Idiot's Guide to Blogging

A Recap of IGTB's Guest Posts

I would normally be featuring a guest blogger's article today, but instead, I wanted to take a moment to say THANK YOU to all the bloggers who've taken the time to write for IGTB.

Here's a list of the articles submitted so far:

• Why Do You Blog?: 6 Good Reasons to Write by Tom Kephart
• How to Improve the Quality of Your Writing by Venessa Giunta
• So You Want to Host Your Own Blog... by Dave Miller
• Using MySpace as a Promotional Tool by Clark Bjorke
• Translating Blogging Success Into Career Success by Ann Murray
• Taking Your Blog Writing From Good to Great by Bob Younce
• How Do You Write a Blog Post? by MrDoubts
• The Risks of Blogging to Your Professional Career by Ann Murray
• Engage in Social Networks to Build Blog Traffic by Sandi Atlas-Gordon

Again, thank you all for your time and work. I appreciate it.

If you're interested in becoming a guest blogger, please see:

• Guest Bloggers Wanted!

And if you're looking for guest blogging articles, you might be interested in:

• 6 Benefits of Guest Blogging
• Reaching Out to a New Audience: 4 Tips for Guest Bloggers

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Make More Money With Multiple Income Streams

Blogging for money has become a popular career choice among many internet users over the past few years, and continues to grow steadily. Unfortunately, only a select few of these bloggers manage to earn a decent income.

Why is this?

One mistake I've noticed (and I see it every day) is the number of bloggers who only stick to one method of creating income, the Google Adsense program being the most common.

It's extremely hard to earn a lot of money from a single ad program, and just about any experienced blogger can confirm this statement. If you can manage to earn $10 a day from Google, you're one of the lucky ones. And if you can manage to continue earning that amount (or more) every month, you're one of the very lucky ones. Revenue is hardly ever constant.

The secret to earning a sizable amount of money from a single blog is through multiple income streams- earn a little from one source, a little from another, and it all adds up to one lump sum at the end of the month.

Here are a few income-generating options:

• CPC ads
• CPM ads
• text link ads
• direct ad sales
• affiliate marketing
• online stores
• pay-per-post
• selling your own products
• selling your time (services)

These are the most common ways to make money from a blog, but there are plenty of other options, too. Get creative, and experiment to see what works best for you. Every blog is different and will benefit from different techniques.

Most importantly, don't put all your eggs into one basket.

Let's take a second and pretend you did. You have a high-traffic blog and make a sizable sum from CPM (cost per mille, or 1000 impressions) advertisements. But now here comes a "low month" where traffic is slow (this happens to everyone), and now you are not generating enough pageviews to earn nearly as much as you have been. If you had another income stream to fall back on, you would not have to worry quite as much about not meeting your income goals with your CPM ad program.

Don't be partial to one source of income- rely on several and you will not only be working to protect yourself from the low points in your blogging career, but you will also be making more money in the long run.

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What Are You Offering to Your Subscribers?

Are you having a hard time getting people to subscribe to your blog, just like thousands of other bloggers out there?

Here's something to think about:

What are you offering to your readers?

In order for a person to subscribe, they must like your blog and the content you are publishing. Or perhaps there are other incentives, like a free ebook or extra content available only to subscribers.

Whatever it is you are offering, others must find it to be valuable, and well worth the time they invest in reading it. Keep in mind, when someone subscribes to your feed, they are allowing you to provide them with updates right to their email or feed reader. They are essentially in it for themselves, not for you (in most cases).

So how can you improve your offer?

Take a good, long look at your content. Try to see it as if it was written by someone else. Is it full of information that people want? Is it interesting? And most importantly, is it worth subscribing to?

A blogger can offer all sorts of incentives to new subscribers, but if the content is not worthwhile, people are bound to unsubscribe sooner or later.

I've lost count of the many bloggers I've seen who offer free ebooks to subscribers, and gained hundreds of new signups because of that, only to lose half of them within a couple weeks. Every one of those bloggers put a lot of work into their blogs and ebooks, and they were very community-oriented. But all that aside, their content was just like everyone else's. They offered few original thoughts and theories, and repeated everything that has already been said by more popular bloggers. They provided nothing new to the blogosphere.

Don't be like them. Dare to be different and speak your mind. Present your own thoughts and opinions to the world, and try not to recycle the words of others. This can be hard, I know (especially with all the content on the net now), but write from your heart, not the "rules" other bloggers have pounded into your brain.

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