Its hard for any new blog, (including mine) to break in to the ”Make Money Blogging” niche. With so many established blogs out there, writing about the same sort of things we like to write about, it can be quite a struggle keeping up your motivation. Another thing that can really bring you down are your blogs stats. Everyday I have to stare at my Alexa ranking, a lowly 2 million and something. Next in line is my Technorati Authority, an embarrassing 5. Feedburner, an excellent addition to any blog. It’s just a shame you only have 22 subscribers. Probably the biggest area of your ‘’stats” is traffic. I use Google Analytics. I’m pretty sure most other blogs do too. It’s nice to look at Googles pretty pie charts and graphs. But it’s demoralising when one day you receive 130 visits, then the next day you only receive 35 visits. If I was talking about thousands it wouldn’t be so bad. 
Getting your blog noticed is easier said than done. People are forever telling new blogs to get entrecard. Fair enough, it brings in traffic. But the traffic isn’t what I like to call quality traffic. People only visit you’re blog to drop their card on you. How many people can say that they read all 300 of the blogs they drop on daily? How many people can say that read 5 blogs out of the 300?
Another thing new blogs are told is to always comment on other blogs. This will get your blog noticed and you will be rewarded with people commenting you back. Hmmmm, getting noticed maybe. Getting comments back? Not 100% true. I comment on a lot of blogs, I mean a lot! I think I’ve received about 3 comments back. Is it just me? Or has anyone else noticed that?
Ahhh, the most important one. Make sure you quality is of the highest standard. If you have high quality content your traffic will increase. Maybe, but don’t you have to do the whole promotion thing first? How can someone view your amazing content if they don’t know about your blog?
This post isn’t a rant, I’m not moaning about my blog not being very well known yet. I just think the whole blog promotion thing is very very difficult. A lot of the time it seems like you’re going backwards rather than forwards. I guess if I wanted to bring in traffic I could hold contests. But why on earth would I want to do that? My blog isn’t about giving away money. It’s about making money. Plus, everyone is holding contests at the moment. I like to different.
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March 3rd, 2008 at 11:56 am
Yeah, blogging is a tricky business. I haven’t bothered with blogging. I prefer to create sites for my affiliate products. I have the same kind of problems with promotion though. Competing on google adwords is a big battle.
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:53 pm
“130 visits, then the next day you only receive 35 visits. If I was talking about thousands it wouldn’t be so bad”
I dunno.. 130,000 visits dropping to 35,000 visits, that’d be devastating ;-).
Best of luck with the blog.
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Seriously, people should start looking away from the blog itself, or the affiliate products, to make money online. Provide real value. Take a step back and look at the entire Web 2.0 and the implications it has on industry and create!
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Andrew - Lol, actually it would be pretty devastating. But at least you still have a good amount of visitors.
Entrepreneur - I haven’t tried affiliate products yet. I doubt I ever will. There’s just to much competition. Money with blogs. From what I’ve seen it does seem quite possible. Ad space, paid reviews etc.
Moving away from blogging and affiliates, I know there are many many other ways of making decent money. Selling flash files seems to be quite popular at the moment. I know handful of people over at flashden.net who are making 1000’s a month.