The best blogging advice ever

I've been a blogger for over a year now. In fact, its almost two. As scary as that is, I am very happy with what blogging has taught me. It taught me about business, advertising, writing, promoting, networking, computers and the internet. I even made a few dollars along the way. Now that I can look back at my blogging adventures, I can tell you the best advice a blogger can give:

Do not blog for the money.

It can be a painful and sad road if you are blogging only to make some extra cash. I spent hours in the first few months of blogging doing anything and everything to gain readers, publicize and sell advertising. In the end, when the dust settled, the blogging research I did to try to make lots of money really became second hand to the joy and fun of writing about something you love or are passionate about.

I would say 99% of the blogs about blogging sites out there are failures that do not make more than 20 dollars a year selling ad space. If you aren't careful, you'll be next. Just browse entrecard in blogging resources or marketing, there are 10 bad unkept sites to every good one. The key to being one of the good ones is to commit yourself to writing great posts for at least 12 months. Never let up, and make sure to promote the heck out of yourself, either by purchasing ad space or by using a multitude of free blog marketing tools like entrecard, feedburner, blog catalog, mybloglog and many others. Find communities of potential readers and find out what they read, and then write some good stuff, and ask them to come read your work. Soon enough, if your product is good, people will come and you will have a readership and once you have readership you can start earning a little money with your blog.

I spent so much time watching and keeping detailed notes of my adsense and project wonderful numbers, counting the pennies each day. Trying to determine what posts sparked the most clicks on advertisements and what posts were duds. This study was what we call, "a waste of time". It just distracted me from writing more blogs,and focusing on good content and not simply following patterns that work.

Feel free to blog some of my older posts, which have been a big help to many bloggers before you. I hope you enjoy.