I Want Success

In this post I will be spilling some of my guts so please be kind in your comments, thanks!

What is success? Everyone defines it differently. When I started this blog in November of 2006 I didn't know anything about blogging and so I didn't set any goals. It wasn't until about 4 months later that I started to learn how huge the blogosphere is and the potential it has to be a money maker. I then set a couple goals for myself.

1. To make between $200-$300 per month through google adsense and other ad networks. To some this is a lot of money (like me) to others this is peanuts. I figured once I got to that goal the numbers would continue to increase because I would continue to work on the blog.

- My progress on this was very slow in the beginning. I was writing a lot of articles, but they didn't mean anything. They were about stupid things that no one wanted to read, not even me. Lately I have been goal driven and have a desire to write good content that is full of sustenance. I make some money with sponsored posts so if I were to count those towards my goal I would be about there. Sponsored posts aren't part of my goal though, so it is nice to have a couple hundred dollars in extra money from those, but I want my ads to take off.

2. To have 20+ subscribers. I thought with writing posts the subscribers would just naturally come. Well if your content is good and interesting this is probably true, but with the content I used to produce it wasn't happening. Lately my subscribers have gone up a little. This is partly because of my current blog contest which is all about subscribing to this blog. I do think that my more knowledgeable and heart filled content does have something to do with it.

- I have recently added the feedburner subscriber count button on the blog because I care how many subscribers I have. If everyone sees the number perhaps they will become interested in subscribing, or it will remind them that they want to subscribe.

To have a successful blog or website I know it requires a lot of knowledge. You have to know a little bit about programming to make the website. Even though I am using a free blogger website, we still have had to program the template and add things to it. We didn't want a standard free blogger template. You might think it is a standard issue, but it is a custom template. Basic knowledge of computers and internet I'm pretty good at but beyond that it is hard for me and I really have to work at it. For exampleI know what SEO stands for and I have read tons of articles to trying to understand it, but I haven't been able to really grasp the concept and how to make my blog SEO friendly yet. I'm only now beginning to understand that a blog won't sell itself, you really have to work at it. With my bidvertiser ads which are going extremely well and having people write sponsored reviews about my blog my traffic and income has picked up.

In the beginning when we first decided to start a blog it was because of an article we read on Steve Pavlina's site. He is a motivational speaker and has a very successful self help website. He said that it took his website about 6 months to become "successful" and now he is making thousands of dollars a month from it. In my not-so-knowledgeable mind I thought we could pull that off. Well here we are almost a year old and not meeting our goals, but with my new plans being implemented we are in the right direction and starting to make very good progress.

If you have any tips, or lessons for me to learn please comment. I feel like a sponge right now and really want to learn from other people's successes.

Technorati tags: SEO, success, blogging, ads, money

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