How to Waste a Year of Your Life Blogging for Free

If you are starting to blog with even the slightest hope of blogging for money one day, please, start the right way from day one. Don’t build a free blog, rather make a plan on how you will build it, grow it and make money from the get go.

A big, very big percentage of blogs die in the very first months. Most never make any money. But if you go through the first year, you are most likely in it for the long haul.

However, if you make no money in the first year, what is there to motivate you to keep going? Nothing. So don’t make a plan to start making money in a year, start being serious about it from the very beginning.

Here are the main mistakes you need to avoid when you are building an online business, in order to avoid wasting a blogging year of your life:

#1 Choosing the wrong niche, especially internet marketing

I am not talking about keyword research only, I am talking about knowing about a topic, loving it, loving to talk about it and knowing that there are some people out there (other than you) that will like to read about it. Include researching the monetization options and you are good to go.

Choosing internet marketing as a topic to write about is a big miss, unless you have a lot of experience with it. Like with any other industry, for that matter! Make sure you know your stuff.

#2 Stealing other people’s content

No, you can’t know everything about your topic but that doesn’t mean you should simply steal other people’s content. If you need to write a post about the issue in your niche you don’t know a lot about, do your research and link to the reference you used.

#3 Doing the same thing everyone does

Writing unique content is the way to go but sometimes you can’t think of anything new. Well, if that is the case, try different ways of presenting the content. If everyone is writing about a topic, try making videos to stand out and present the content in a better way.

#4 Selling too hard

Don’t “sell, sell, sell”. Write a lot of quality content and link to related products. Making people naturally click on your affiliate links after being pre-sold on the idea and the product is going to work the best for selling a product.

#5 Selling too much

If your site is pretty new or doesn’t have many visitors yet, don’t put any ads on it. The math is simple, if you put Adsense on a new site and the “normal” CTR is about 2%, that means you will get 2 clicks for every 100 people on your blog. If your CPC is 5 cents, you will make 10 cents for those clicks.

A new site will be getting about 30 visits a day for example, so just do that math how little money will you make in this case. At the same time people will see a new blog trying to monetize. Not a great start. Don’t put any ads on your blog at the beginning and wait for the traffic to come.

This will build trust with your readers and instead of “selling” a few of them for a dime, you will later sell them all for big dollars.

#6 Not building a list

Maybe I should have put this at the very beginning. There is not enough space on this blog to tell you how important it is to build a list. You don’t have to sell to your list all the time, you don’t even have to do it at all. But just having a pile of willing people ready to get information from you is something you will always be able to use good. I personally think Aweber is the best tool to use for this (here is a complete tutorial).

Conclusion

These are only some of the mistakes you must avoid at the beginning to make sure you make some money in the first year of blogging. They are the most important one though, and if you skip through these, and the information overload you will run into, you may build your money making online business faster than others.

Are you still fighting some of these?