Creating a blog to make money with

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve wasted a lot of time doing things the wrong way on the internet. I’m stubborn and I’ve always felt that I learn best by making mistakes. It’s true, but the downside of that philosophy is that I’ve spent the past five years making the same mistakes that others had already made. I could have spent a month or two doing intensive study as I am doing now and then spent the other 50 or so months actually earning money instead of floundering in the waters of internet blog monetization.

I’d love to save you the same realization. Since you have found your way here, chances are that you are serious about making money through blogging. You are actually taking the time to learn what mistakes others have made. Let me tell you about the first mistake I made in learning how to make money on the web:

Mistake #1:

I thought that if I simply created a blog and started putting cool things on it people would find it and then I would earn money from it.

Sure, sties like Boingboing do that and they make tons of money, but they also have a committed and motivated team that is filled with tech savvy, content savvy, marketing savvy people. Boingboing is not just some guy reading the news and posting what he finds. The truth is the internet is littered with this kind of blog. I come across them all the time, I enjoy them, but not many of them make money. Boingboing is the exception and not the rule.

Mistake #2. Refusing to let go.

In my first blog, I succeeded in creating a cool blog with lots of cool postings. I failed in that it had no focus, most of my content was lifted from news sites, readers didn’t know how to find me, and over the course of five years I ended up making a total of about $3500. Most of that came in the last six months I had the blog. You know why? Because I started paying attention to what works and what doesn’t.

Ultimately, I felt that holding on to my behemoth of a blog was actually going to hold me back from creating something that actually works so I decided to let it go and shift my focus to News Notion and doing things the right way. I’m certain that part of the reason I’ve been floundering over the past couple of years is because I refused to let go of my monster. Now I have.

Building a blog to make money with
And here we are. Possibly you already have a blog. Possibly you are reading this because you are going to build a blog. Either way, I recommend that you learn or refresh yourself with the basics. Before you do anything else, I recommend that you go to Bloggercise.com.

Bloggercise is a free, easy to navigate website that takes you through the ten steps necessary to build a blog the right way. I’ve seen a lot of websites devoted to this information on the web, but this is by far the one that does it best. You can read through the entire site in an hour or less. Bloggercise covers choosing a name, finding hosting, CMS, monetization, and more.

I hope this helps to save you from wasting five years like I did. But don’t worry, the upside of wasting those five years is that I’ve learned enough to make me succeed. And I had fun the whole way.