Blogging blues!   We all get them.

You know, you’ve been blogging for a while happy as lark, topic after topic tripping off the keyboard like there was no tomorrow.  Traffic is growing and even some comments are being left by your appreciative  readers when BAM!  Just like that when you should be feeling like you’re sitting on top of the world, the blogging blues take hold.

Suddenly:

-          You have nothing more to say

-          A commenter challenged your content and therefore (you think) your authority is being questioned.

-          Traffic has stalled

-          Alexa no longer loves you

-          You are not making any money

-          Doubt sets in – is this the right niche?

-          The topics on other blogs are always more enticing

-          You begin to flirt with the idea of a hmmmm… an online affair of a different kind

-          Your blog no longer appears attractive to you

-          Posting becomes a chore

-          Google has banished you to the sandbox

If you have ever experienced any of the above – or, all of them at once – you’re in good company.  There isn’t a top blogger around who at some point or another didn’t come up against the same challenges.   It’s as if you turn a corner and the road ahead is nothing but one speed bump after another.

You feel as if all your hard work is for naught, that the universe is set against you and you sink into a real funk – you get the blues and you get them bad.

If there is anything I can say to you at this point  it is that you do not give in – don’t succumb .  Simply add the experience as one of the rites of passage in your blog income career.  There are ways to deal with each of these speed bumps.   Check in tomorrow and the day after and then again … all of the above will be tackled one by one until once again you feel like you are standing on top of the world – a champion blogger!

This is a question I often get asked.

The real answer is that it differs blogger to blogger.  But that’s not what the question is about.  The question is about my blog income life.  It’s not stated that way but I know.  So I answer accordingly.

I think that there is some disappointment when my answer fails the litmus test.  People have read and heard that there are bloggers out there who are living the life of Riley, drinking fine wines, dining on epicurean delights, travelling to exotic destinations and living in the house of their dreams.

The answer is that yes, there are bloggers who do pull in the big bucks and enjoy a lifestyle to which many aspire – bloggers or otherwise.  The disappointment is in my answer.

Amongst my friends I am living the life of Riley – now wasn’t he the real life spy after whom Fleming supposedly modeled James Bond? – after all I ditched the 9 to 5 a long time ago, have the luxury of doing what I please during the week as opposed to leaving things like mountain hikes and day fun trips to places like Whistler for the weekends.

Actually I probably put in longer hours than my 9 to 5 friends.  Not all my time is devoted to blogging.  I have several businesses and each needs my time.  Internet marketing is a new venture for me and so far the ROI, both in terms of money and time invested is miniscule.  So if I do drink a fine wine even if only now and then it is not because of my blog income – not yet.

The question that goes begging then is why do I persist with blogging if my other sources of income are sufficient to buy me that fine wine – even if only now and then?

The answer is passive income and living the life of Riley – eventually.  Fine wine any time I want it!

Most of my business activities are linear – that is, produce the results and make the money.  There is no recurring income for having done something one time and having a  check arrive in the mail on a regular basis.  No, actually I do have one such business in network marketing and it is the reason I looked at internet marketing in the first place – to market it online.

I got hooked.

Internet marketing had a lot of intuitive appeal to me.  I dove in head first.

After taking several courses the penny dropped – the best place to cut your teeth on internet marketing is in blogging.  Hard costs are minimal.  Expertise is gained on the job and progress is largely dependent on time available and general comfort level with the internet.

So perhaps the proper question at this point of my blog income life is

“What does the time you spend on blogging look like?”

On average I put in four hours a day.  Not all those hours are devoted to Blog Income Life as I have other blogs which I market online.  Ironically it is these others that make bank for me.   Here are the activities that make up the four hours a day on blogging:

1. Writing content.  I write fresh, original content for all my online marketing – that goes for blog posts, article marketing, long sales letters, squeeze pages  and feeder pages.
2. Publishing to appropriate venues.
3. Visiting similar content blogs
4. Commenting on blogs
5. Visiting forums
6. Social media marketing

These activities are what I would term as high gain, their function is to ultimately make me money.

In addition to high gain activities I also schedule at least an hour a day to continue my internet marketing studies.  I still buy courses that I think will help broaden my knowledge and more importantly online experience – it`s what I call muscle building.  Confession:  sometimes this part of the day does not get done.

Sorry … the blogging money truck may have left but it has not arrived at my doorstep yet.  The little guy, the tonka truck makes frequent stops though.

What do you think is at the core of the question of “What does your blog income life look like?“

Curiosity for one.

But I think the question is deeper than that.  I think that the real question is `

“Is it true about what they say about blogging – that you can make a lot of money in no time flat and with little effort?”

They have seen the ads, read the long sales letters, watched the videos.  What they take away is that this is a piece of cake and anyone can have the cake and eat it too.  Overnight success is shouted from one guru to another.  The questioner wants me to validate this with an affirmative, that yes, I make gobs of money blogging.

The truth is that overnight success can and does happen – most often after months and months, even years of continuous effort.  Ask any guru – most have put in the time in some way or another on the internet.  Even John Chow who started to make $40K per month in less than two years on his blog already had another online business.  To hear him tell it, his John Chow blog kind of just happened.  It appears that way, but John has smarts and had already built up his internet muscles and when you already have muscles, the heavy lifting isn`t so heavy.

What I find enormously rewarding with my internet marketing in that for the first time in many years there is a learning curve to scale.   Too often we  get into a groove that has become comfortable and that groove provides us with what we need.  We don`t need to learn new things to perform well.  For me internet marketing was completely new.  I had to engage my brain and apply.

On this blog I write about things I have learned and experienced in my blogging career.   I hope that the content is of value to you, my visitor; that you can take a nugget or two away with you and that it will help you in your own journey to a profitable blog income life.

An unexpected bonus.  Well you could have knocked me over with a feather as I never would have thought that I would enjoy studying but I find  the challenge of learning invigorating, it’s like feeding your brain that has been starving all this time.  Feels good.

So for now my blog income life is mostly about learning, applying and measuring … and a whole lot of satisfaction with the progress I am making.  Financial success?  Promise, I’ll let you know.  If there is one piece of advice I can give it is simply this:  stay the course,  correct, continue.

Here’s to your blog income!

Today I met Maren Kate.  Never heard of her before.  I met her on my blog visiting route over at Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income.  She is a guest blogger there and her article is about how to turn an active income into a passive income , I’m not going to go into the details here as you can just hop on over there and read the whole original article, it’s what I would call PDG – pretty damn good.

Of course after reading the post I took the time to visit Maren’s own blog – Escaping the 9 to 5. Impressed me all to bits – of course I subscribed to the RSS.  But that’s not the point here, the point I want to make is that if you are an aspiring professional blogger, blocking a bit of time for blog hopping is a smart thing to do.

I admit that for the longest time I was an online hermit.  Staying at home at my Blog Income. Write and they will come was my modus operandi.  Then some kind visitors left a comment here and there.  That got my curiosity up.  Who are these people I thought. Why don’t I find out more?  Why don’t I go and visit their blog and find out what they are all about?

Timidly I ventured out.  First I just hung out – then one day steeled up enough nerve to make a small comment and that is how I discovered a whole new community of awesome bloggers.   Now I go blog hopping several times a week – and daily if I can.

Here is how blog hopping helped me:

FRESH CONTENT

By fresh content I don’t mean that the blog is original in thought, topic or presentation.  No.  Fresh content is the first sign of a good blog and by that I mean that the blog owner has taken the time and effort to write the article herself.  There is nothing new under the sun after all, but originality in perspective is compelling.

I was once on a tour in a foreign city.  The tour guide showed us where to stand and click for the best photo shots of famous landmarks.  I was pleased that when I had them printed they looked just like the postcards I bought and sent home.

But the group I was with was made up of journalists and photographers.  The photographers snapped from different angles, played with shadows and lens filters and created a view of the same scene that was so very different.

That is one of the major reason I like to visit other blogs.  To read about the same topic as seen through the lens of another.

GOOD CONVERSATION

Blogs are set up to be interactive.  Readers are welcome to leave comments on the post.  Often the comments present yet another aspect of the topic at hand.  This opens the mind, broadens not only your knowledge but also introduces you to the way others think.  Sometimes the comments are thought provocative and take you to places you would not have visited on your own, sometimes they pose a question or answer one and sometimes they prompt you to write a comment of your own.

It won’t be long before you recognize the regulars and just like in real life you’ll “bump” into them as commenters on another blog.  You bond. Each blogger brings something unique to the table and I have found that the community of bloggers is a generous lot, sharing and offering to help.

LINK JUICE

When you finally get out of your shell and start to post comments, there is a section in the comments format to leave your blog URL, this is a backlink. Backlinks are desirable to have – the more the better.  Somehow they factor in the algorithms when search engines rank your site, moreover when a spider crawls a site with your URL as a backlink, it will go and crawl your site as well.

One point to consider here. Many sites are  “no follow” which means that there is a message to spiders not to follow the backlinks back to the commenter’s site.  Some people won’t leave comments on “ no follow” blogs.  Frankly, if I like the blog and its content and wish to comment I will whether it is a “do” or a “no” follow blog.   The link to your site is live no matter whether it is a “do” or a “no” follow and often other commenters hop on over to your blog.

You might be interested in reading in these related posts:

Link Building Part I
Link Building Part II

BLOG ETIQUETTE

Remember when you are visiting someone’s blog you are a guest.  When you join in the conversation and make a comment make it relevant to the content on the post, and please, please, please do not leave throw away lines like “cool stuff dude” … that smacks of milking for link juice and is spamish.

Comment spamming is on the rise and many bloggers have posted their policies as to what will and will not be approved for publishing.  Generally speaking Akismet or similar plugins catche most spam and it never sees the light of day but I have had a spate of spammy stuff recently that is why it is a good idea to configure your own comment section so that comments need to be pre-approved  before publishing.

When someone has taken the time to visit your blog and leave a comment, it is common courtesy to acknowledge the commenter.  A return visit to the commenter’s blog with a comment of your own is a nice touch.

Here’s to Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

I buy your products and visit your blog often but a recent post of yours  got my hackles up.  In your post of Feb 09 “Where 99% of Bloggers Go Wrong” you pulled no punches and pretty much told those of us who are blogging about blogging to pack it up.  The topic has been done to death and extremely well by uber bloggers who cut their chops on this subject and have entrenched themselves as experts for life.  They hold top positions and rankings with all the major search engines for just about every keyword associated with earning an online income and its not likely that any new blogger can add value or anything new to that which has already been written about in every which way except Sunday.

The “A” Listers have got it in spades and who are we to think that our humble efforts would ever see the light of day or  receive the blessings of Google and rub shoulder with the likes of Darren Rowse , Yaro Starak or John Chow – just to name a few.

Whew!  Nathan, you might be right.

That’s a lot of humble pie to eat.

But not so fast my boy.  At the risk of offending someone I admire – yes, you Nathan  here are my two cents worth, a retort if you will:

I am a “Z”Lister – no, you know what, make that a “Y” Lister (recently promoted myself).  I am a shameless hussy climbing the ladder to success and I notice that there are other aspiring bloggers blogging on blogging who are riders on the up escalator ahead of me.  I notice that they have good rankings of PR3 & PR4, and even PR5 with Alexa’s below the 100K mark.  That escalator is pretty crowded but my faves are:

Glen Alsopp of Viper Chill

Dave Doolin of Website in a Weekend

Gabe Young of Free Blog Help

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income

Caroline Middlebrook of Caroline Middlebrook

There are plenty more and they all provide some valuable info.  Granted some of the above are not exactly wet behind the ears when it comes to internet marketing, and they brandish some sharp cyber smarts, but for all intents and purposes their blogs on blogging are.

I have learned a lot from these potential usurpers to the number one spot which is not to say that I have not learned from the current reigning kings.  But here are the reasons I like to visit the “new” blogs:

1. Inspiring.
   I can relate to these dudes.  Yes, they are ahead of me but not so far that I need to genuflect at the altar of their blog.  If they can be where they are in less than 2 years, and in Gabe’s case less than half a year, glory be.
2. Timely Information.
   Yes.  I can visit the uber bloggers blogs and go through their archives for content that is relevant to where I currently am in my blogging career.  But quite honestly, that content is somewhat wilted by now.   I realize and recognize that the basic info hasn’t changed, but I like the fresh approach that the new lot is bringing to the make money online market.  They are not so far ahead that I have to dig into back issues to understand what they are talking about.
3. Fresh Perspective
   Did I mention fresh approach?  No matter how grand the symphony a young conductor can infuse it with a new richness, a new energy, show a side that the audience may not have heard in quite that way before.  I also think of the new covers being recorded by no-name artists of the Beattles classics – and you know what?  Great as the originals are, the covers are smokin’
4. Community
   No offence here but what are the chances that a fledgling like myself would ever be noticed by oh say the likes of Darren Rowse (hey I like the guy and have opted in for the membership).  Those lower down the food chain still have the luxury of being able to mingle with us babes in swaddling clothes and actually helping us – they reciprocate with visits to our sites and leave valuable comments, they private message us with helpful suggestions, they give of their time in a way that the A Listers cannot if for no other reason than that logistics just get in the way.
5. Potential Alliances
   Just like the A Listers, this new lot is active and aggressive – they have products in the pipeline, we mere PR oners do too.  Can we ride on their coattails?  You betcha!  Can we form strong strategic alliances?  Ditto.  Can we eventually look to joint venture partnerships?  You bet your sweet bippy we can!

I don’t know why the current upwardly mobile bloggers blogging about blogging  got into that saturated niche.  My guess is that they felt it isn’t so saturated after all, that they had something of value to say.  Maybe they’re just an ornery lot who look at the face of impossibility, stare it down and grapple it to the ground.  I dunno know but I thank them.

I do know why I got this market.  Actually I was visiting Caroline Middlebrook one day and noticed that she was just blogging about her experience in blogging, talking about her success and failures and things to fix and so on.  I thought that was rather brave of her – moreover I liked her online voice, felt the sincerity and thought, hey, I can do that too.  Yup!  I quickly appropriated the idea and wrote and told her so.

By blogging about blogging, or at least my trials and tribulations and ultimate small granules of success I have learned things I probably never would have otherwise.  You see, I had been trying to get into the internet marketing arena for some time (well at least two years prior) and took course upon course.  In retrospect some of those courses were damn good, but honestly, I wasn’t fully up to them.  Almost without exception the early chapters were easy (they seemed to get easier with each course) but within a short period of time the eyes would glaze over and the brain would go on strike.

I thought about that and about Caroline and came to the conclusion that blogging would be the best way to put into practice that which I know – and I felt I knew plenty after all the credit card statements supported that feeling.  So I began my blog about blogging.

By applying things I knew I found holes.  Moreover, now that I was writing something, I had to do some checking to make sure that what I was saying was indeed so.  My atrophied internet marketing muscles began to gather strength.  I have laid a foundation, one that I can now build on.  I have launched other “niche” blogs which blush, yes, do bring in some shekels, but it is this blog that I look to as my flagship.  It is this blog that makes the others possible.

From this blog I learn.  It is my practicum.  Along the way I hope that my experiences are relevant to bloggers newer than I, that my content is helpful to them.  Because of my newbie status I still speak in a language that is devoid of blogspeak although I have caught myself drifting that way occasionally.  I am still at that place of my blog career that fledglings can look at me and say “I have a chance.”  And that is all I want.  It is a right of passage – maybe we will never sit side by side with the Darrens and Yaros and John’s, but we’ll have learned a hell of a lot by trying.

Nathan, forever your admirer …………..

Valentina

This morning the radio practically crackled with all the last minute things that the city is going through.  Today the flag bearer for Canada will be announced – speculation is rife as to who that might be and why.  Listeners called in to weigh with their preferences.

With coffee firmly cradled in my hands I got to thinking … I got to thinking that there are momentous events in our lives when you just jump in and learn to swim with the tide, and other times when you need to plan everything to the minutest detail.  I think that our first day at school is just jumping in while weddings, even elopements, take some planning and of course the bigger the happy day the more details to tend to – these are the Olympics of our lives. Would I be stretching it if I said that this thinking applies to internet marketing as well?  Stay with me.

Blogging is a just jump in event.  I think it is momentous because it sets us on a new career in the world of the internet.  Sometimes we don’t even know that, it just happens.  We know of course that proper planning ups the success factor as a blogger, but really, how many people do you know who sat down day one and said, yup, gonna create me a blog, choose my niche topic, select my primary keywords, optimize my site for search engines, monetize and then sit back and enjoy an awesome blog income life?

None!

If there is a blogger out there that is pulling in the big bucks who started out that way I have neither met nor heard of him.  Most bloggers, even the superstars, began by just jumping in.  Along the way they learned to swim.

Think of it this way: as a blogger in the water your skills improve and you jump from pool to pond to bigger pond to lake to sea and finally to the ocean.  How far do you want to go out in the ocean?

At this point the landscape takes on a different perspective.  The blogger is now a full blown internet marketer and is about to launch her own product.  Just jumping in can kill you.  Takes good detailed planning – form a team, design and develop the product, beta test, form strategic alliances and joint ventures, promote, check that all engines are firing on full throttle.

LAUNCH!

Now that’s what I would call an internet Olympic event!  How do you want to participate in such an event?  As a spectator?  A supporter?  A joint venture partner?  Or do you want to be the host and throw the party?

No matter how, before the launch ever happens, you have to just jump in!

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

“Hi Valentina,
I enjoy reading your newsletters as I learn something new each time! I do have a question for you. Why did you switch from Blogger to Wordpress Direct? What are the advantages that Wordpress Directs provides over Blogger? I guess I’m out of the loop with blogging sites. I use Blogger to blog about SweetStacks.
Elaine Babauta
SweetStacks, Inc.
www.SweetStacks.com

The first point of consideration when deciding which platform to choose for your blog is to answer the question: what is the purpose of my blog?

If the purpose of your blog is to serve your main website as a promotional tool, to help drive traffic to your sales page, then the Blogger vs Wordpress debate is not that critical, in fact, I almost always recommend that if you are completely new to the internet and techie type info gives you a nosebleed, Blogger is a good place to get started. I started all my first blogs on Blogger. It’s easy, you can plod along at your own pace, and as you begin to develop some net muscles you can even pretty it up a bit here and there.

Early on this year I began to notice that most of the internet marketing professionals were using Wordpress. I looked into that and found it very confusing, my techie skills were not up to it at all. Notice, I said Wordpress.

This is a little confusing. Wordpress is not created equal in all its guises. I found two very good articles that you might be interested in:

Wordpress, Wordpress.com & Wordpress.org
Wordpress vs Blogger

Another interesting thing I began to notice was that it wasn’t just blogs, but what looked like websites were being powered by Wordpress. I became intrigued that with Wordpress you could have both static and organic pages in the same blog/site. It lent itself extremely well to both squeeze and long letter sales pages. My challenge at this point was still having to learn how to use FTP, and c.panel.

Enter Wordpress Direct. I found out about Wordpress Direct when going through the 30 Day Challenge this summer. Here was an answer writ in heaven: a system that offered the flexibility of Wordpress and the user friendliness of Blogger, I started a fresh blog for the 30 day challenge and as I followed along, I found that it was a no-brainer to switch to this system. Yes there were differences that I had to get used to but they were not difficult to master.

The main reasons I chose to switch this blog from Blogger, and others from other platforms to Wordpress Direct are:

1. Bigger selection of done for you templates. Over 150 templates The recommended ones come with tech support. For the tech advanced or gifted crowd only your imagination and level of ability limit the possibilities.
2. Done for you system. Wordpress Direct templates come loaded with widgets that help you with Search Engine Optimization and other important gizmos that enhance your online marketing efforts.
3. Direct online tech support. This is a major difference between Wordpress Direct and Blogger. It used to frustrate the living daylights out of me when I had to resort to the forum for responses to glitches that I was experiencing.
4. Point and click installation.
5. Easy to follow video tutorials guide you through the back end office – the admin area
6. Ownership of content. What you publish on your Wordpress Direct site is yours. With Blogger, which is owned by Google, Blogger has the rights and ownership to your content.
7. Ease of customization.
8. Mix ‘em up static and organic pages. The importance of this is that you can feature your online product for sale on a static page, while the organic pages which is where you blog give continuous fresh content. This means that your “site” is constantly being crawled by the spiders, increasing the probability of moving up in search engine positioning and ultimately page rank.
9. Automatic fresh content pings increase traffic to your blog/site
10. Categories. Each blog post, in addition to a running dateline order can also reside within one or more categories, determined by you. Enhances keyword recognition by search engines and ease of navigation of your site by visitors according topic interest
11. Selection of themes that offer two or three columned templates.
12. Templates with pre-set ad space
13. Detailed statistics on your site – although I still use Google Analytics in addition for a different reason.

Interestingly, in the war for blog supremacy, even though Google owns Blogger, according to the tech experts, Wordpress is favored by Google. This goes for all stripes of Wordpress I gather. If there was one thing I wish could be improved on it would be to have automatic updates at the press of a button. Wordpress’ open source status makes it a robust program. There are frequent updates, however they are not automatic for all areas that Wordpress Direct manages.

Wordpress Direct is a for fee service. You can get one free site but it is recommended that you get it hosted. I started with the entry paid version which gives me 10 sites/blogs for $19 a month and I chose Hostgator as my host at the baby level with unlimited hosting for $7.95 a month.

In conclusion my experience to date has been nothing short of excellent. In my opinion if your blog is set up to derive a blog income then it is worth the initial learning curve to start with Wordpress Direct.

I believe there are two types of entrepreneurs. There is the A type of entrepreneur, the individual who may have tried the nine to five but couldn’t stomach the stifling atmosphere. Typically this type of person has an innate restlessness, an impatience for something bigger and better and quite honestly, does not make for a good employee. Such a person has a different agenda. You see such a person in the faces of Richard Branson, Warren Buffet and Phillip Knight.

Lesser known and flying under the radar of visibility is the entrepreneur who becomes one out of necessity, or, for want of a better term, the B type of entrepreneur. These are legion and account for a significant portion of multi-millionaires – not a bad place to be financially. Faced with economic uncertainty they actively cast about for opportunities and finding them take action. Today that opportunity is writ large on the internet and the entrepreneur born is often a blogger.

Blogging for money is the easiest introduction to making money online. Everyone can write, the cost is negligible and it is a user friendly introduction to cutting your teeth in the field of Internet Marketing. In fact knowing what I now know, after having taken several internet marketing courses, were I starting in Internet Marketing today, I would definitely start with blogging.

A word of caution though, you need to do more than just publish posts on your blog. If you want to make money blogging you need to treat it as a business. There are some basics that need considering:

1. Select a niche
2. Select the blogging platform
3. Monetize your site
4. Market, market, market.

Each of these basic to the bones steps form the foundation upon which you will build your business. That is why I wrote the e.book ABC’s of Blogging for Money which you can download in PDF format for free.

Once you get the basics down pat you can expand, bit by bit and eventually become a super blogger pulling in at the very least a mid-six figure annual income.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina Bellicova
Blogger for Money

Blogging is all about getting your own cheese.

Quick Lins:
ABC’s of Blogging for Money

Here in Vancouver the weather has decidedly cooled from just a few weeks ago when we were melting from the heat … yes, they were scraping us off the sidewalks then! I love working from my home office which looks out on a grove of oak trees. The leaves haven’t even got a hint of rust anywhere, they are green as green can be. It won’t be long though before the squirrels start coming to gather the acorns of which there will be plenty.

I always look at Labor day which usually is a bit earlier in September (I guess September 7th is as late as it can be)as the beginning of a new year. To me this is more of a new year than January. I guess it goes back to school. We always started a new grade or “year” in September and finished in June, with the summer off for fun. I still do that now with my business. I have noticed that this is also a time when people start new things – not make resolutions like they do on New Year’s Day, but things like signing up for a course on something they’ve always wanted to learn, or sign up for a new activity like fencing or aerobics.  Corporations typically ramp up their efforts in sales and marketing to finish the year strong … statistically October and November are the most productive months of the year, both in business and personal lives.

Ok… enough of the musing already.

Found a site today that publishes blog incomes of bloggers who, well, publish their incomes publicly. I wrote last week that I was going to try and compile such a list well Jeremia Froyland has done it. I noticed that the big earners were absent, Jeremia and I had a little bit of online conversation about that and agreed that when you start pulling in the really big bucks, a la John Chow, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak to name just a few (easily in the half mil a year league)then you stop publishing. Privacy and other things come into play. So the big guns are missing but it will be interesting to see the incomes of the current list members rise over time. Hmmmm….. gee, I’d like to be on that list soon … and then earn to the point where I will stop publishing.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

I guess acorns are like cheese for the squirrels

Quick Links:
Jeremia Froyland

Of course the stats need updating, notably her own. Two years into blogging she was making 50% of her corporate income as an IT engineer in Silicon Valley. That can’t be too shabby. It is now three years. Is she at 75%?

This is the time of month that bloggers who publish their monthly results … well, err..publish. So I am putting together a list of my own, which will not be a complete list, but its one to start with.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for Money

PS… today, blogging for cheese!

Quick Links
The Digerati Life
Make Money Blogging: Top Bloggers And How Much They Earn

Having said that I still think that Blogger is the easier platform upon which to build your blog. It is very forgiving and does not require you to learn anything about other types of software. So, if this is going to be your first blog or if you are new to blogging, it is Blogger hands down. .

On the other hand if you are a techie type or if in real life you find yourself gravitating towards Operations rather than Sales or Customer Service, then Wordpress is your platform – it is also the platform that most professional bloggers choose. For my next blog I have decided that I will use Wordpress, not because I am blessed with a left brain nor that I am a professional blogger - I am learning on the job in public view – but because I feel I need to stretch my muscles. Remember, if it doesn’t scare you, its not much of a goal, just business as usual. If you don’t exercise your muscles, atrophy sets in. Frequent visits to the gym builds healthy muscles.

I am being asked if I have selected my next niche topic and was I successful in finding a good domain name. Yes, and Yes. I am torn between revealing it now or waiting to make a full announcement as the new blog goes live. I think I’ll defer this decision for a few more days.

Meanwhile if you are struggling between Blogger or Wordpress this may help: Blogger is free and money friendly, that is you can monetize it with Adsense and Affiliates; Wordpress has a free and paid version. The free version has limitations.

Till next time ………..

PS… sprinkled within this post are hints of the my next blog topic. See if you can find it and post in comments below:

REPLY WITH COMMENTS BELOW