Making money by blogging seems to be the latest fad. Everyone wants to be doing it but only a select few are. A heap of people start blogging, and if you visited their blog within the first two weeks you would have said, ‘This guy could be a problogger. They have what it takes.’
Their blog is growing, they seem to be developing a following and maybe even start to gain some authority in their niche and then 1 month, 3 months, 6 months later the blog has gone stale. They may still be posting, they may not - but it wouldn’t make a difference either way. Their blog is dying - and so is their dream of retiring from their blogging income.
There are really only 5 reason why the dream of retiring from blogging is crushed:
You Are Too Lazy
If I had a dollar for every time I have heard someone say that they want to create a blog and make money from it, I could probably treat myself to a world-wide jet setting holiday. It is vogue to start blogging and everyone is jumping in head first because they see the monthly income reports of the probloggers and think ‘This would be way easier than work’.
Most new bloggers are under the impression that making money from blogging is collecting sand at the beach, and when they find out that it requires hard work, a lot of hours and creative thinking, they stop blogging and go back to work. Blogging is just like any business, you have to provide a service, build a network, and convert your customers. But most people wont do this because they are lazy.
You Give Up To Easily
Isn’t this just what you were talking about? Isn’t giving up the same as being lazy? Not really. These bloggers understand that to make their blog a success they need to put in the hard yards. They need to push the pencil and burn the midnight oil, and that is exactly what they have been doing. For the last month they have been writing quality posts, commenting 10 new blogs a day, submitting their posts to social networking websites, promoting their blog like a mad man. Now one month later they are burnt out, have 15 subscribers, 50 uniques visitors a day and ready to give up.
You see, these are the bloggers that tried so hard but in the end their lack of results started to get to them, and they thought that if they hadn’t had success yet, they probably never would. They let their circumstances dictate their attitude.
Your Content Is Rubbish
You know the ones I am talking about. These bloggers come wearing many different outfits.
There is the:
Regurgitating Blogger - who justs rewrites what everyone else is talking about
Depressing Blogger - who is always failing and never looks at the positives
The’ I Failed English’ Blogger - No offense but do you even spell check your posts?
The ‘Hand In Every Basket’ Blogger - Do I need to explain?
The Criticizer - who is always bagging the latest products and probloggers
I think you get the idea. Visitors want to be informed, inspired or entertained, if your content doesn’t fit into these extremely broad categories, there is a good chance you blog will be struggling to survive within 6 months.
You Don’t Network Property
Networking is vital if you want to be successful as a blogger. If you are not networking you are basically just going to get search engine traffic - and in the first few months this will be very sparse.
Set yourself networking goals if you have too. Goals like:
Comment 5 new blogs a each day
Spend 30 minutes each day posting in forums
Write at least one guest post a month
Learn how to correctly use social networking website
A lot of bloggers fail simply because they do not understand how to network properly.
You Never Start Blogging Maybe the pictures you had of a successful blog with people complimenting you on your efforts was all just in your head. A lot of people will never succeed in blogging only because they never started. People will always make excuses for why now isn’t the right time for them, or why they could never retire from blogging.
They sad thing is, maybe they could have. Maybe they could make enough money from blogging to retire from. But they will never know.
So do you have what it takes to become a problogger that is able to live off the income their blog generates?
Are you willing to put in the effort required?
Will you choose never give up?
Are you prepared to commit only publishing quality content?
Are You ready to network like crazy? (The smart way of course)
And if you haven’t started already - then are you prepared to start?
If you can answer ‘yes’ to all of these, then I have no doubt that you have what it takes to be a problogger. Success is 1 percent talent and 99% hard work!
———————— This is a guest post written by Tom Sinfield over at StandOutBlogger.com who runs a blog that focuses on training, inspiring and encouraging bloggers to stand out from the crowd and start making money.
Just a quick update to confirm that the Darren Rowse Interview is now online. As is to be expected, Darren excels himself in this Interview
Thank you Darren - one of the really great things about running a website like RetireAt21.com is getting the chance to interview personal hero’s like Darren.
One thing I really like about Darren is how he explains everything so well - hence the success of http://www.problogger.net
This is a his reply to: What are your top tips for writing a successful blog post?
• Start with a need that your readers have
• Help them overcome the need
• Share how you have done it yourself
• Give examples of how others have done it
• Ask readers to share their own experience on the topic
We are currently working with my designer on our third redesign, every design has been great but I like perfect! Here is a previews of designs I liked but didn’t go ahead with:
We have hired the programmers who will be completely reprogramming the website offering some cool new features! We are just waiting for the design from my designer and we are set to go!
After seeing such great things from Market Leverage, I am hoping to run a contest with there prizes soon.
Whats Michael Been Up to?
Yesterday I decided to clear out all my old stock from numerous business ventures, it was great fun going through it seeing all the stuff I have sold in the past, the pile includes, Lacoste Shirts and Polo’s, Abercrombie Polos, batteries, Stink Bombs, Belts, Sunglass and the list goes on.
Heres a picture of me with my stash:
I had two choices, either sell the stuff on eBay which would of taken up a lot of my time or give it to charity, I’m sure you be happy to know I gave it to charity.
In the past few weeks the weather here in England has been great so the real reason I haven’t been around is that Ive been down the beach, kayaking, walking my dogs, mountain biking and so on.
This has effected the amount of time I have put into my website but have managed to do quite a bit of work on Webdesigndev.com. One thing that has been great is advertisers here on Retireat21, this is because every month my advertisers get automatically billed for there payment, so even though I haven’t been working much on Retireat21 I have still been earning quite a bit of money, all on autopilot! I would like to thank a couple advertisers:
RSS Readers: 374, I belive this is a great start but will rise quickly as the website does.
Income: $50, so far I am yet to monetize the site with different affiliate programs depending on the tutorial catagory, I will be showing different adverts by using wordpress codex.
Visitors: 58,068 may sound a lot of visitors but I hope to triple that in the next month, atleast!
We have added some great new tutorials, check them out here:
I am also considering offering the Retireat21 blog theme in 4 different colours on Webdesigndev.com - would you like that?
New Project
Last week I bought a small website of a friend called IncomeDiary.com which I bought mainly just because I loved the domain and felt it was perfect for my next project!
Market Leverage
Every day I check out my readers blogs to see how they are doing and what projects there working on. When I visited Nick Throlson’s website I notice he was running a Market Leverage give away contest, all you had to do to enter was leave a comment and subscribe to his feed. So thats what I did and sure enough a week later Nick emailed me telling me I won first place, a flip camera!
It arrived in the post yesterday and all I can say is WOW! I didn’t know how cool this was, ive made atleast 20 videos last night when I was out with my mates.
Anyways, you must join Market Leverage and start earning the big bucks right now! They also offer a 5% share of everyone you get to sign up, for life!
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