THE REALITY OF BLOGGING

When I read articles about people who made tremendous amount of money blogging, I thought it was an easy way to make money. Boy was I wrong. Creating blogs and directing traffic to your Blogs can be a full-time job if you want to make serious money. It's so tiring and time consuming. It's really important that the topic you pick is something you're passionate about because you will spend countless hours researching, and writing about it. In this blog, I have created a list of obstacles that newbies will expect to overcome, if they want to make money with blogs.

#1- LEARNING HTML

If you have no idea what HTML is, you're going to have to spend some time getting familiar with it, because you'll be needing it to implement codes into your blog layouts. Even though bloggers.com is designed to be user-friendly, a newbie to blogging and HTML will still have a lot of trouble figuring how to make the site work for them.

#2 - DESIGNING A BLOG LAYOUT

Everyone wants to be an individual. We don't want to have the same layouts as everybody else. Once you get tired of the layouts that bloggers.com provides, you're going to want your own layout. This requires you to spend countless hours playing around with HTML codes to change the columns, alignment, graphics and colour of the blog to suit your needs.

How you design your blog is very important because it needs to be easy for the readers to understand and navigate through; but it's extremely crucial if you want good results with Search Engine Optimization. Google release "crawlers" or "spiders" to go through blogs in order to determine what kind of ads to place in your blogs. If your blog is poorly designed and organized, it will be difficult for Google place relevant ads to your blog; which can make it almost impossible for you to make money.

#3 - WRITING GOOD QUALITY CONTENT

Make sure what you're blogging about is good in quality. People check blogs for info to learn or for amusement. What ever the case is, the content must be interesting enough that people would want to visit it again or refer it to their friends. It will take a bit of time to research and update your blog consistently.

#4 - UPDATING YOUR BLOGS REGULARLY

If you want to make money blogging, you will be expected to update and post new blogs on it regularly. No one is going to your blogs, if you have the same old blogs all the time. Updating it a few times a week, makes your blog fresh and gets people to come back to check what you have next to say. It's also a very important marketing tool when it comes to generating traffic to your site. More priority is given to blogs that are posted regularly, which will affect your ranking in blog directories or blog lists.

#5 - MARKETING & DIRECTING TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOGS

Without a shadow of a doubt, the most difficult part about blogging is marketing it. It's an ongoing task that will never end. This is the most difficult part about blogging because it requires A LOT of time and work. You spend a lot of time, linking your site to other people's sites/blogs, or blog directories. You have to find out some how and some way to get the word out, (generating awareness). Then you have to spend time, figuring out how to get people coming back and refer it to other people. It's a very big job. If you want to make money with blogging, good luck and have patience because you will need it.


I hope this blog helps some newbies understand some of the challenges you will face when you decide to blog for money.

WHICH IS BETTER GOOGLE OR SQUIDOO?

The purpose of this blog is to share key differences between the money you generate from Squidoo and Google Adsense.

For those of you who don't know what Squidoo is, it's a website that allows the user to create lens (similar to a blog) on any subject that you like. The publisher of those lens are called lensmasters. Squidoo allows their users to become experts in their topics. What I like about Squidoo is that it's very easy to set up, virtually takes minutes to do. They pay out very quickly, unlike Google. Squidoo pays out their users every $10 or more. Google pays out every $100 dollars. Another feature I like about Squidoo is that they use PAYPAL to pay their lensmasters. Very easy and simple process. Unlike Google, they either send checks or electronically transfer the funds every 30 days, and the amount has to be over $100 USD. If your amount does not add to $100, they hold your checks for another 30 days, which is a real drag.

Another reason why I like squidoo is that when you create a lens with them, it comes with Google's ads built into the lens, so you don't need to apply for Google Adsense. What some of the beginners don't know is that when you create a blog, you have to submit an application to Google Adsense in order for you to display Google's ads on your site. This process can take anywhere from a day to weeks or even months. If you don't get approved, you don't get ads, therefore you dont make money. With Squidoo, you bypass all those headaches.

Using Blogger.com (owned by Google) does have it advantages. Google does have the largest pool of ads compared to their competitors. Therefore, if you do get approved, you can bet that Google will place the most relevant ads on your blogs.

It doesn't hurt to have blogs with both Squidoo, and Google. So in terms of a faster but smaller payout, Squidoo wins it. The slower but bigger payout, Google gets the top notch.