Although blogging for money isn't my intention with this blog, I make money with it. I don't know about you, but I won't argue with a couple of hundred dollars per month I wouldn't otherwise get. Regardless, this blog exists for the sole purpose of keeping me busy.
When I ask "Where did we go wrong?", I'm speaking collectively because there's a whole lot us bloggers trying to make money in the wrong ways. There is only one way to make money online: Getting the right kind of traffic to your website. It doesn't matter if that traffic is social traffic, search traffic or referral traffic as long as it's the kind of traffic that meets the demands of your monetization methods.
False Assumptions
Due to all of the misinformation being written and parroted across a wide range of blogs, many people assume they can make money online as soon as they put a blog (or any kind of website) online. Even the patient people expect results within 6 months to a year. What happens when it doesn't work out for them? They either quit or they find a different way to make money.
This is what happened to Costa Fong, who recently sent me a message about Blog Gigs, whether he admits to it or not. He started his blog with the intention of making money and when the going got tough, he tried to sell it. After taking advice from the same people that I get my advice from, he didn't sell it and is instead concentrating on making money from other sources.
I don't know if Ellie, the Ultimate Geek Girl, started her blog with the intention of making money. She's been attempting to narrow the focus of her blog and has been watching her traffic decrease. The problem she's having is another false assumption: You can profit by competing in a niche that's already too competitive.
The Facts
There are several niches that are way too competitive for newcomers to get into unless you're very, very good at what you do. The make money online niche is one of them. Niches that cater to Internet geeks and nerds are others.
I'm not the only one that's made some valid conclusions from observation. Bloggers don't click on advertisements and neither do other web-savvy people. When you start a niche site of any kind, you do NOT want to target these kinds of people.
You have to face the reality of it all. New Internet users and people who aren't trying to make money online themselves are the people you need to target. Contrary to popular belief, the percentage of people using online services of any kind is a very small percentage of the global population. When new users come online for the first time and do the information search routine, it's the perfect time to capitalize on their ignorance. It sounds harsh, but it's the truth.
Advice for the Weary
If you're trying to compete in a specific niche and getting nowhere fast, redirect your attention to something else. You can use your existing site as a kind of launch pad for other endeavors. In my opinion, only the worst blogs can't be used this way.
You say you have a PageRank of 0 because you got slapped by Google for paid links? It's incredibly easy to get it restored. All you have to do is to make sure the paid links are given the "nofollow" attribute and then request reconsideration by Google. Google almost always restores the PageRank to what it was before the slap and sometimes makes it higher.
Have you been banned by Google for AdSense? You can reapply and in most cases get the ban lifted unless you were actually doing something wrong. The easiest way to prevent AdSense banning is to limit the display to searchers only. I won't get into how to do that right now, but several plugins can be used for WordPress.
If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding.
Making money online is hard work. Choosing the right way to do it is even harder, but the rewards can be amazing when you figure it all out. I've had some amazing rewards from this blog and I'm not even talking about money. The learning experience has been much more valuable than you can imagine.
As long as you learn from your mistakes and use it to your advantage, you can be successful and make money online. Blogging for money can work, but only if you know what you're doing in the first place.
