How to make a killing with your blog

Isn't that a catchy title for a blog post? I did it for the SEO, of course, in an effort to suck in the newbies and desperate housewives who still haven't lost hope of getting rich on the internet.

The prime requirement to making money with a blog (or a traditional website for that matter) is deceptively simple because it requires only one ingredient. If you have that one ingredient, the other things you have to do will fall into place. If you have that one essential ingredient, you will make money with your blog or other website. In fact, it would be quite difficult NOT to make money if your blog has that one essential ingredient. In all cases, the amount of money you can make online is directly proportional to the amount of that one ingredient your blog must have.

Holy Mackerel, but this is already starting to sound like a teaser lead-in to a squeeze page. Fear not, nothing is being sold on this blog.

Of course that un-secret essential ingredient is “traffic.”  You could have a pretty boring and sloppy blog and still make a huge amount of money if you have huge amounts of traffic. Of course, that is a stupid statement, because you can’t be boring and sloppy and still have a lot of traffic. Be that as it may, traffic is more important than good grammar when it comes to making money online with a blog.

[Was that a sigh of relief from Adullamite I just heard? Upon leaning good grammar is not required?]

If you google “how to make money online” you will get about 5 billion, 230 million results. That's true - I just googled it. I have never seen that many results returned on a Googled subject. Wow. (that was Googled on images, not sites, though. Still, there are almost 2 BILLION sites returned if you do it that way.)

This tells me that one common way to make money online must be telling other people how to make money online, for a price. Read: “Buy my book which explains my incredibly original and secret system for getting rich on the internet and which includes an additional 57 FREE eBooks with your book order of only $29.99.” So don’t bother Googling like I just did.

Most of these secret systems will tell you how to choose a product to sell and how to buy Google Adwords and how to OPTIMIZE YOUR SEO and how to set your site up in such a way that the book author gets a link and a cut of your money. And more. There is surprisingly little real information about how to get tons and tons of traffic to your website (unless you count the HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR SEO part.) Sadly, that is the part you really need to know and work on.

Ask yourself why hundreds of thousands of people would want to visit your blog or other website. Again, the answer is deceptively simple but hard to achieve. Answer: these multitudes of people would visit you because you have something they WANT and LIKE and ENJOY. See? So simple.

All of you, practically, already have blogs. If so, you already have traffic in varying degrees. People blog for many reasons, and making money with their blog is often not that reason. This blog you are reading right now is one such example. I have no affiliate ads in my sidebar and not even any Google ads. This is because this particular blog is just a place for me to hear myself talk, meet interesting people and (often) argue with them. This blog attracts intellectuals. Smart people. Usually liberal people. But very FEW of them. I could fill the sidebars of this blog with adverts and never make a dollar. Probably. This is because, in the world of assessing WHAT PEOPLE WANT, reading the pontifications and ramblings of an imaginary little dog is low on their list of burning desires. But you can do better.

(Continued next time: (what people seem to want”)