fellow bloggers and their audiences. A provider of value in any marketplace is on the road to prosperity. Bloggers that develop a selfless attitude by enriching online communities with their experience and wealth of knowledge will forge stronger relationships and networks online.

Blogging provides opportunities to contribute and build rich learning environments. Web 2.0 allows bloggers to comment and create conversation. read this entry »

I am sure if you have been blogging for any amount of time then you would have noticed the high turnover of bloggers. With ‘blogger burnout’ becoming more and more popular, here are 3 things that are regularly promoted as ‘good things’ that could possibly make you more prone to this growing epidemic!

If you haven’t already had the symptoms of it yourself, chances are you most likely will. ‘Blogger Burnout’ is not something that you should think will never happen to you, because in the 3 years I have been blogging I have been amazing by not only the amount of blogs that just drop off the planet – but also the quality of bloggers that disappear.

It saddens me when I find a fantastic new blogger who has a bucket load of potential – only to see that he has left his blog to become cobweb-filled and rat-ridden.

Today I wanted to take a look at a couple of the causes of ‘blogger burnout’ in part-time bloggers, because it is the exact things that a lot of the ‘probloggers’ are promoting as things that will ‘make you famous‘. read this entry »

I don’t know about you, but success has never been a thing that I have ever been scared of. The one thing I fear most is failure! I know I have amazing potential, yet I am afraid to share my dreams because of the voice in the back of my head that says ‘but what if you fail?’.

If you are anything like me, you are very protective of your goals.

Maybe it is because I am pursuing a different path than that of the majority of my friends and family, but I rarely ever talking about my blogging or online business.

Now it’s not that I am afraid of being called a nerd. I’m passed that – in fact I am embracing it! I recently got some Clark Kent style glasses which might make an appearance when I get around to doing a video – so it definitely isn’t that. What I have come to realise is that I am afraid of not achieving my goals and having all my 8-5 friends say, ‘ I knew you couldn’t do it – just get a job!‘

NO FEAR = NO DRIVE

But the problem with no one knowing your goals is that you start to put everything on cruise control – and that is where I found myself over the last month!

I was just going about business like usual – but I had hit a plateau! And for me…. plateau’s are EVIL.

So here are the steps that I have taken to smash forward towards my main goal:

Of having a location independent family, funded by my online assets.

I hope that it will encourage you to let your own fear of failure push you higher! read this entry »

Have you ever thought about how your blogs home page is viewed by readers on their first visit? What does it tell people about your blog and where does it direct them? This weekend, let’s discuss the perfect homepage design for your blog!

I don’t know if you have ever checked your blogs stats, but chances are that your homepage is one of your most popular pages.

Whether people hit your homepage straight away, or enter through one of your posts and then decides to check out what else you have on offer – have you ever thought about what type of first impression your blogs homepage gives new visitors? read this entry »