There are very few profitable endeavors in life that are easy to execute and don't require a whole bunch of time and commitment.
I just want to say this because when it comes to monetizing your blog, it seems like people get real excited about it, then dive in hoping to become rich and generate that elusive passive income we all hear so much about, then they become discouraged when their monthly revenue is $2.39.
All the times I've written about Darren and Andy's Six Figure Blogging course (here, here, and here) I've tried to point out (as they do) that although there is money to be made from blogging, that it is also a heck of a lot of work.
I think it's pretty safe to say that most bloggers who are making six figures off the revenues for their blogs are working more than 40 hours a week to make all that dough.
And it's year after year of producing consistent work, networking, studying metrics, tweaking, tracking changes, marketing the blogs, keeping up with the blog admin, maintaining the relationships with their blog's community--all this is on top of the writing of the actual blog posts themselves.
It is a real job and a real business.
Sometimes I'll see the probloggers reveal their earnings, where the money came from (what ads and affiliate programs they tried) with the intention of helping other bloggers get better results with their own problogging endeavors.
In the spirit of this self-disclosure, I would like to reveal that my "revenue" for 4th quarter 2006 was $2.39.
I feel a bit silly calling it revenue :-), cuz it's really not even enough to buy a cappuccino from Starbucks!
But on the bright side, I truthfully didn't work at all for this "income".
When I started my blog I signed up for Amazon's affiliate program and then sort of forgot about it.
When I got the email from Amazon telling me what my 4th quarter earnings were, I was actually quite delighted to see that there were any earnings at all! :-) It was kind of like putting on an old coat and finding $2.39 in there.
This is what passive income looks like! I guess I'm a One Figure Blogger.
At least I know that if I want to start truly building my online blogging empire ;-), that I'll have to actually work for the money.
Something else that occured to me is that all the folks I know who are now making their living from blogging started out blogging for a different reason than to make money.
They had personal blogs or were blogging for their church blog or just doing a blog that they thought was fun, and they were doing it without monetary compensation.
Somewhere along the way, they figured out a recipe for turning their love of blogging into a way to make money. Some of those people even figured out a way to start a business around their passion for blogging.
So, it doesn't all come down to money earned. Although we would probably all love to get paid handsomely for every single activity that we love to do, it just doesn't work like that, and perhaps having the expectation that we could make money from our blogs creates the danger of us losing the passion which made us start our blogs in the first place.
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