Personal Blog Income

This follows on from my morning post about Expectations and i thought it would be great to highlight some of the characteristics of successful bloggers who have made it “all the way” and are now successful.

I recently read an interesting article How to Be a Successful Blogger: Learning From the Best on Online Public Relations that discussed what successful bloggers had in common and the receipe for success as a blogger and it boiled down to the following criteria:

• Passion
• Listen
• Dialogue
• Play Fair
• Become the Resource
• Network
• Business

I like it, its certainly got all the elements of what makes a great blogger. The only thing that i think might be missing is i would suggest drive or persistence. No one gets to the top overnight and its only through a whole lot of hard work that they make it.

Next week I am going to start to introduce you to the first steps of monetizing your blogs and before I do that I wanted to take the time to talk about expectations. By now you would have read that there are people who quit their jobs to blog full time and they have bought cars, houses, holidays, put their kids through college and more. And chances are you have already thought about quitting that job yourself. You will have seen ads for get rich schemes where for one low price you can make big dollars with an exclusive plan, probably marketed along the lines of “The Shocking Truth they didn’t want you to know”

STOP!!!!

Before you spend that $19.95, $99.95 or tell the boss where to put the job I need to tell you the truth. There is no quick way to blogging riches. To make money blogging takes time, effort and perseverance despite what the flash marketing tells you. With many of those marketing schemes the only person getting rich is the author with your hard earned money.

Ready to switch off in disgust? Don’t because now its time for the good news. From day one blogging you can start to earn money from your blog and over time the money that you can earn will increase. If you’re skilled, hard working and lucky then you may be one of the relative few that do get to make blogging a full time job but for the rest of us, you can still make more than loose change from your blogs but you need to set realistic expectations.

So what are realistic expectations?

You need to set yourself reasonable goals. When I start a new blog there is a certain amount of outlay before the first entry is ever posted. There is the hosting costs, cost of the domain name(s), cost in my time and effort to get the ready to post in. And then there is the time spent researching and writing your posts. It all comes at a cost and while you are outlaying the cash, its not going to come back right away.

When I start a new blog to keep my expectations realistic is to set goals to achieve that are both obtainable and realistic. To use this blog as an example I have set the following goals

• 90 posts in 90 days

• Break even on costs by 120 days

• Make a thousand dollars in the first year of operation from this blog.

Time will tell how successful I am with this goals but none of them is impossible to achieve. Its even possible that I may succeed far more than the goals that I have set. So using my goals I have realistic expectations as there is nothing worse for motivation than setting goals that are too high and failing to achieve them in spectacular fashion.

Of course there is another side to setting goals and that is that it can also highlight what is not working and what could or should be working better. It gives you the chance to change things or even throw out old ideas and start with new ones.

I hope that this has given you a little bit of food for thought. Coming up next for those that still think they have what it takes to make it all the way to full time blogger is the characteristics of successful bloggers. How did they get where they did?

In the meantime, answer me this. What are your goals from blogging and what is the plan to get there? I look forward to reading some of your answers!

Ok so you have chosen that perfect theme for your blog and have it set up on your blog and now i am going to say one thing, STOP! At least until you read this.

A common mistake with a new blog is that you find all these things that you can add into your blog that you believe are cool and interesting. They can include the popular MyBlogLog list of the latest visitors, tweets from your tweeter account, where your visitors come from, the list goes on. Now you while you may think these are truly gods gift to bloggers but it can be doing something completely different:

Are your cool things slowing down your blog’s loading time

In these days of broadband internet, loading time isn’t quite the issue that it once was. But there are still people out there that are on dial up that don’t want to wait for your blog and its “cool stuff”. And the same is true as well for broadband users, if your blog takes more than a few seconds to load, their attention may wander and they may just visit the next place on their list.

What kind of Impression is it giving.

Another problem that can occur in addition to slow loading time is the impression it can give. If your sidebar is cluttered with different things then it is going to look exactly that, cluttered. Its going to distract the visitor from what you want then to read, your content.

What should you do

Those that have served in any army would have probably heard the expression “lean green fighting machine” and you want to create the same thing with your blog. You want it to be a lean blogging machine. A faster, leaner blog with less distractios is going to minimise the distractions that can happen and let visitors focus on why they are really there, your content.

Good luck with your new lean blogging machine!

Update: Seems i am not the only one thinking this. Andy Wibbels is Loofahing blog sidebars along the same lines as me

Its time for the next step setting up your blog, choosing a theme and its important for a number of reasons that include that its the first impression and that your theme choice can influence how your site is seen by search engines.

I will be honest when i say that i am not an expert on themes which is why I am going to refer you to a post by Meg on Blogpond Top 5 Steps for Choosing a Blog Theme where she breaks down finding a theme into 5 steps:

1. Researching - understand what makes a good blog template
2. Define your Requirements - including code structure, validates, emphasises post title and blog name
3. Investigation - finding the right theme from the multitude on offer
4. Testing/Validating - When you find that theme
5. Installation, Customisation and Follow Up

I thin its great and i have already found some errors in this theme that i will need to fix in the near future!

Next i am going to talk about a trap for new bloggers with their blog.

Just a quick one. I just noticed that Technorati has had a major revamp of its design and to me at least it seems to be a bit quicker than it has been. Techcrunch has a write up (naturally) that mentions that its to better serve a far more mainstream user base rather than just bloggers.