blogio blogging blog

You see this same question over and over again: how can I make lots of money with my blog? Especially on the a-list blogs. People want to know how these bloggers pulled it off to become so popular and make mad money with their blogs. Like the question, the answer is also the same each time: you don’t!

There’s no money in blogging, sure there are a few that reel in the cash, but there are millions of bloggers that don’t make any money at all, or at least not nearly enough to justify the time they spend on their blogs. Try to blog for money and you will be frustrated pretty soon. In stead, treat it as a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you do it for a few years, maybe, you can turn your hobby into your job.

As soon as you stop worrying about the number of visitors and the number of ad clicks you get each day, blogging becomes so much more enjoyable, as a hobby should be. Readers will notice a positive change in your writing and before you know it, positive things will happen.

I am running a couple of different blogs, one of them never got too much attention, but these last few weeks I have been feeling very positively about it and really enjoyed working on it. Last week I suddenly got an e-mail from an editor of a printed magazine. He liked the information on my blog and wanted me to write for the magazine!

I know, it’s not the jackpot, but I got a few hundred bucks for about a days work plus very targeted advertising for me and my blog to 70000 magazine readers. Plus, they liked my writing so much, that they offered me a regular column in the magazine.

It’s stories like this that the big bloggers will also tell you: the blog doesn’t make the majority of the money, but it helps the money to find them.

Search engines have their bots roaming the internet, looking for new and changed website pages. There’s no telling when the bots will visit your site and indexing new pages on your site can take anywhere from minutes to days or even weeks.

If you’re running a blog and people have subscribed to your rss feed, you’ll want to let them know immediately when you have posted new content. The rss services, however, also rely on checking your site to see if new content has been posted. Checking every blog every minute of the day would be a big burden, both on their servers, as well as on the one hosting your blog.

This is where ping comes in: by pinging a service, you let it know that you have updated your site and it should come over to see what has changed. (not to be confused with the tcp/ip ping command, which tests the connection between two systems)

Within the WordPress admin panel you can find Update Services under Settings -> Writing. Here you can type in the URLs of the services to ping, whenever you post something new to your blog.

There are loads of ping services available, but be careful! Don’t just put every ping service you can find in there. Services like pingomatic will forward your ping to multiple other ping services. This will cause multiple pings, both from you and from pingomatic, to the same service. With multiple pings coming in for a single post, your blog could be marked as spam!

Here’s the list of ping services I’ve put into my WordPress installations:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

When writing a personal blog it’s usually quite easy to find subjects to write about. Things you’ve done that day or places you’ve been to are frequently encountered in personal blog posts. When writing for a niche blog, however, there’s a lot less to choose from, topic wise. Still, you have to come up with new posts frequently or your blog will quickly lose it’s subscribers. When just starting a blog you can probably think of tons of topics to write about, but as your blog grows, your pool of ideas shrinks.

Here are a few ideas to come up with new ideas for your blog posts.

Make a mind map
A mind map is a great tool to plot down your ideas. Start with a clean piece of paper and write the topic of your blog in the middle of it. Don’t write down a whole paragraph of text, pick the single most important word that describes the topic of your blog. Now think about subjects that relate to your blog, this would probably be the post categories already on your blog. Draw lines to connect each topic to the word in the center. Next you start splitting up each category into sub-categories. Each one could be the topic of a new blog post or be further split into new topics. You’ll be amazed at how fast you fill up the whole sheet of paper with ideas.

Look what others are writing
There are probably other blogs in the same niche. Have a look around and steal borrow ideas from them. An easy way to keep a tap on what other bloggers are writing is build right into every blog: rss feeds! Just add the rss feeds of every blog you can find in your niche, to your rss reader and you will always be up to date on what they are writing about. This also keeps you updated on industry news from your niche, that you might have missed otherwise.

Get away from it
Sometimes you just have to let it all go and do something completely different to get your creative juices flowing again. Get out, take your dog for a walk in the park, go for a bike ride, a subway ride to some random destination or whatever other activity you can think of, that does not require you to be near a computer screen. You can even take a piece of paper with you to work on that mind map.