Hi guys, I wanted to share something with you about making money online by blogging. Hopefully this helps someone out.
Let me start with this. About 16 months ago I decided to launch a blog focusing on an area of life I've been studying for well over 13 years which is Personal Development. In April 2006 I launched PaulPiotrowski.ca which later became SelfHelpWisdom.com. My intention when launching the site was to write free Self Improvement articles, similar to Steve Pavlina, to help people out.
I never went into it looking to make big money because I already have a job and I don't "need" to make money from blogging. However, lately I've been doing a lot of research online and realizing that I have been growing dissatisfied with the amount of traffic coming to my site. Meaning, it is pretty disheartening when you spend 4 hours writing an article only to later find out nobody read it, or 2 people read it.
Now, I understand that blog traffic doesn't happen overnight and I understand that it takes a while to get going, but lately I've been doing research and I'm finding out that
writing useful content is totally not enough when it comes to blogging. I'm realizing that I am doing a disservice to my POTENTIAL READERS by having a blog that doesn't get enough traffic.
Let me give you guys an example. Recently I wrote this post:
» Will Power is Nothing: How to Get Yourself To Do What You Want To Do - Self Help and Personal Growth Blog by Paul Piotrowski
It's an article I wrote up on the topic of Will Power. I sent a copy of it to a few of my friends that enjoy my articles and it had a big impact on them. I'm not trying to stroke my ego, all I'm trying to say is that when people DO read my articles, I normally get good responses, so I must be doing something right? Also, outside of the blogosphere I have been very successful, so I know the stuff I talk about WORKS. I've used it in my life and it WORKS.
Anyways, now look at this link and check out the video John Chow posted of Sally doing the Potty Dance:
Miscellaneous Ramblings - 8/24/2007 | John Chow dot Com
Ok. I'll try to say this as nicely as I can, but basically I spend HOURS writing my articles, all of which have personally tested knowledge in them that took me YEARS to derive and simplify from reading hundreds of self help books and personal experimentation - and I get very small amounts of traffic. John Chow has posts of a little girl doing the POTTY DANCE - and his site traffic outranks Steve's. Do you see where I'm going with this? There's something wrong with the formula here.
Yes I do realize that John Chow makes useful posts as well, but my point is that 90% of John Chow's success is his ability to DRIVE TRAFFIC and MARKET his site and 10% is the value of his content. His topic of interest is Making Money Online, which requires lots of traffic so he works on getting traffic to his site (and then monetizing of course).
SO, instead of bellyaching, after MONTHS of research on building traffic online, etc. I have decided to launch a new blog seperate from my Self Improvement blog aimed at helping people to improve driving traffic to their blog and helping them make money online using their blog.
My intention is to document every step I make from having a site at a complete ZERO to building it's traffic up to the level of StevePavlina.com or JohnChow.com etc. I know that ProBlogger.net and JohnChow.com already kind of do something similar, but I think they have some big gaps on their sites. I've been reading both of them plus many others for months (including Steve's) and haven't found all the anwers I've been looking for how to make money from a blog and how to drive enough traffic to it.
Anyway, my new blog is called
http://www.InspiredBlogger.com and if any of you would be willing to offer ideas, comments, suggestions, I would be very grateful. I am very excited to build this site focused on making money with it and sharing how I'm doing it with everyone else. Note that if the URL doesn't work, it's because the DNS hasn't propagated yet. I only registered the domain a few hours ago. It should be up very soon.