Blog Beginner Basics: What is Working for Me

I've made a decision to devote my time to a couple or three blogs and making a go of making some extra money with these. I don't plan to quit my day job soon (I'm an English teacher at a Hawaii community college), but I like the idea of an added income source. Blogging, I've decided, is the way I'm going to try to do it.

Consequently, I've been spending a lot of time searching around on the web (which is starting to bug my wife) for biz ops and biz ideas. One of the key ingredients to success in business on the web, in addition to keeping our spouses happy and content, is traffic, meaning the number of people who visit our sites/blogs.

One blog guru suggested Blog Carnivals as a good traffic generator for newbie bloggers. I have heeded the advice, did a Google search for "blog carnival," found a couple of good sites, submitted my blog URLs, and have seen a spike in site visitors. Hey, good deal.

Another suggestion I have come across repeatedly is to write specific, helpful content targeted to the designated blog readership. And to write a lot! Doing that over and over is the start of a good foundation for a successful blog. Accordingly, I have faithfully tapped out blog articles and posts for my blogs for the past couple weeks. With continued day by day writing diligence, and with continued work on other methods of traffic generation, I hope that a readership base will follow

Another path to success is come up with a gimmick that isn't just fluff but that can really help people who come to a blog. And I found one gimmick here, which tells you how much a blog is worth in dollars. Now whether what you find there is helpful or not, you make the call, or the click, as it were. What I found myself doing is plugging in blog site URLs into this site to see how much various blogs are worth. Lots of amazing and really big numbers.

For the record, one of my blogs, which is less than a month old, is worth a whopping total of $0.00. Yup, nada, zip, zilch. But I plan to persevere, blog regularly, work on generatin traffic, and see what happens in 2008.

Another blog I maintain, is worth over a grand. :-) I've been working on that one a while longer so there is hope.

Again, I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon, but I do hope to make some extra money so I can take my wife on a nice vacation this same time next year.