Blogging Lessons - Follow Your Passion, Not Your Wallet

June 20, 2008

A few months ago I started did some keyword research, discovered a niche that was interesting, had potential, had high-paying keywords and thought I was going to get rich (no I am not going to share it!). At very least, I was hoping to get a few easy adsense dollars here and there to let me go to the movies and order a hotdog instead of having to sneak snacks inside hidden in my pocket or my wife’s purse.

What I learned was that if you don’t have the passion then the posts just won’t follow.

So, I switched gears from my high-paying adwords keyword site to focus on developing a travel blog for guys, discussing mancation ideas etc. That blog, only a couple months old, is slowly growing and is averaging a 100 visitors a day, though it was averaging 200+ and peaked about at over 1,000 daily visitors because of a single article about an event that has since ended. Is it paying the bills?  Nope, not yet, but during the weeks before the event when I had 1,000 people visit my site every day it did show the promise that if you combine a good article with a good topic that advertisers want to advertise on and visitors want to learn about then you can absolutely make money and lots of it.

This is an important lesson that most new bloggers don’t understand.

It isn’t enough to want to make money, you have to have something worthwile to write about that you are passionate about - that isn’t guarnteed to bring you money from adwords or affiliate programs, but it may bring other rewards, including new clients, free stuff to review, or the satisfaction that people find what you are writing about worth reading.

Posted in Adsense Blogging