2010 is a tough time for many writers who wish to become successful bloggers. The handful of mega-successful bloggers out there have gotten there after working hard for long periods of time. But do you know how long it took for each one to make enough money to quit their jobs and work on their blogs full time?

Timelines

The time it takes an individual to make his/her blog a hit varies from blogger to blogger. There is no universal goal for making money, and each blog owner contributes a certain amount of time writing, networking, and marketing. This results in the fact that it may take you a year to reach success, while it takes 4 years for someone else.

What affects your timeline is your ability to “make time” and understand that in the end, it will pay off. This might mean that you have to skip that movie at the drive-in, or stop your addiction to primetime television. I would like to quote Dave Ramsey here with the following sentence. “Live like no one else, so later you can live like no one else”. This means that you may be giving up things right now, but you won’t have to later in life. I have to admit that for me I can’t wait forever to live like no one else. I have to see something happen in order for me to continue on. But luckily I am pretty patient. I currently work full time from home blogging, consulting, and designing/marketing websites. My goal is to blog full time which I should reach within the next 6 months.

Timeline Breakdown

• Stay focused: Do not let the world distract you from performing the work.
• Network or FAIL: Without traffic, you will fail. Utilize other blogs, social networks, and forums to establish relationships.
• Be realistic: Set a goal and it doesn’t have to be financial. You can set a traffic goal or a goal of Alexa traffic rank. Increase your goals realistically as you reach them.
• Be yourself: You are an individual, and your posts should reflect that. Don’t copy others in order to reach success.

Focus

Your ability to focus is what determines how successful you will be and when. Choose a topic or a few topics that you love to write about, and stick to them. You will notice that my personal blog focuses on blogging, internet marketing, and finance related topics. I do sometimes post some mini articles or news items that I find interesting, but that makes me more human to my readers. I do revert quickly back to my main topics, so it is not an issue.

Networking

Networking means conversing with others. There are many different ways to network and I would never limit myself to a single method. I use social networks, blog comment marketing, guest blogging, article publishing on 3rd party publishers, and other means to network. In addition, when I write an informative post, I tend to social bookmark it with services like StumbleUpon and Digg.

Your chances of getting a lot of traffic is determined by your networking abilities. If you are a blogging virgin, then you need to learn how to network right away.

Realism

If you don’t set goals, you are going at this venture half-cocked. Your chances of failure are great, and more than likely you will fail within a couple of months. Keep in mind here that investors and banks would never loan out business funding without a business plan. They require a plan that shows them how you intend to repay them, and what your exit strategy is. The same rule should apply to blogging. Without a plan, you have nothing to look forward to. If you simply want to make a million dollars then your goal is too naive.

You need to set realistic goals. An example of a realistic goal would be to establish an average of 10 comments per blog post. Start small and increase your goals in time. Your goals shouldn’t all be self serving either. You should create a goal to write one good article every day for a year. You can get around this by writing multiple articles in a single day and scheduling them to publish one every day. That way you can take breaks and avoid blog burnout.

Be yourself

It is wise to choose a topic or topics to focus on, but occasionally you need to be yourself. Readers want more than a teacher. They have had enough school already, and don’t need you to constantly tell them how they should do things or how they should think. They want to know how you think, and how you get things done.

Being yourself means being vulnerable to others. Putting yourself out there will show that you are more than a professor, and they can relate to you better which increases the chances they will return to your blog. You can probably do this by writing an extensive “about me” page. You can post occasionally about what you are doing in life, or share your blogging successes with others.

The result

The result of your efforts will be more than making money with your blog. The entire process will make you into a better person. You will grow rich with experience and knowledge to share with others. You will feel the personal achievement which will make you happy, and that is something money can’t buy.

Now I ask you to share this potential happiness by re-tweeting or bookmarking this article and tell everyone you know about it.

I have tried for many years to create a viable work-at-home formula that works. Like most everyone first starting out, I tried the vast amount of shortcuts to get rich quick. There’s lots of get-rich information available online, but the fact is that most of it is junk. The only ones getting rich off of the information they provide are the ones selling the information.
Information sales are a huge business with many entrepreneurs looking to cash in. The ones that make it to the finish line are those who present the information well, and take advantage of the people looking to make a quick buck with affiliate sales.

Eventually, I picked up on blogging. The problem with blogging is that it was definitely not a get-rich-quick solution. Blogging is very time consuming and requires lots of dedication and hard work. It is easy to give up trying to create a successful blog because of the amount of time and work it takes to even get readers. The good thing is that it does in fact happen, if only you gave it enough time.

I have personally found that in order to even get a couple of dedicated readers, it takes approximately 3 months of daily posting and internet marketing to make your blog known to others. My beginning involved researching, and using knowledge already obtained in order to write extensive articles. I wrote so much that I scheduled blog posts weeks ahead of time just in case I was unable to blog on a daily basis. What ended up happening was that I posted multiple times per day. This created a demand for information by search engine spiders that literally crawled my blog 24/7, indexing every single word, picture, and audio content that I published.

When I was not researching and writing, I was marketing my blog on the internet by commenting on other blogs and including a link to mine. I took part in forums and provided my blog link in my signature. I sent out replies to emails with my blog link in them. I linked my blog to many social networking sites and even had my blog feeds imported into them. And the list goes on.

If you are unable to ‘at least’ write articles and schedule them to post at least one per day, and marketing your blog, then give up right now. If you do give up, please send this article link over to someone else who can benefit from it.

What are my options?

The cool thing about blogs is that there are many platforms available to you. Some of them are free, while others cost a one-time or monthly fee. Luckily, one of the best blogging platforms on the market is completely open-source and so are various plugins and templates. The platform I am talking about is called wordpress.

The other platforms out there are not nearly as popular or reliable as wordpress, but you can easily locate them by googling “free blog script”. There are platforms available in different programming languages also. WordPress runs on the php development language which requires a linux/unix setup and mysql.

Setting up your blog:

Setting up a blog is relatively easy. If you sign up for hosting, and you are a non-programmer or unfamiliar with computers, then make sure your host includes an easy script installation. Namely wordpress. There are some hosts that allow you to install wordpress with a few simple mouse clicks, enabling you to avoid manual setup of the database that stores the information.

How does your blog look?

There are many aspects of the layout of your blog that are important to think of from the beginning. When I started BrandonConnell.com I was thinking about how I was going to monetize it, and what it looked like aesthetically. Looks are important to me, but so is ease of access for my readers.

The cool thing about wordpress is that there are many free designs available for download. You can get some from the official wordpress site at www.wordpress.org/extend or you can do a google search for “free wordpress themes” and find other sites offering them.

When you do find a few designs that you like, make sure they are widget compatible. If they aren’t, then chances are you will have a hard time using some of the unique plugins available to help monetize and market your blog. Most designers these days make blog themes widget friendly.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization, also known as seo, is an entire industry. You will find tons of seo companies out there who’s job it is to make your website search engine friendly, and if you hire them to, market your website online. The fees for such services range from $300 per month all the way up to $10,000 per month depending on what you are able to budget and wanting to achieve. Luckily, I will tell you how to make your blog search engine friendly for nothing more than the cost of this book.

When I talk about seo from here on out, I will also use the word to describe what is known as search engine marketing even though the two are separate entities. I might also refer to search engine marketing as sem.

Blogs are some of the most search engine friendly types of websites out there. The biggest asset of a blog is the constantly added fresh and unique text content that you provide. Secondary is the images, video, and other media that you publish. Just because blogs are search engine friendly already doesn’t mean that you can’t make them even more search engine friendly.

Permalinks are basically the links that you see in the URL after the .com or other extension used by your domain name. When you initially install wordpress, you will notice that the links are dynamic.

Choose your topic:

The topic you choose to write about on your blog will be your motivation. Every single day, you will have to come up with something to say about this topic so make your choice wisely.

I am a strong advocate of anti-niche. If you are not familiar, niche means narrowing down a topic to something specific. If you like to do wood crafting as a hobby and want to write about it, then wood crafting is your niche. Your readers will be people interested in wood crafting, and believe it or not you will end up with a large loyal following in this niche.

The anti-niche is something I believe in which basically means that I will not blog about a single thing. If you see my blog you are on now, you will notice that I blog about blogging, marketing, investing, news, and technology among other things. My argument for this is that I will bring in multiple sources of traffic from people of all niches who link to me, or find me through search engine rankings.

What do you blog about?

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