Working On Your Blog Or In Your Blog?
One of the greatest misconceptions among those attempting to build a business is that you need to work hard in it, rather than work hard on it.
What's the difference? If you're working in your business, you're only an employee with limited potential, even though you own it; if you're working on your business, the sky's the limit, and you'll spend your time to do the right things to make it grow and flourish.
This is no different with a blog. Here's how you do it, even if you want to make a living with a free blogger blog.
Without exception, anyone starting off blogging to make money will find themselves thinking they're writers. Those with this mentality have the journalist mentality, and you know what that is bringing them now, and has been for some time.
Read almost any article on how you make money blogging and they'll always tell you to write quality content.
Sounds good and right doesn't it? But in reality, as far as making money with a blog, it's completely false advise.
The reason why you've heard this said over and over again is because all these people do is read what another 'writer' has read somewhere else, and simply repeat it. Usually the source goes back to a so-called A-lister.
Journalists behave this way because that's their nature. In truth, they're regurgitators of existing information or events, and they rewrite it with their own words and/or interpretations. Where they struggle and have trouble is discerning if the information is accurate, unless they're specialists in a field, which very few are.
The first step in financially profitable blogging success therefore is to forget about being a blogger, i.e. writer.
You writers who think you want readers won't believe this, but stick with me and you'll see why.
What Do A-Listers Know?
What these A-list bloggers, which are really only a small handful do is, make it sound like you can write your great content, attract a ton of readers, get famous, and finally make a fortune through attracting advertising revenue.
The only people this works for is the A-listers, who as I said, are a small handful.
Those large niches served by this small number of Internet marketers is pretty much not worth competing in, as it would take years to make a dent in their business model, as why would someone go somewhere else when the A-listers are already doing it?
The average person wanting to blog for a living is delusional to attempt to copy their business model and think they'll make money.
Graveyards of earnest and talented blogger/writers exist to confirm this truth.
What You Must Decide Before You Start!
What it comes down to is you must decide before you ever start writing what it is you want to do. If I can't talk you out of being a blogger, rather than running a business, I guess you'll have to learn the hard way.
The secret to this is writing for the Google search engine and potential ads you will target through specific keywords. Don't write for readers, write for Google and Google advertisers.
I don't mean by this that you don't have a blog or don't write content for it, what I mean is that is only a tiny portion of a successful blogging business, and you can do all that perfectly and still make very little money.
Your focus must be on something else and not readers.
What Really Drives Blogging For Adsense Success
Backlinks "Are" The Business Of Blogs
So how do you work on your blog and not in your blog? What is the business side of blogging for Adsense dollars? It's all in the backlinks and targeted anchor text.
Backlinks are simply a link from another blog or website that points back to your blog or page of your blog.
Anchor text is the word or words used within that link.
The Real Killer Combination That Dominates Adsense Revenue
Now if you have an Adsense business model, 80 percent to 90 percent of your time and effort should be used in generating backlinks. That's the business side of the deal, and that's the difference between failure and success.
The pros and cons of that are it can become tedious and boring at times, and you must be willing to go through the process in order to be successful. The positive side is it can be tedious, repetitive and boring at times. Hehe. In other words, you're not going to have a lot of people willing to do that, and thus not much competition.
This assumes you're not trying to do the ego thing and start off in highly competitive categories.
One repeated truth that is the truth, is you need to really research you keywords, and you need to start off in smaller niches you can conquer in a relatively short time.
This is important just because of human nature. Few people are willing to stick with something for a long period if there aren't measurable results.
In this case the results you're looking for is a first page ranking in the Google SERPs, and eventually to land at the top of the page.
With a smaller and proven niche, you can do this in a relatively short time.
Backlinks and Anchor Text
In reference to building backlinks, what words are used as the anchor text of the link are as important as the link itself. If the link doesn't include keywords or longtail keywords connected to you blog and blog content, they'll be almost worthless.
So whatever backlink strategy you may use, make sure you use the right words in your backlinks. Don't use the 'click here' thingee unless you're just trying to make it look more natural to the Google search engine.
Another thing to do is mix up the words in the anchor text a bit so it doesn't look too contrived. You want juice for your site, and backlinks with a variety of phrases and keywords do that better than anything.
When considering a blogging business model, the business model is backlinks ... end of story. It doesn't matter whether you eventually move away from Adsense into a different way to monetize you blog. If you work on backlinks as your primary business model, you'll be able to drive traffic to whatever blog or web page you want to, and there your targeted visitors will do the think you want them to in very high percentages.
To work on a blog as a business is to work on backlinks. If all you do is write great content, well, look at the New York Times and other media properties if you think that business model has a future ... even on the Internet.
I rest my case.
Stay Focused on Backlinks
Just to give you an idea how difficult it is to break away from this mentality, I've been running online businesses for about 8 years, and blogging solely for a living for the last four. Blogging is the only income I make as far as from working (not including investments, etc.).
Today, right before writing this article, I was extremely frustrated and exhausted, you know, that burntout feeling. When that happens, you can quickly trace it back to one thing: you've started to be a writer or blogger again, and forgot to work on the business. That is really true.
Even you long-time bloggers could take this to heart. When you start feeling burnout, check to see if you're focusing too much on writing and not on building backlinks.
Of course part of backlinking is writing, but what happens is an increasingly larger amount of time can be done writing without you realizing you've gravitated toward that. Suddenly you're burning out because you're still carrying the backlink workload, while adding more writing workload.
This is very easy to miss while you're in the midst of working on your blog business, so take inventory occasionally to see if you're staying on your backlink focus, and aren't blogging more without realizing you're doing it.
I discovered that was what I was doing today, and when I pinpointed the problem, it was very easy to finish up and close down the blogging and start focusing primarily on building the blogging business through backlinking strategies.
Whether you're a beginner or have been doing this for awhile, this is the key to successfully being profitable in the blogging business. Just stop thinking of it as writing and blogging, and start thinking of it as backlinkng and anchor text, and you should do very well.
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