I’m often asked how to make money from Blogging.
Not wanting to dampen enthusiasm, it’s not a get rich quick scheme.
But it’s not impossible.
To get you there you need to have these six crucial skills:

1. Patience
2. Resilience.
3. A great imagination.
4. Knowledge.
5. The discipline to learn.
6. Multiple Income streams?

Why patience you say?
If you do everything right.
Join blogging forums, create networks of friends and acquaintances, got seen on social media websites and actively collaborate on other blog websites.

Then it can still take months, even years before your have any kind of recognition.

With a legible writing style and perseverance you will make it in the end!

Resilience?
By resilience, I mean being able to take it on the chin!
Being able to fail without labelling yourself a failure.
Being successful at something doesn’t make you a success.  When that publisher or editor rejects you, pick yourself up and start all over again with even more resiliance!

A Great Imagination is imperative!
You need to be able to see outside the box.
Knowledge and information is widely available on the web but you need to have the imagination to create a useful blog from that information. When you compose your next blog you need to know who your target audience is going to be, then you need to work out ways of getting in front of them.
Your title, (absolutely essential if you want your blog to be read), needs to grab them and say, “READ ME!”.

Knowledge.
It is all too easy for someone to claim to be an expert.
There’s no Internet police checking your credentials but I believe “what goes around comes around” so don’t copy, don’t pinch other’s stuff and don’t claim to be what you are not!
A lot of people will read other blogs and articles and do a good job of copying them by not copying them. But it is easy to recognise the fakers. Take a look at their other work. If the writing style is different every time then they are probably seasoned fake artists.
Don’t get me wrong, we all do our research, that’s what the web is for, but there’s a lot of difference between learning and passing that knowledge on and copying someone elses articles and changing a few phrases.
If I see something that excites me, then I print the article and read it and then do my report on it. This is a great lesson as not having it sitting there on your computer you are not tempted to copy and paste – you have to use your own words.
One more point on KNOWLEDGE. As is normal with a business, you must be prepared to invest financially – you could do worse than taking up a few subscriptions for products and courses on good blogger’s websites, you will be amazed how much you’ll learn.

The Discipline to Learn.
If you want to keep up with the times you need to be ever evolving. The Internet and Social Media changes on a daily basis.
What was a great strategy yesterday could be a waste of time today.
When I first started to market my blogs on Twitter, I was in-undated with visits to my website even though my followers were under a thousand. Now I have many thousand followers yet the response has not gone up that much in relation. I am afraid that we are victims of our own actions.
We know that most people who ask us to pop over to their website for some great stuff are almost certainly going to have a hidden agenda and alteria motives. But that’s Ok if what you get from then is of value!
If you are like me and you are always inquisitive to see if there are any snippets of information that you can pass on to your readers then you may well profit from these opportunities but many of you are probably far too busy, so the offerings are ignored.
The lesson here is, don’t be too hasty, if there is one thing that has come out of all this, it is that people know that if they give something of value then people will be attracted to them or their business so it is rare that the info is worthless.

Mutliple income streams!
Google AdSense on your website? You’re not going to get rich but you can make enough to pay for the odd evening out. Good affiliates? They may bring in a little more than AdSense, but you have to have a mighty busy website to make any real money from affiliates.
The most efficient way of getting closer to monetising your blog is to create a subscriber list. As they say, “The Money Is In The List!”.
Create a subscribe box on your website where they can get something worthwhile for free then once you have your subscribers you can start to work on the relationship. When they see you as a leader and as an expert in your field then you can start to market to them. The format is: give them good stuff, give them more good stuff, give them more good stuff then, when you have their attention, do the pitch then follow that with more good stuff. Be careful, gently does it! You don’t want them to un-subscribe.

Watch this space for my next article, “How to make big money from Blogging”.

Pat Sutton – Official Blog http://www.PatSutton.com

The content of your website tells your visitors all about you and your business; it is your shop window. The problem is that if your shop is on a back street and you have no passers by then you need to get people to take a detour down your street! It’s easy, you put a sandwich board out with key phrases to grab their attention?

So what can you do to get people to come to you on the web?

Good blogs and articles will lead people to your site if they are written with good content that includes the important relevant key words.

So how does good content and great articles get you traffic? Well, many search engines rely on the keyword and keyword phrases of a site to put it in their results list. If your content contains a good number of keywords and keywords phrases, it may be chosen to be a part of the top listed sites in the search result pages.

But before you think of just plastering your site and articles with all the keywords and keyword phrases you can, remember that the search engine police will notice if you are trying to abuse the system and will most certainly penalise you. You must have good well written articles that incorporate the keywords and keyword phrases properly in their content.

I know it’s difficult as many of you will say that you just don’t have the time to write your own website blogs and articles. But if you can find the time, articles specifically designed for the internet will take some getting used to and a certain amount of expertise to create but it is well worth the effort.

There are writers who have great experience in doing this and charge only a minimal fee for such work. Writers like this can be regarded as experts in this style of writing and can greatly help your website to get that coveted spot in the search engine rankings.

Other than getting your site in the web results page of search engines, they can also provide your site with meaningful articles and content that can impress your website visitors and entice others to view your site. This is the type of thing that makes your website “sticky” and if you set up an RSS feed button on your website they may even subscribe to your articles and the search engines love that!

Of-course, if the mountain won’t come to Mohamed………..I take my website via Articles and Blogs to the mountain.

Articles once written, can be posted across the web to drive traffic back to your website. Sort of like a virtual sandwich board.

Depending on the number of words needed, usually, a two hundred and fifty word article would cost from about $30, (about £20 in English money). This is a small price to pay for having a content rich, well researched and written paper on your website and it is a lot cheaper than a Google Adwords campaign.

It is easy to find a good writer as these days most authors will have blog sites or articles published on websites like EzineArticles.com where you can read some of their work to get an idea of their type of writing. But what is important is that the writer has the knowledge to “write for the search engines” as well.

Pat Sutton, visit her official blogsite: http://www.patsutton.com