Blogging can very well be your dream job. You have flexible hours. You stay at home, and you get to write as much as you want to. You can also make a living out of it because blogging for money is a legitimate means of having a regular income. You will find hordes of advice and recommendations on how to earn serious cash from blogging. That’s not what this list is about. We’ve chosen to provide you with equally useful tips on what not to do when your aim is to earn from your blogging activities.
10. Think of it as a hobby
Blogging may be your passion and your favorite past time, but if you don’t go beyond that way of thinking, you’re not going to earn the amount you are gunning for. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of thinking. But being stuck with this perspective will not get the cash flowing. If you are serious about generating a regular income from your blog then think of it as a business venture, and not as a hobby. In this way, you will invest the proper amount of time and resources. Remember, you reap what you sow.
9. Go about it thinking, “To h–l with the learning curve!”
This attitude will earn you cool points, but it won’t get you any extra cash. Blogging requires work and no matter how good a writer you are, you need to learn how to blog because those are two different things. You will have to learn a lot. For some, the learning curve is rather steep. But if you start out with the right attitude, then you’ll find yourself on the road to getting rich from blogging very soon. And since there are many tools and resources available now, you won’t have to learn blogging the hard way. Be grateful that things are easier now because it was not always so.
8. Set it up at Blogger.com
Blogger is a great platform if income generation is not part of your blogging objectives. Blogger is a free service and thus possess limited flexibility and potential. And since somebody else is hosting your blog (that’s what Blogger does) you do not own it and can’t really earn money from it. There are ways and means to get passive income from ads, but it’s not the serious cash that you project to earn from all the effort you’ve given. If in the future you can find a buyer (people do buy blogs) it would be difficult to sell something that is not self-hosted, no matter how well it had been built and how high the traffic is.
7. Write for everyone
If you do not have a target audience at all, better get back on the drawing board and decide on that essential building block first. You can’t write for everyone if you want to earn a regular income from blogging. You have to find a niche that you are knowledgeable about and write about a narrow set of topics. From there you can build an audience that will keep coming back and bring in the revenues with them. People actually browse the Web for very specific reasons. You have to find out where you fit in the grand scheme of things.
6. Slack it out and a sloth away
If you did not get it the first time, then we’ll say it again. Blogging is hard work, especially of your aim is to get a regular income from it. You can sit back and relax and let the ads on your blog bring in the cash, but that only happens when you have a tremendous amount of global traffic to your site. Have you done enough to get that traffic coming in regularly? If not, you’ll only be waiting in vain.
5. Think of it as passive income
Eventually, you can sell your blog/s for five digits or so, but thinking of it as passive income at the outset is a loser’s mindset. It might be true that blogging is one of the more popular means of getting passive income you might end up being passive about it. So, think of it rather as a means of getting just reward for hard work done. You’ll be doing a lot of work before the money comes while you just slack around. Don’t put a mental block and maintain a productive work ethic.
4. Build a blog at WordPress.com
WordPress is an excellent blogging platform for many reasons. But if you are at WordPress.com you are still not self-hosted. It’s a good thing WordPress.org is here. You can customize all you want, and best of all you own the site. Doesn’t it make sense to own a business that you intend to make money from?
3. Snub the “Follow” button
We’ve already said that huge site traffic equals huge monetary returns. Being involved in various networking strategies help a lot in increasing traffic to your website. I you keen holding off on clicking that “follow” button, then you’d be stuck in limbo. When you follow other bloggers, you expose your own blog to their followers and they will probably follow you. Establishing a wide network is key to readership and readership gets the money flowing. So, waste no more time and follow more blogs today.
2. Neglect the Math
So, let’s say that you already have established your blog as a worthwhile online destination. To make the most income from it, you also have to know how to calculate the value of your blog. The figure you will end up with will factor in your monthly revenues from ads and other income sources. Think about it this way. When you are selling a blog, you are selling a business that you have built from scratch. And that is why you have to spend time doing the Math. And you’d better do it right or you end up losing a lot.
1. Mix business with pleasure
If you recall the premise of this list, we said that these are things that you should NOT be doing if you want to earn serious money from blogging. At the outset separate your personal online accounts from those that you have designed to make money. And so, here are our final words. Do not mix personal accounts with business accounts. You’d save yourself a lot of headache when the time has come to sell your blog for the right price.
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