If you decided to start blogging to make a few quick, easy bucks, your going to be in for a world of disappointment. However, in no way am I saying it isn’t possible to monetize and generate passive income from them.

Blogging requires a great amount of time and effort to write great article posts and market it effectively. If you want to take the money path, you have to treat it as a business.

Take this Pavlina post for example, he tells his story of how he was able to make a living of of his blog, and provides some tips to newbies at blogging. He didn’t start out with just a couple of ideas and hoped for the best, he offers a unique perspective on life and writes about something he is passionate about, Personal Development.

Most people are probably thinking that you could write maybe about 15 or 20 posts for their site, place some ads on their site, and expect the income to just roll right in, however this is certainly not the case, it doesn’t work that way. How do I know this? It’s because I had a similar mindset when I was first starting out.

Take my first site I ever created as a prime example, Toptenlisted.com. I started out thinking that if I wrote a few Top 10 Lists that were mildly interesting, my income opportunities would roll right in and I’d be flowing with the cash. Not necessarily scamming people or anything, I just thought I originally had a great idea, only to learn that there were already at least 5 or 10 other competing sites (another lesson to learn here, make sure you do your research properly beforehand).

I first started out with my ideas back in the Fall of 2006. I figured I’d purchase some Website designing software (Dreamweaver), use a common template without knowing much about HTML or CMS systems, slap some content together, and I’d be on my way. This was before I really knew how wonderful Wordpress can be.

I completed everything I mentioned around February of ‘07, and I can honestly say my first site attempts were awful. Take a look at the site archives of Toptenlisted to get a few screenshots of what it looked like.

After I realized just how awful my designs were, I thought that I couldn’t create something great. But then I decided to look around at Wordpress.org and played with a few designs until I finally rested on my current theme, which looks pretty good to me at this moment, in my opinion, miles better than what I first started out with.

Although I felt my design was OK, and I had a fair amount of content written for it, it was too restricting for me. I feel that my mind is always racing with ideas and always writing a “Top 10 Reasons…..” or a “Top 10 Ways…..” was just holding me back, thus the reasoning for this blog’s creation was born.

You have to keep it at and not give up so easily, even now with my current blog, I’ve made about a grand total of $10 via adsense. However, money is not my primary concern at this moment, you have to build a traffic base and network with others who have similar interests as yours. If monetizing and writing for money is your primary reason for getting into blogging, you probably won’t be very happy with the results you receive.

Vangogh gave me some great advice a while back (over 6 months ago) on the Webmaster Talk Thread “How do you build Quality Links?” (among others, such as St0x and Seolman, etc. not to discredit the advice everyone else also gave, but Steven’s really hit me). I’d recommend reading this thread if you’re just starting out and would like to receive some great insight on blogging and internet networking, or to find out just how much of a n00b I was back then (Not saying I’m not a n00b anymore, that’s still up for debate ).

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Blogging, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.