Nathan Waters

All I can say is “wow”, this is an awesome resource. Steve Pavlina, the one-stop guy/blog for all personal development information, has just posted a very lengthy, but very informative article on how to make a good living income from blogging.

He goes through steps he has taken to grow his traffic and income from 0 to substantial levels after just 16 months. He now receives around 1.1million visitors per month and generates around $5000 per month mainly from Adsense.

I will briefly list a few of the things he wrote about, but be sure to checkout his post for more detailed explanations.

Be web savvy

You need to know the basics of blogging. This doesn’t need to include PHP, MySQL or other complicated programming (although basics in these wouldn’t hurt either). But you need to know things like RSS, comments, pings, trackbacks, SEO (search engine optimisation), tagging, traffic stats etc.

Take risks, try new things

Don’t be scared of failing and always be prepared to adapt to change. Experiment with new ideas or sources of income generation. The blogosphere is a rapidly changing beast so you need to stay ahead of it or get gobbled up

Have an income-generation strategy

Write it down. How much do you want to be making in X months time? How will you do this? What sources of income will you use? Affiliate programs, PPC programs, sell products/services?

Traffic… a must have

Income won’t come without traffic. Steve has some very simple advice for how he built his traffic:

1. Create valuable content
2. Create original content
3. Create timeless content
4. Write for human beings first, computers second
5. Know why you want a high-traffic site
6. Let your audience see the real you
7. Write what is true for you, and learn to live with the consequences
8. Treat your visitors like real human beings
9. Keep money in its proper place
10. If you forget the first nine suggestions, just focus on genuinely helping people, and the rest will take care of itself
11. Blog Carnivals!

Don’t blog for money

Don’t do it. Blog for other reasons before blogging for money. Only 1% of bloggers actually make a living from solely blogging, so the probability of you making money is very slim… don’t set your sights on the dollars or it’ll affect other areas of your blog such as article quality and just general motivation.

Multiple streams of income

Having more than just the one income stream is very important. If one happens to fail overnight, then you will always have something to fall back on. The regular methods are mentioned including Adsense, Donations, Text Link Ads, Chitika eMiniMalls, Amazon and LinkShare.

Choose a niche, in something you’re passionate about

Write a list of all the things you’re passionate about, if one of these fit into a large niche and there is little to no competition, then you may very well have a winner. An integral part is having the passion, as it will help keep you motivated for those many months where it seems your efforts get you no where.

Luck and timing

This is my own little point, but I think it holds true for almost any blog or site. There is so much competition between sites on the Net and the area is so rapidly changing, that involves a great deal of luck and just the right timing to build a site from nothing to a successful traffic-generating and income-generating machine.

One major thing I did take away from reading the article was that Blog Carnivals are a great way to build blog traffic early on. I haven’t actually tried out a blog carnival, so I’ll have to give it a go soon and report back on the results.

Nathan Waters
Traffic <> Income