You’ve heard the stories about people making thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars a month from blogging. There’s some truth to those stories. People really do it. Some people really do make that much. But the vast majority of bloggers earn little or nothing for their efforts. One reason for the difference is the value the successful folks deliver.

Creating blogs is very easy and inexpensive. With just a little bit of training, most anyone can do it. It’s so easy to create blog that statistics indicate there are something like 100 million of them. But only a tiny fraction make any money. Perhaps the biggest reason is that most blogs, regardless of the effort their creators put into them, give the visitor nothing unique that would cause them to come back again.

For a blog to deliver real value, it must have something special. Either the content must be unique, or the presentation of the content must evoke people’s emotions. Blogs that could have been written by anyone, with contents that readers can find all over the web, just won’t matter to people.
When it comes to delivering unique content, it helps to be an expert in the niche the blog covers. Experts can deliver value simply by providing information that isn’t readily available elsewhere. For those who aren’t in a position to write about unique aspects of the niche, the way you deliver the information has to provide the value your readers want.

A moderate and uncontroversial style is the kiss of death for bloggers who aren’t experts in the field. It’s great if people love your style, but it is just as good if you make them angry. Drill it into your head that if you can’t engage your visitor’s emotions, and can’t give them unique information, your blog is doomed.

I hope I’ve convinced you that delivering something readers value, either unique news, a unique point of view, or a unique style, is vital to earning real blog income. If you learn how to do this properly, you’ll have conquered a problem area most bloggers never get past.

Unless you’re completely new to the blogging scene, you’ve probably heard two things. One thing you’ll have heard is that content is king. The other is that you must offer your visitors real value if you want them to come back. These things are necessary to make money, but they’re not enough in themselves. A less talked about secret of earning big blog income is that great content and providing value will only get you so far. That may seem to contradict what you’ve heard, but it doesn’t. Please let me explain.
In addition to great content and value, the top blogs, the ones that make money, have several other key characteristics that set them apart from lesser blogs. The most important of these is that they have traffic. That is, their blogs get thousands of visitors a day.
Great content is crucial. Providing real value is crucial. But if no one finds your blog, you’re not going to make money. There are tens of millions of blogs out there. If your blog addresses a popular subject (and if it doesn’t, why are you bothering?) you’ll have lots of competitors. Getting enough visitors to your blog is challenging but doable.
Once you have lots of loyal readers, you’re getting close, but still not out of the woods. Earning money from your blog (monetizing it) is the next step you must take. Just because you have visitors it doesn’t mean you’re going to make money. Finding one or more ways to earn money from your blog visitors is crucial if you want significant blogging income.
Clearly, giving your readers valuable content isn’t enough in itself to make money. Getting visitors to the blog in the first place, then getting them to spend money are additional blog income secrets you need to master if blogging is going to make you real money.
For more blog income secrets, go to http://TheBloggersPayback.com

If you’ve dipped so much as a toe into today’s marketing world, you’ve heard about blogs. Actually, if you’ve been on the internet at all lately, you’ve probably seen that blogs are a pretty commonplace occurrence. You probably are not aware of how truly easy it is to advertise on the blogs of bloggers.”

What is this thing called a “blog?” What is it for? When did people across the unverse first hear about it? How can you make it work for you in today’s competitive marketplace, especially when you have very little money to spend on your marketing?

The term “weblog” was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, editor of RobotWisdom.com, one of the oldest blogs out there. The shortened term “blog” came about in 1999, offered up by one Peter Merholz, editor and author of Peterme.com, a very well-established blog about his life, the web in general, and about everything else under the sun. By July 2006, statistics show that there were 12 million bloggers in the US alone (we’d venture to say there are many times that amount now), and that more than 39% of the US population reads blogs. Again, chances are that now, with the unemployment rate rising and Internet costs getting less expensive, that number is much higher. From the perspective of someone who wants to advertise on blogs, this is a good sign. Statistics also show that by February of 2009 there were 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide.

At almost 25% of the world’s population, that’s nothing to sneeze at. With only 80% of the world’s population being literate, you can figure that almost half of the world’s literate population is online. And more and more people who connect online choose to go to blogs. What does that mean for you, oh Person Who Wants to Advertise Their Business? It means that you can use this medium to promote your business.

For a minimal cost you can reach millions of people with your brand and your website. And why does it mean that? For as many bloggers as there are, there are that many blog readers.

Many people choose not to put their every thought and opinion onto a website, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to read the thoughts and opinions of the people who do. The cool thing about that is that many bloggers are quite influential. They will spill the beans often and tell folk how they really feel about product X or company Y. So how do you get into their sites to advertise your company? One way is to find blogs that fit your product’s image and go through the rigmarole of emailing them individually.

You’d need to offer them free product, send it to them and wait for them to write about you and link to your website. Or, in an easier and possibly more effective move, you can sign up with a service that makes your ads available to bloggers. Because of today’s economic climate, more and more bloggers are trying to make a profit from their blog.

Whether it’s to offset the cost of their domain name and website, or whether they are trying to put food on the table, more and more quality bloggers are putting advertising on their websites. The service they use can be the same service you use to take advantage of some prime internet real estate and reach an audience who may not be looking for your product otherwise.

Blog readers aren’t stupid, but they are partial to the blogs they read the most. And chances are, if the blog is established and has a decent readership, those readers are going to be interested in the ads posted on their favorite blogger’s website. Why not have that ad inventory occupied by you?

This article has been donated by Samson Harper, an esteemed agent at BloggingAds.com, a website that helps businesses purchase blog advertising and gives bloggers an opportunity to earn money blogging

I have a guilty secret.  I’m not proud of it, I hardly even remember when I started doing it, but now I’m hooked.

Sure, I could give up if I wanted to – I just don’t want to.  What is it? Failblog.org

It’s a silly website dedicated to videos and photos depicting epic fails of all sorts.  Before I check the news headlines, before I check my emails, hell, before I even check on my kids I have to have my daily fix of fail.

The reason is, I know there will always be more fail. Never will there be a fail free day. The world will never manage to coordinate a massive run of epic wins so that the good folk at failblog don’t have a new post to entertain me with.

I don’t mind the odd minor fail, even an occasional fail-fail but there is ALWAYS a new fail of some description, often 3 or 4 a day. If however, I logged-in for my daily fix and just once there was no new update, I would feel cheated, ripped-off – disappointed.

I may not return, I may decide I can do without this rubbish and move on to lolcats or something more erudite.

What’s my point? My point is that most humans love routine, in this chaotic world full of choice we like to have certain rituals that require no thought, we can just do them on auto-pilot without effort and get our needs predictably met.

It’s what fast food restaurants thrive on, regular columnists in newspapers and even the next book from ______ insert your favourite author here.

So make sure you provide your readers with their daily fix, their blogployment All-Bran.  Blog ahead, schedule those posts do whatever you need to do but don’t make excuses and don’t let them down. They’re depending on you.

A close friend of mine stared blogging many years ago. She was a pioneer, sharing her innermost thoughts with the world.  Oh she got all the feedback about, “why share your diary with strangers?”, “what will your colleagues think?”, “Aren’t you scared of stalkers?” but she took sensible privacy precautions and opened her heart.

In the early days her blogs were a touch guarded and I could tell that she was holding stuff back in case a parent or family member was reading, but as time progressed and her style became more confident she would share more and more intimate details with her readers.

The results were self-evident, as she shared more, her audience became involved. A crisis at home, a fragile relationship with a friend or even a personal health “life-changer” moved from being an abstract concept to something affecting a “virtual friend”.

What had changed was the style, a style that started talking from the heart.

A lot has been written about Web 2.0 and interactivity with audience. My friend understood this intuitively. She wasn’t responding to comments because she felt she had to keep her linky-love going, her audience cared about her and she cared about them.

So if you are writing a personal blog and wonder if anyone is ever going to read it, go hard or go home. Either open up and bear your soul or blog about bee-keeping.

I wrote my teenage diary as if somebody might read it at anytime – I regret that. It lacks the passion and torment that I remember feeling in my heart at the time.  It’s only when you expose your weaknesses and vulnerabilities that you truly find yourself. And you audience  finds you.

Day 132: Travelling on Public Transport


Pain Level at Rest: 3/10

Pain Level if Provoked: 10/10

Visual Unattractiveness: 2/10

My toenail is affecting my relationships with complete strangers.  It used to be my personal secret, an embarrassing disability that is the subject of humor in ‘Carry-On’ movies but recently its shifted up a gear.

I could pull on a pair of shoes and for all intents and purposes I was a regular member of the public, no outward signs of distress or difference until the subway trip.

It started off well enough with a relatively empty train, plenty of seats and the relaxing hiss of second hand i-Pod music allowing me to play “name that tune” from clues consisting purely of notes exceeding 20,000Hz  and the occasional mumbled lip movement. However as the car filled up I was compelled to give up my seat and as each stop fills the train, commuting becomes more like a Japanese game show where they explore the limits of elevator capacity.

Then it happened, an unintentional placement of a hand made leather Italian instrument of torture was guided on to my toe with the force of a 170lbs focussed by stiletto and a gum chewing secretary.

White searing light, combined with a pain like, root canal surgery performed using a car battery and razor wire electrodes, coursed through my body.  If there was an apology, I was in no state to hear it.

The throbbing started to ease about 10 hours later as I boarded the torture train home.  This journey I was guarding my personal space like a grizzly bear with her newborn cubs.

From now on I am keeping the human race at a distance on at least 1 foot. Pardon the pun.

I’m not sure if there is a blog about an in-growing toenail. If there is, I’m not sure who would want to read it. The point is, there is no limit to what you can blog about. Around the globe there are over 1,000,000, Internet connected, English speakers who are currently enjoying the pleasures of an in-growing toenail.

Your blogployment site may not be the first thing they log into every morning – but hey if even a few find it useful you’ve got the start of an audience.

The website Technorati, has produced an annual ‘State of the Blogosphere ’ report since 2004 following the growths and trends across the blogging community. The recently released 2009 report confirms that while “more bloggers than ever are making money from blogs” the actual methods by which they do it appear to be as varied as the topics that they blog about.

According to Lijit, between 2008 and 2009 there has been a 68% increase in the number blogs with ad tags installed. This indicates that monetizing blogs is high on the priority list of most publishers.   However advertising is only part of the story.

Across the groups who make money from blogging, being a speaker at an industry event or contributing to print media is likely to contribute more to the bottom line than the monthly cheque from Google.

So if highly paid jobs in the “traditional” print media are become scarcer and few bloggers are getting rich on advertising revenues – where’s the money?

A role is emerging for semi-professional bloggers who earn an income as the conduit between their various specialty interests and the more traditional media.

In journalism the pillars of connectedness (to community) and competence are vital.  While newsrooms have the competence they are struggling in this world of “hyper-local” communities. The opposite is true for Citizen Journalists.

Enter the professional blogger. Able to engender and coordinate input from highly specialised communities and then in a curatorial role, review and channel the content as ‘journalist processors’.

By crowdsourcing such stories, traditional media can keep costs down while the professional blogger input ensures that quality control is maintained.

Armed with quality, specialised content “hyper-local” advertising can be targeted and a model for pro-am journalism begins to take shape.

We live in interesting times.

You’ve set up your blog.  Everything is going fine, you’ve got some traffic, people are recommending your blog to friends.  That picture of a cat juggling potatoes worked really well.  Readers seem to respond to it.  They must love cats.  You’ve been uploading content for a month now and you have a respectable amount of content on your site.  You sit back and relax, because life is just so good.  After making yourself a delicious sandwich you log on to your computer and check your blog.

BOOOOMMM.  Your blog is gone.  You refresh the page and still nothing.  You start to panic.  You suddenly realize that a month’s work has transformed into an error page.  All that time you spent looking for funny pictures of cats has been wasted.  Your blog, like magic, has gone.

I hope this tale illustrates the point I’m trying to say.  Many people don’t bother taking precautions as they never think the bad things will happen to them.  They don’t wear sunblock.  They prefer not to wear seatbelts.  They eat sushi a lot.  These people are setting themselves up for a world of trouble.  Disaster will happen to you one day in one form or another so it is very important to be prepared for it.

So what is the safety net of the blog world?  What will soften your fall when you stumble from grace?  It’s actually very easy.  The first part is so easy that I shouldn’t even bother telling you.  Maybe I won’t tell you, as telling you this might insult your intelligence.  You probably already know this.  I mean, you should, but I guess it would be cruel to build this up without telling you what it is.  Okay, here we go: INVEST IN A DECENT WEB HOST.  That was simple, right?  Look, web hosting is ridiculously cheap today, so there are no excuses for cutting corners.  Go with the big guys who have the experience and reputation to run your website RELIABLY.  No gimmicks, just 24/7 quality service.  I personally recommend Bluehost.com.  The reason it’s good to have one of the big guys instead of your friend who is a part-time weed dealer is because the big guys have the best customer support.  They have probably dealt with whatever question you have a thousand times before.  You will be in good hands.

The next thing to do is have a backup of every bit of content you post.  That means saving all of your adorable pictures of cats on to your computer.  If you’re really good, you should have a backup external hard drive with everything important on it.  Having an external hard drive will protect your precious material from any virus attacks or other annoying computer problems.  It doesn’t take long to save a copy of each file on to your computer.  So take the time and do this.  Most good web hosts have a backup system that will save your files in case of a malfunction, but if there’s anything that you learnt from ‘I, Robot’ it should be not to trust machines.

When blogging becomes a source of income for you, you have to protect your assets.  Back up everything- hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.  If you don’t, your life’s work can be gone in an instant.  Poof.  Now go back your stuff up.

Wouldn’t it be nice?  You sit down from a crappy day at work and type up your troubles into your blog where millions of readers await the latest update on your uneventful, tragic existence.  Every wild and crazy story about your annoyance at noisy traffic and your frustration at the government for taxing people will be applauded by hungry readers around the world.  Imagine the response.  Okay, so maybe you can overlook my sarcasm, but the point is this- there are millions of confessional blogs written as a kind of therapy that make no money at all.  So this begs the question- why should your personal blog make any money?

The key to money on the internet is traffic.  If no one reads your blog then you have to be pretty inventive to make any cash.  Actually I’ll be frank- NO TRAFFIC MEANS NO MONEY.  How do you get traffic to your blog?  Well, I won’t lie, sex blogs tend to due pretty well.  Take Tucker Max and The Pussy Ranch.  These have a cult following and have generated cash and fame for both authors.  But it is important to look past the sex and see that these blogs tell great stories.  Taking your readers on an emotional journey is the value you offer.  Personal blogs must tell a great story.

I’m not ashamed to say that if you want to make money off a personal blog you better have something interesting to write about, or you better be able to tell a damn great story.  Practise writing every day, get someone you trust to give you feedback and read other successful blogs all the time.  A lot of people think that personal blogs are the easy way out, a kind of loop hole which no one has noticed- ‘Oh my God,I can write about my day and people will just throw money at me!  I love the internet!’.  Now the internet is pretty good, but it’s not that great.  It’s not crazy-great.

Personal blogs are about building a readership.  This means that when someone reads your blog that they actually return to read it again.  Or better yet they read it, tell all their friends, flag it up on facebook and myspace, and then return to see what you’ve wrote.  As I’ve said, get used to writing compelling stories.  The other thing to consider is the topic of your blog.  I admit that if you can write well you can make tin-mining sound interesting, but your job will be easier if you choose a topic that people immediately respond to.  Perez Hilton makes a living out of gossiping about celebrities.  He also makes use of YouTube to significantly boost his traffic.

The internet audience is growing up.  If you can use multimedia to promote your blog, you’ll be making your job easier.  Posting on YouTube is tapping into a huge source of incredibly bored people.  Whether you make a short viral teaser to arouse interest in your blog, or if you post YouTube videos as part of you blog, the 21st century internet is about audio and video.  So as well as getting used to writing, get used to presenting yourself in front of a camera.

Don’t cut corners on the content of your blog.  Becoming a better storyteller doesn’t necessarily mean your life is boring.  It’s about improving how you present your life to your readers.  Tucker Max writes about crazy drunken adventures ending in sex.  Any frat boy could write about this and it would suck.  But Tucker Max invests time in becoming a better storyteller.  Do the same.  The story you tell is the value you give to your readers, so make sure it rocks.  Whether you’re a onion farmer or a high-class prostitute spend time crafting your epic tale, and you’ll have your personal fan club in no time

Niche blogging is the act of creating a blog with the intent of using it to market to a particular niche market.

Neither blogging nor niche marketing is a new concept. However, only in recent years has the concept of a niche blog come into being. Usually, niche blogs will contain advertisements of some sort (pay-per-click or products or both). In some cases, the purpose of the niche blog is to incite the reader into visiting another website which may then attempt to sell the reader a product or service.

Niche blogs are sometimes referred to as splogs, but this is a misnomer. Even though the desired end result for the niche blogger is to make money, the niche blog itself often contains valuable information. Most pay-per-click advertising is content-sensitive, so it is vital to the niche blogger to have useful content that is related to the chosen niche.

So how niche do you make your blog? I strongly believe that you can’t be too niche. If you want to get relevant traffic then the more you can “own” a certain niche becomes vital.
Search traffic can be obtained by all sorts of methods (just try getting an article written by Britney Cameltoe for your site) but this traffic won’t stick around unless your site offers unique value in the area of interest.

Use the scale of the Internet to develop a regular audience who can only get their fix of “Cross Dressing Welsh Bee-Keepers” or “Amish Power Tool Reviews for Spanish Speakers” from you.

If anyone can suggest the most niche blog you’ve ever seen, send us a link.