Make Money by Blogging

With the financial crisis in full swing (don't let the government Inc fool you), many people are turning to the internet as a way of making money. I have made my living online for three years now, and I can promise you - it is no easy feat.

A few lucky souls hit big time by chance, and I am always amazed at the occasional "rags to riches" stories. You know the ones - single Mum starts a blog about the trials and tribulations of raising three kids alone and gets picked up by a network with a big deal TV show and goes on to world wide acclaim and fortune. I will let you in on a secret - NOT GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU. Sorry - reality bites. The chances of this being you are so slim - you would be better off buying a lottery ticket if this is any part of your plan to online success.

It is competitive out here; and I mean really, really competitive; the sort of competitive you can only dream about in the "real world," because you are not limited by geographic location and are competing with the entire world. I have had sites hacked and taken out of commission for successfully targeting the right keyword. I have people following me around and buying sites with similar names to the ones I own, and then emailing me trying to sell them to me. I have people here on hubpages copying what I write and writing an article about the same thing 3 days later. I spend more time protecting my personal sites from hackers and spammers, building links and doing background work than I do writing.

When I first started out to make money by blogging, I had this idyllic image in my head. I am well educated, can turn a mean phrase and like to think I can be witty when the moon is in the right ascension. Piece of piss - I will sit down at a computer, write about the world according to Mark and be rich and famous by next month. Ha!

Sadly - the qualities our society seem to value are not the ones I speak about. I am neither controversial enough or nasty enough to be a total success. I should be paying some Russian hacker to break into my competitors sites and destroy their databases. But - I am too much of a nice guy to do that.

Don't get me wrong - despite the fact that I live in Europe and get paid in dollars - I make a reasonable living, but it is at least 10000% harder than I anticipated, requires constant adaptation and is far less lucrative than a lot of people would have you believe. Most of the people making real money online are doing so in an underhanded - if not criminal - fashion. And that includes google.

Making money at hubpages. I would heartily recommend - if you are a beginner - starting out on hubpages and using them as a way of learning what will and will not work as far as making money goes. This site os not a blog - nor will it ever be, but there are distinct advantages to using their technical knowledge that is worth giving up 50% of the income. And yes - I know hubpages only takes 40% of the impressions - but the site is set up ion such a way as most people visiting will only visit one page of yours.

If you wish to make money by blogging, there are a number of skills you will need to learn that are completely unrelated to writing. You will need to learn how to do keyword research and create incoming links to your sites, you will need to suck it up, admit there are things you do not know and find some one you can trust to ask about where you are going wrong, but most importantly - you are going to have to learn that - even if you do everything right - it is still possible to fail. The best advice I can give is to diversify - whatever that means to you. Find as many different clients as possible if you are a freelance writer; find as many different affiliate programs as possible if you are an affiliate marketer; find as many different, unrelated niches as possible if you are making money with google adsense. Diversify, diversify, diversify.

Good luck.