When Should I Monetize My Blog?

I have seen much debate over this topic, and I am surprised at some of the answers that people come up with. The correct answer in almost all cases of blogging, is to monetize your blog the day you set it up. I've seen way too many people argue that your blog should not be monetized until you have a strong readership following and a good amount of organic traffic flowing to your website. This answer is absolutely ridiculous, and I'm going to explain to you a few reasons why.

The easiest way to explain why you should instantly monetize your blog as soon as you start it is to argue against waiting until you have subscribing readers and are receiving steady organic traffic from search engines. For this example I'm going to use nice, round numbers, so let's say you heard to wait to monetize your blog until you have 500 subscribers, or followers to your blog, or 10,000 page views from search engine traffic a month. As I said in my post about blogging everyday, the more content you have, the more pages of your blog are indexed, and the more search engine traffic you will get. So when you are first starting out, you may not have hundreds of pages indexed, and you might be receiving very little search engine traffic. It will naturally take time for your traffic to go up, and let's say for this example it takes you one year from the day you started to hit 10,000 page views a month.
Google Adsense pays both by click, and per thousand views, so if you do have any Adsense ads on your page before you hit your goal, you're still missing out on views that Adsense is going to pay you for! Not only that, but Google does a great job of making their Adsense ads relevant to what that viewer has recently been searching for (if you don't believe me, what are the Adsense ads on this page about? Most likely something related to your interests or that you have recently been searching for), so many times the ads will help your reader find more information about what they came to your blog for. The very first month I signed up for Adsense, my account had accumulated just a few cents short of $30, and that was by a brand new blog, with no paid promotion tactics at all. It was purely self-promotion by sharing links on social network platforms, interacting with other bloggers, and talking to people in my related niche on forums and message boards. Had I taken it seriously at the time, I'm positive I could have doubled that figure my second month, and kept it steadily growing from then on.

A common misconception is that the ads will only bother your audience, and make it look like you are only trying to use your blog as a source of income. But that is far from the truth, they landed on your page someway or another for a reason, because they were looking for information that you had. That should always be the main reason for blogging, to share your knowledge and experience with other, and to help inform others. Remember, Google does a very good job at making their ads relevant to your viewers, they have to if they want to keep making money from them as well.

If you keep to these standards, you will do just fine in the blogging world. True, it is a very slow start and sometimes hard to keep persistence, but it will pay off eventually, and once you see your traffic stream steadily going up and up month by month, that will be what keeps you going and becoming a successful blogger.

Blog Every Day

This is probably the most important thing you can do to help you become a successful blogger. True, it may be a bit cliche in the blogging world, but you need to get content on your blog if you want followers and readers to keep coming back for more. Posting daily is also a great and easy way to get another page of your website or blog indexed by the search engines. And we all know that the more pages that are indexed to search engines, the higher your chances are of getting organic search traffic, even if you aren't ranked number one the a keyword.

While your content should be high-quality and true to the word, there will be those days (and I've had plentiful amount of them, trust me) where you just keep blanking out and can't seem to think about any good content to use. Here are a couple ideas to help you figure out how to write a useful post that will help your blog even if you can't think of what to write:

• If you think of a topic, but just can't get a focus on what to write about it, make a post to use as an introduction for something you want to go into detail about. Then when you do create a good post based off of that introductory post, you can link to it from the first post.
• You can create a continuation of one of your previous posts. If there was a post you think you can improve, or have more to explain, you can create a new post off of that already existing foundation, and then interlink the two.
• Look at other blogs! You can easily find inspiration for what to write about by checking out a couple other blogs in your same niche category. Mayne you'll find a post you think you could write better, or maybe you'll find that spark that you need to create a great post.

The important thing to remember though, is that not every post needs to be extremely long or fully cover your topic. You can always interlink different posts on your blog to create great content, or use a 'skeleton' post to get in some quick content that you will elaborate on at a later time. If you can post consistently, your readers will take your more seriously, because they will see that you care about your blog, and that it is up-to-date.
If you have any questions, please use the comment feature, and don't forget to subscribe if you like what you read!

My Blogging Experience

First I must say that I am not a so-called 'professional' blogger. I do not make my living by blogging and a have a regular job with a somewhat regular company where I get a biweekly paycheck that pays my bills and otherwise gets me by.

However, I have had a steadily gaining interest in blogging, and find myself writing more often than I ever thought I would. In fact, English and Literature were my two least favorite (and worst) subjects in high school! After learning about how popular blogging was, and figuring out that most of my favorite websites were essentially just very high-quality blogs, I found myself wanting to create my own, where I could write about whatever I wanted to, sharing my knowledge and interests with others who shared the same hobbies as I do. I found out that there was potential to make a little bit of money doing this, and now I am trying to create an establishment for myself in the blogging world.

I am currently making a small amount of money on the side, and I am always looking for different ways to improve my blogs and expand my ideas in my free time. My intention for creating this blog is to share with other beginner bloggers, and maybe even advanced and established bloggers, my experiences and tips and techniques I have found through my personal trials. I hope to be able to share with you some useful tricks in SEO (search engine optimization), article writing tips, help with ways to get useful traffic, and anything else us bloggers need to try to gain the upper hand in our niche.

One day, I do hope to be able to earn the majority of my income from my own websites, and I hope I can provide some useful information or new insights for all of you readers. If you enjoy some of the content I provide through this blog, I encourage you to subscribe so you can receive updates on new posts, and please feel free to share with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. If you have any questions on any of my posts, feel free to use the comment feature to ask, and I will attempt to answer any and all inquiries.

Thanks for reading!

Kris