Why blogging for money is so difficult

For many webmasters the dream is to turn their hobby of blogging into a full time living. However even if you do manage to build up a successful readership it’s not always possible to turn those readers into a real income. Here are a few of the main reasons many bloggers can’t make money from their hobby.

General blogs are all the rage these days because people like talking about whatever they feel like that day. The problem these bloggers face though is finding advertisers because it’s a well known fact that general un-targeted traffic doesn’t convert into sales.

Even if you are getting targeted traffic to a specific niche it still needs to be traffic with a buying purpose in mind. For example if you have a funny videos site there’s really no way to make money from it because nobody visiting is expecting to make a purchase at any point, either for you or your advertisers.

It’s important to create content that sells, and this goes for blogs as well as ecommerce sites. E.g. if your promoting an affiliate product in a post you really have to drive home why it’s so good and why you endorse it in order for people to “believe”. You can’t just drop a link at the end and hope people click it out of curiosity.

The design of your site can also negatively affect your sales. That new flashy menu you had created may look cool but if it makes it too difficult to navigate your site then you’ll be losing customers. People on the net have very little patience so you need to make your site as easy to use as possible.

All advertising is not created equal and it often takes time to find the right type of affiliate program for you audience. Essentially you need ads that complement your content as visitors are much more likely to click on something that is related to your theme. You also need to be subtle as there’s nothing more off-putting that un-related popup ads.

It’s not easy converting blog readers into money as I hope I have shown, but at the same time it is possible if you use a little common sense and also plenty of testing to see what works.

We have lots more tips on making money from the web on our new blog