Writing and Making Money With a Blog

Any writer can understand that there is a risk when you write and publish online, you might not earn as much income, or traffic isn’t increasing quickly. We’d like to make money on our blogs.

There is always an element of uncertainty when you self-publish because all too often you get exactly one chance to make something. This chance is almost certain to be less than a second online- and if you’re interested in making money on a blog, you needs readers. People don’t care about how great your writing is, but rather if they can take information and fix their own writing problems. This doesn’t mean you worry about writing, it means you produce the best you can and keep your “eyes and ears open” for information affecting you.

How would you go about making money on a blog? I’m not a guru, but I’ve learned a few things about writing and blogging over the years.

1) Make it real.

If you say it once, you’d better say it well.  If you say it twice, you’d better have said it differently.  If you say it over again with feeling or passion, people will get bored.  The reality is if you have a book review blog, and you review only books you like, you’ll have a wonderful audience, but it won’t grow.  If you expand or try to expand too long after you’ve established yourself as a reader of “X” genre, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.

By making it real, you establish yourself, and you can build on the foundation of your blog and the future of your writing.   The more you are working to make your blog useful to your readers, the more they will see you as someone who has a lot to offer them.

2) YOU!

Why worry about you?  As a writer, we all have some sort of commitments in our lives, and the numbers game of blogging can be a real hard thing to accept.  It’s not about the readers sometimes, it’s about you and what you need to do to create a fantastic blog people want to first go and see, and secondly, want to tell others about.

The hard hard fact is it’s still your blog.  It won’t matter eight years from now when you decided to begin to take your hobby far more seriously, what matters is you decided. You created the blog, and then you need to take it to the next level.  It’s your readership and your people.

3) Own Up To Your Blog.

Now this is the hard one, have you sat down and taken a good look at your blog?  Go on, I’ll wait.  Okay? Good, welcome back, but I’m pretty certain, you took a look at the last few posts, or the first few but nothing in the middle of your blog.  Some bloggers have been writing for years, so there is a lot to go over.

It’s your blog, there will some great blog posts that you’ve written, so okay blog posts, and some one which you wish you’d never find again ever.  The problem is most readers will find your posts and will do some looking- and odds are they will find some of your posts you don’t like.  These posts tend to have great titles, but poor content and the two combined means money, but at a lower and slower rate.

That’s the beauty and the curse of social media- and networking.  If you don’t own up to your blog, you have a problem- and your reputation and earnings will suffer.  It’s okay to go back and begin to fix up these much needed posts, and it’s better if you say ‘yes these were bad, but I’ve made them a good blog post!’  Own your blog, post on the blog, if it’s not you it won’t be anyone else.

The more you learn about how your blog ticks the more likely you will see success.

The most important thing about making money with a blog? Watch and care about the blog, learn about SEO or what needs to be improved on your blog, and do it.  It’s a simple how to, but it makes all the difference in the world.  Use Google Analytics and learn how to leverage your writing to make a change in how readers see your blog.