How to Make Money Doing What You Love Learn advanced self-improvement techniques that will get you out of the job you hate and into making money by doing what you love.

So you’ve been running a blog for a while now and you check your mailbox every morning, but it seems like those checks for $10,000/month surprisingly haven’t arrived yet, right? You may be feeling like you’ve been duped, or perhaps like there might be something wrong with you and nobody seems to want to read your blog or click on your ads. You had high hopes, you even had your resignation letter for your day job all typed up and ready to go. Months or even years have gone by, and still no $10,000 checks. What gives?

Before you throw in the towel and give up on this whole “Blogging” thing, take a look to see if you’re aware of these ten key “secrets” to successfully make money Blogging. I compiled these “secrets” from extensive research and study of professional Bloggers followed up with a lot of testing and personal experience of my own. They really helped me to get clear on what I had to do to earn an income from my Blog.

Let’s jump right in:

(1) Get CLEAR as to what type of Blog you are running.

From my observations, there are basically three types of Blogs out there. To make money Blogging, you have to know which type of Blog you’re running in the first place. Here are the three types:

(a) The “Pump and Dump” Blog - There are many variations on this type of blog. One example would be the type of Blog that gets setup, and then using some type of automatic scripting and scraping tool it populates and creates multiple pages of fake content with the intention of (a) getting ‘accidental’ traffic from the search engines, (b) providing no actual value to users, (c) capturing some ad revenue as users click off the site hopefully leaving by way of click and not by way of typing a new URL in their browser. This type of blog tries to make money by capturing traffic from the search engines and then capitalizing on people’s laziness and hoping they click on an ad during their 8 second stay, instead of re-typing something new into their address bar.

Another example of a “Pump and Dump” Blog would be one which takes old and recycled content and organizes it in some way simply to generate AdSense revenues. For example, you could go out there and find public domain text and articles and sorting through tonnes of information you could organize it in some way that fits within a specific niche. For example you could pick something like “Kitchen Aid Appliances” and the try to find as much publicly available, non-copyright content that you can put on “Kitchen Aid Appliances” on this blog in hopes that you’ll rank high for that keyword term and draw some traffic to the site with it. This is not your own original content, it is simply someone else’s content that you’ve organized in some way. This type of Blog provides SOME value to Internet users putting everything on one place, but not much. All of the content is recycled. Also, the type of content you aggregate is not based on your own personal experience, or passion, but rather based on your research of trends on the Internet.

For example, if I was to start this type of Blog, I might pick a niche like “Royal Doulton Figurines” even though I have absolutely no interest in them. I would simply be picking a niche market that I’ve researched to be a good candidate for making money. If I find no money to be made in the niche, I dump the Blog and move onto the next one. If I do find it to make money, I leave the site up there and move onto the next one. If I make $10/month from each blog like that and I setup 1,000 of them over time, I’ll theoretically make $10,000/month. There is a big emphasis on the word theoretically here though.

The “Pump and Dump” Blog type may have some quick income earning potential, but I personally don’t run these types of Blogs so I can’t tell you how to do that, or if it’s even still possible to do it. My gut feeling is that the only people who make money with these types of Blogs are those who do this very efficiently, very quickly, and have a lot of scripts and tools at their disposal. The truth about how to make money with these types of Blogs is very often hidden behind smoke and mirrors with people very closely guarding their “secrets”. You can almost be sure that if someone is sharing a “secret” form this world, it’s very likely that it’s something that USED to work but doesn’t anymore. The secrecy of what works here is what makes them money, so why would they share it?

There are other variations of the “Pump and Dump” Blog, but basically the easiest way to discern whether your Blog idea is a “Pump and Dump” is to look at the next two types and if your Blog doesn’t fit into one of the next two categories, then you’re probably running a “Pump and Dump”.

(b) The “Personal Diary” Blog - This is the type of Blog that you setup with absolutely no research, no thinking, no business intention or plan behind it. You simply run out there and setup a Blog as quickly as possible to share what’s going on in your life. If the domain your register is your first and last name, it’s because you want your friends to know it’s your Blog, not because you’ve thoroughly thought about branding yourself.

If you didn’t use your own name for the domain name, you probably picked something that sounded cool to you or you didn’t even register a domain name, but instead setup a Blog on one of the free hosting services like Blogger or Wordpress etc.

There is nothing wrong with this type of Blog. In fact the vast majority of Blogs out there fit within this category. The advantages of this type of Blog are that you can write about anything and everything, whenever you want. You don’t have to promote your Blog, you don’t have to plan anything, you just login and write something whenever you feel like it - even if it’s just once a year.

Even though there is nothing wrong with this type of Blog, in 99.9999% of the cases, these types of Blogs don’t make money long term. If anything, you might be able to pay for lunch with the type of income you earn from this type of Blog.

(c) The “Blogging as a Business” Blog - This is a Blog that you setup with an intention that is something like this:

“I have some expertise in an area of life that people have problems with. I will share my expertise with people and by helping them to solve a problem, I will earn an income by providing them with usable value that is equal to or greater to the payment I collect.”

Your intention here is to become a source of trusted information in a niche that you are familiar with. Whether it be “Dog Training” or “Basket Weaving” or “Doll Collecting” or “Raising Children” or “Healthy Eating” or “Make Money Online”, the intention behind your Blog is to provide value in your area of expertise and to somehow monetize the Blog so that you can continue to focus on your area of focus exclusively.

Think of it as being a high-school teacher or university professor, except that instead of teaching in a class environment you teach by Blogging. Basically, the deal you’re making with society is something along these lines:

“Listen guys, I’m really passionate about ___________. I know I’m not a total expert in this field yet because I haven’t focused on it, but I do know more than most and I am passionate about it so how about I focus on it and become a total expert in that area of life, wrapping myself around anything and everything that relates to that area of life and I’ll Blog about it, sharing everything I know that will help you out when you need info. I’ll look at all the problems in that area of life and I’ll find solutions.

I’m not just going to spew garbage information at you that you can find elsewhere. I’ll actually test out the stuff I learn and report from my own experience, so that what I’m saying is WISDOM and not just INFORMATION as we all know that the Internet is already FULL of INFORMATION but very lacking in WISDOM.

In return, I’ll make enough money from the Blog to allow me to focus on this area of life exclusively so that I can become more and more of an expert. Anytime you have a problem in this area of life that you need solving, just come on by and I’ll have various solutions available to you for much less than you’d be able to solve yourself, and that way you don’t have to be an expert in everything in life.”

This third type of Blog is what I’m going to be talking about. If you’re running a “Personal Diary” type Blog that’s fine, but it may be hard for you to make that $10,000/month you’re dreaming of. To make that kind of money you need to be running a “Blogging as a Business” type Blog.

If that’s what your intention is, to setup a “Blogging as a Business” type Blog, then keep reading as the rest of these strategies relate directly to that type of Blog. If you’re just running a “Personal Diary” type Blog, well keep doing what you’re doing and just don’t bother trying to make money with it. You can throw some AdSense up there if you want, and make some lunch money perhaps but if you’re expecting to be making big money from your personal Blog, you might get really frustrated. Unless of course you’re already a celebrity like Britney Spears and people really do care which brand of peanut butter you used today, or unless you take your “Personal Diary” type Blog and convert it into a “Blogging as a Business” type Blog.

So, here are the three types of Blogs:

1. The “Pump and Dump” Blog
2. The “Personal Diary” Blog
3. The “Blogging as a Business” Blog

Get clear as to which type of Blog you’re running or thinking of starting. Once you pick one type, stick with strategies that work for that type of Blog. There are a lot of Blogging tips out there that are directed at all three of these, so you’ll need to think about this before implementing the strategies. You can’t just blindly do everything that everyone says because people are running different types of Blogs. Strategies that will work for “Pump and Dump” Blogs for example, will absolutely destroy a “Blogging for Business” Blog.

Are you clear on the type of Blog you’re running? If not, get clear. Don’t try to run all three on one Blog…it’ll just turn into a big mess.

(2) Set REALISTIC expectations for yourself.

As a “Blogging as a Business” type of Blog you have to be thinking in 90 day cycles. For example, during the first 90 Day Cycle the only thing you should be expecting from your Blog is for it to take up a lot of your time - that’s it. You may make some money, you may lose some money. Don’t expect to be making $10,000/month your first month. If you do, that’s great, but chances are that during the first 90 days or so you’ll just be in “Setup Mode”.

This is not a downside of Blogs, it is a downside of ANY type of business. Most businesses don’t make a lot of money for years. If you were setting up a restaurant, it could be months before you even open your doors, and then months or years before you even break even. That’s just how businesses work, accept it. This is exactly the reason why most people never get into running their own business even though they’d love to. They stay at their jobs because they have very short-sighted thinking, and if any business venture they get into doesn’t make them a pile of money in the first few weeks, they quit. THINK LONG TERM.

The benefits of a Blog Business is that typically the startup costs are very low so you can get into it without much investment. This does have a downside though. If you had to invest $50,000 to start a Blog, you’d probably stick around and MAKE IT WORK. Because it only costs a few bucks to start a Blog, it’s really easy for people to give up and walk away from them as well. If you’re a person who gives up easy, that’s bad news for you. If you’re a person that has persistence, then that’s good news for you as most of your competition today won’t be around three months from now. Isn’t that exciting?!

So if you’re thinking of starting a “Blogging as a Business” type Blog in a niche that already has others in it and you’re worried about competition, chances are they won’t even be around in three months as the vast majority of people are unclear, unfocused and short-sighted.

Sit down and set some goals for yourself. For example, maybe the first 90 days you should just use to setup your Blog. That means doing the research to pick the right domain, finding the right niche you want to start your business in, writing your first 20-50 articles, getting the technical sides of running a blog figured out, creating a theme and design for your blog etc.

Maybe the second 90 day cycle you might want to play around with monetization strategies and experimenting. For examaple you might set a goal of finding different ways to make $10. Try making $10 with AdSense. Try making $10 with ReviewMe. Try making $10 with Kontera, etc. Learn how the different types of monetization work and which ones will work well within your niche and audience.

Then, maybe after the first 180 days you might want to start looking at ramping up your traffic and income, etc.

Keep in mind that while you’re doing all this you still have to feed the Blog with regular posts and articles you write. You can’t just do nothing for six months. While you’re doing the setup, write. While you’re experimenting with monetization strategies, write. Even if you don’t yet have a Blog running, write anyways. Just write in a word processor or on paper until you’re ready to post online.

(3) Don’t let Linear Thinking kill your Blog

Linear thinking can kill your Blog. What is linear thinking? Linear thinking is what most of us utilize in our day to day thinking. You’re probably not even aware of it. Let me offer you an example.

Let’s say that your first month you have 10 articles on your Blog, and you attract 200 visitors and you make $2.00.

How many visitors will you attract the next month if you have 20 articles on your Blog? If you’re thinking 400 visitors and $4.00 in income, you’re thinking linearly.

Since I can’t do justice to this subject in this Blog post, I highly recommend that you download my free eBook instead as it dives into this topic in great detail and will help you to understand how linear thinking can kill your Blog.

(4) Connect With Your True Passion

A lot of people try to start Blogs by trying to figure out what makes money out there instead of trying to figure out what they are truly passionate about. That would be like Michael Jordan looking at which one of the sports pays a higher contract (Golf, Baseball, Soccer, Football, Basketball) as a way to decide which sport he’s going to want to play.

Chances are you’ve probably already chased money when looking for your job, right? Don’t try to do that with Blogging, as it doesn’t work. If you’re not truly passionate about the topic you’re thinking of Blogging about, people will be able to tell. It’s very easy to “hear it” in the writing. I have absolutely no passion for Barbie Dolls, for example, so no matter how lucrative the Barbie Doll industry may be, I’ll never write a good Barbie Doll Blog because I have no interest or passion in that area. Talk to me about personal development or making money doing what you love and I can chew your ear of for months. Why? Because it’s my passion. Even before my Blog I was talking to people about this stuff.

If you take a passion of yours and build a business blog around it, you’ll be setting yourself up for an exciting and fulfilling Blogging career. If you chase the “niche of the week”, you’ll just get frustrated. You may make some money short-term, but it won’t last.

More importantly, in order to be a successful Blog long term, you’ll need to write a continuous stream of articles. That is nearly impossible to do if you’re not interested and passionate about your subject. Sure I could write a few articles on Barbie Dolls and you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that I know nothing about them because I could research the topic really well, but if I wrote 100 articles about Barbie Dolls I’m sure it would be blatantly obvious that I know nothing about them.

One resource I suggest you use to discover your passion is my free eBook “The Passion Project”. It may help you to identify what you’re passionate about and may help to spark your imagination as to what you may want your Blog to be about.

An easy test to see if you’re truly passionate about your topic, or if you’re just doing it for the money is to ask yourself if you’d do it for free? Would I continue to research and read and learn about personal development topics and to talk to people about starting businesses and doing what they love? You betcha. I do that anyways. My Blog is just an extension of that. Find your passion.

(5) Get some help by modeling other successful Bloggers

You don’t need to re-invent the wheel here. Remember that the value YOU provide is solving people’s problems by providing experience-tested wisdom in YOUR area of expertise and passion. Anything outside of that you can ask for help / copy / learn from others. For example, in the very beginning when I started Blogging back in April of 2006, I started by building my own blogging software. Why? Because I was a programmer and I thought I could do a better job than the “Wordpress Guys”. I wanted things to work a certain way that was “perfect” for what I wanted.

So I wrote my own Blogging software and it worked fine. However, shortly after that I realized that the Blogging world was changing really quickly and I needed to make additions, changes, plugins etc. to keep my Blogging software up to date with the industry. Soon I realized that I was spending more time working on coding my software and applying fixes to it than I was writing articles. So I switched to Wordpress. I tried out a couple of other platforms, but I eventually went back to and stuck with Wordpress. Now, while I focus on writing, which is where my usable value is, I let the “Wordpress Guys” do what they are passionate about which is building that software.

So don’t try to do everything yourself. Collaborate with others. Ask for help. Work with others in the Blogosphere to succeed together. Take courses, read eBooks, invest in the wisdom offered by others. For example, when I decided to really learn how to get the most out of AdSense last month, I didn’t try to do it all by myself. Instead I invested $9.95 into Joel Comm’s AdSense Secrets 4 eBook so that I could model from the wisdom that he’s already spent time figuring out. I can always tweak what he teaches and apply it specifically to my Blog and my audience, but I’m not going to spend a year trying to re-invent the wheel just to save $9.95. How much is your time worth? Don’t be cheap when it comes to learning from others.

Read other successful bloggers, subscribe to their RSS feeds and stay on top of what’s going on in the industry. Treat it like a business. Watch what people are doing to make money, not just what they SAY they’re doing to make money. Sometimes successful people don’t know what they’re doing to be successful. You can learn a lot by watching people’s behavior. For example I may or may not say that I’m writing one post every single day on my Blog right now. I may mention it as a “success tip”, but even if I don’t, you should be able to look at my Archives and see what I’m doing even if I don’t mention it.

Study what others are doing as well. Study ProBlogger or John Chow or Steve Pavlina, or whoever.

(6) Personal discipline is the key

Personal discipline is a key element to “Blogging as a Business“. You need to create and follow a schedule for yourself during which time you “work on your business.” This is especially important in the beginning. There are going to be a lot of things competing for your time, so you need to get really clear on what type of activity you need to take on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to grow your Blog.

For example, you need to decide on a posting schedule. Are you going to write posts/articles every day, every other day, every three days, once a week, four times daily? This also needs to be a business decision. If you’re running a Blog which reports up-to-the-minute news, you might need to be posting several short length articles per day to stay on top of the latest trends and news in your industry. If you’re writing a personal development Blog which contains timeless wisdom that isn’t as time sensitive, you may be able to post less frequently. There are a lot of factors involved, you really need to study the marketplace and look at what other people are doing too. If you’re trying to make an income Blogging about the Gadget of the month, and someone else already runs a Gadget of the Hour Blog it might be harder to compete with that.

Once you set your posting schedule, make sure you can commit to it religiously and stick to it long term. It’s better to have a once a week schedule that you stick to every week, than a daily schedule that you never stick to. If you only update once a week every Friday, your readers will become aware of that soon enough. If they’re OK with that, they’ll stick around and come back on Fridays to check things out. If, however, you post once and then nothing for two weeks, then seven posts in one day, and then nothing for eight weeks, it’s going to be hard to get anything going.

Personal discipline is really important. You need to keep a list of things you must do every day, every week, and every month for your Blog. As you learn new things, and you decide to test them on your Blog, they will fit into one of those column of either being a daily, weekly or monthly task. For example, posting new content may be a daily thing, submitting to Blog Carnivals might be a weekly thing, and looking into advertising opportunities might be a monthly thing.

(7) Be Authentic

The value you bring to the table with your Blog is WISDOM. What is Wisdom? Wisdom is knowledge coupled with experience. You take a piece of “knowledge” from wherever, you test it out in your life, and now you’ve learned something from that knowledge by applying it. The thing you’ve learned is Wisdom. That’s what you need to share. In order to share that wisdom, you need to be honest and authentic with people.

Let people know who you are, have a way for them to converse with you and contact you. You need to build trust with your audience. They must know and feel that you are there to help them, to solve their problems, not to rake them in for money. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making money by helping people to solve their problems. That’s how the whole world works, but people do need to know that you are who you say you are, and they need to be able to trust you before they’ll really engage in your content and listen to your advice, etc.

There is no place that the saying “Be Yourself” is more important than in the Blogosphere. People want to connect with you, a human being, not some corporation or business. People come to your Blog to hear YOUR opinion, not what you think they want to hear. Even if they don’t agree with your opinion, they’ll respect you for sharing it. Don’t try to be “neutral”. Express your opinion because that is EXACTLY what people are reading your Blog for! Be yourself, express your true self as much as possible and the right people will naturally be drawn to you.

(8) Be Careful Who / What You Promote

Once you develop a small following of people who trust you and listen to you, be careful not to fall into the trap of chasing money again by promoting every piece of potential income that comes your way. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m not saying you can’t promote things to try to make money. That would be suicide. You NEED to promote things, but you need to promote the RIGHT things - things that will help your audience.

I do Paid Reviews on this Blog, but I am very clear with my readers as to which one of my Blog posts are paid reviews. Also, I won’t review things that I don’t think are relevant or important to my audience. For example, one of the first reviews I was ever asked to do was for a Casino Gambling site. It didn’t feel right so I turned down the review. I want to help people make money doing what they love, not to gamble their money away as a coping / avoidance behavior that temporarily distracts them from the fact that they hate their jobs and they aren’t doing what they love to make money. I’m not saying that is the reason everyone gambles, but I just didn’t feel like the review was relevant to this Blog.

You don’t have to worry too much about banner ads or things like that because those are clearly paid advertisements, but just be careful of promoting products and resources in your blog write-ups that you haven’t tried yourself or don’t believe in yourself. Last month I said a few good words about AdSense Secrets 4 by Joel Comm because I believe it’s a great product and because I’ve tested it and tried it myself and it worked for me. It might not work for everyone, but it worked for me and that’s all I report. It is then up to everyone individually to see if they want to purchase the products themselves or not.

Trust me, as your Blog starts to grow in popularity the number of people that will want to contact you to promote something of theirs is going to skyrocket. This is actually a really cool thing as you can get some really neat and cool stuff for free, but don’t fall into the trap of promoting everything that comes your way. I’m just getting started and I’ve already got half a dozen different things that I *might* review on this Blog but I haven’t fully tested them yet so I’m not sure if they work, so I won’t review them yet.

Remember that it takes a long time to build trust and a reputation but it can be easily broken, so don’t let someone else who has no reputation destroy what you’ve spent so long building.

(9) Blog Design Matters

Your Blog is your identity. First impressions count. Your Blog tells a story. You can start with something simple at first, perhaps a free Wordpress Theme, but eventually you’ll want to get a professional theme or even get a professional unique blog designed for yourself as soon as you can afford it. I tried all kinds of different free themes, and then I finally got fed up and invested in this Mimbo Pro theme, but even then it’s not perfect. So I hired Unique Blog Designs to create a new Blog design for me. I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

(10) Personal Development Absolutely Positively Without Any Shadow of Doubt MATTERS

The value of your Blog and how much money it makes is directly tied into who YOU are as a person. You must “get into” self-improvement. Whether that be by taking courses, reading books, watching DVD’s, going to seminars, reading this Blog, or whatever else it may be that you do to work on yourself, you MUST learn to improve yourself every day in some little way.

I don’t care if you have the worlds best Blog with the coolest design and are doing everything right, if you have a limiting belief in your head that says “I can’t make money doing what I love”, you’ll continually self sabotage your success. You’ll spill coffee on your laptop. You’ll lose all your data in a hard drive crash. You’ll miss important meetings. You’ll “accidentally” delete some emails that were important. You’ll almost get publicity for something you did, but just not quite.

You will never out perform your limiting beliefs long term - PERIOD.

This final point is something that so many people leave up to chance. You must embrace “self-improvement”. As an employee at some “job” you can get away with not working on yourself as you had others who complemented your weaknesses and you had a boss that made sure you did what you needed to do in order to get the job done. As a self-employed entrepreneur Blogger, you have to work on yourself and become the best BOSS and best EMPLOYEE to yourself.

It doesn’t have to happen overnight, but I can’t stress the importance of this point enough. If things are going to change in your life, YOU need to change.

Final Notes

As I wind down this marathon article that I hope might help you shed some light on what’s required to make money online by blogging, I’d like to ask for your help with something.

I’d like to get this article out to as many people as possible, so if you enjoyed it and found it valuable please pay-it-forward by sharing it with others by clicking on the Share-It icon below.