You keep hearing about all these people making 6 figure salaries, sitting at home blogging and your asking yourself, “why can’t I do some of that too?” Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of hard work to get your Blog to a point where it can make you enough of an income to start living purely off your Blog earnings. If you’re thinking of creating a money making Blog there are a few things you need to think about before getting started.

The first key questions is, what are you passionate about. You are going to have to devote a lot of time to writing posts for your Blog so it better be something that you have a passion for or else your readers will see straight through you. I started this Blog because I love finding new ways of making money on the web and discovering new and even more innovative ways to conduct Internet marketing. I also love to pass those skills on to others, as people did for me when I was trying to learn.

Secondly, if you want to make money from it. Is there anybody out there that wants to read about your passion? To make money, you need people to come to your site. It is therefore, very important that you do some research and find out how many people are looking for the information you are going to offer.

Finally, have you got something to offer. This is the easiest part to fix if you don’t have the skills and knowledge currently to write about your passion. The great thing about the web, you can learn it! Some of the most popular Blogs are written by people learning about something. It tracks their triumphs and highlights the pitfalls for those going after them. So if you’re passionate about something, learn about it and chronic al the process in your Blog. I’m always learning about new ways of earning money online and I write about them here. If I find a scam, I let people know so that they don’t make the same mistakes I did!

Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

There are 3 things you need to have a successful Blog. The first is traffic, secondly you need more traffic and most importantly you need more traffic. Without traffic you can’t make money from your Blog! How do I get traffic I hear you ask? Write good original value adding content and traffic will find you! If you write good articles, these articles begin to appear in del.icio.us and Digg.com. Those sites can bring thousands of visitors to your Blog. It is then up to you to make sure you have lots of great content there to keep them, and more importantly, entice them back again. Make it easy for them to come back. Have a “Add to Favourites” button or a newsletter they can sign up to. Then make sure you write even more great content.

If you want a Blog that will attract a lot of visitors, that is the key. All the tricks and tips you may read about may work to get people to your site but if there is nothing on your site once they get there then they are not going to stick around. Great content = Blog success.

One other avenue to pursue when starting out are Blog Carnivals. If you’re not sure what they are then read the FAQ on their site. Submit your best posts to the appropriate carnivals for your market. They are a great way of getting links and traffic to yours site. Make sure that you use them correctly though. Don’t just send them any old junk. Carnivals give you a great chance to get your unknown Blog some exposure so make sure you’re giving it the kind of exposure that you want!

There are lots of other ways to attract traffic to your site and I’ll go into those in future posts. But get this first part right and you will be well on the road to achieving those Blog earnings that you’re after.

Starting to earn an income

No that you’ve got all this traffic coming to your Blog, you have to start finding ways of making money from them. There are a variety of income streams you can look at. To begin with I would look at Adsense and text link advertising. You may get some complaints from some of your visitors about having ads on your site but the vast majority of people are happy for you to earn an income from the free information you are providing for them.

I mainly use Text Link Ads on my Blogs and can’t recommend them highly enough. Once you’re accepted it is very quick to implement (took my less than an hour to put on 10 different websites) and they pay well. There is a 50/50 split but even with this percentage split, their rates are good and if you have a popular Blog, they normally sell out all the ads.

Adsense is another great way of earning money but be careful not too make them too obtrusive. A great place to put them is at the bottom of your posts. It presents your visitors with somewhere to go once they are finished reading your articles.

They are many other opportunities out there and it really is a matter of trying out which ones work best for you and tweak them and their placement until you get the best results.

Blogging can be a lot of fun and it’s always great to be able to earn an income writing about what you’re passionate about. Get it right and you could live the life of a full time Blogger!