The internet is flooded with advertisements intended to entice people into wanting to begin a blog site so that they too can "make money blogging!" The promises are huge! "Tired of working 40 hrs. a week for someone else? Would you enjoy making enough money from the comfort of your own home to enable you to quite your job? Are you a stay at home mom who would like to begin making an income without leaving your house?" These promises sound too good to be true, and for most people, I have learned that is exactly what they are - too good to be true.
I, however, am one of the hundreds of people who have been lured into this world of blogging with the hope of making money. I have never expected the big money that everybody talks about. I figured I would be happy if I made $100 or $200 per month. If so many people were supposedly making much larger amounts of money, then I decided it could not possibly be too hard to make such a small amount.
I made the decision to begin blogging one evening as my husband and myself were talking about our need to find a way to generate some extra income. I had already read a little about blogging, and when my husband told me he knew a man who had friends who made a good amount of money blogging, I made a split second decision to begin a blog site. Right there and then I logged onto Blogger.com and a few short minutes later, I had my own blog site!
That conversation between my husband and myself took place in June of 2008. I have now been blogging for 3 months, and I have made just under $20.00. I have quickly learned that it is not nearly as easy to be successful as I thought it was going to be. I regularly spend a few hours daily trying new ways to improve my blog site. I search out and read advice from wherever I can find it and immediately go to my site and try it out. Traffic, I have learned, is one of the most important aspects of successful blogging. So, I joined one of those sites that promises to drive massive amounts of traffic to my site. All I had to do, they claimed, was surf the web, view other people's ads and sites for 15 seconds each, then click on particular numbers to gain credits which in turn translates into visitors being sent to my site.
That did result in a little more traffic showing up on my sitemeter, but I have a feeling that the traffic that is being sent to my site is simply other surfers who view my site for the required 15 minute countdown so they can click their way on to the next site in order to rack up credits for themselves so they too can drive more traffic to their site. I wonder if anybody actually takes the time to look at the sites in front of them before clicking on to the next one. I did at first, but now my only objective is to keep on clicking in order to rack up those credits so that the numbers show more and more traffic is going to my site. Has this resulted in more clicks on my ads and therefore more money? Absolutely not! Will sitting at my computer every chance I get, clicking and surfing, hoping that somehow the time I am spending at such a time consuming activity will eventually pay off ?
I am not convinced.
I have submitted my blog site to all of the major search engines and blog directories that I can find (that are free). On the advice of someone in some help group where I asked the question "why can't I make any money with my ads?," I changed the arrangement of the ads on my site, eventually taking off all ads but one, and I placed that ad smack dab in the middle of the top of my page. I had a momentary thrill when I almost immediately made $7.00. But there has not been a penny since that time.
I am struggling to understand why I continue to keep my blog site going. I feel it has become somewhat of an addiction. I'm sure there are plenty of people who blog who understand what I mean by that. I suppose it could, perhaps, be compared to gambling in a way. You can't make yourself stop because maybe the next thing you try will be the very thing that begins to bring in the big money that all those advertisements are talking about!
I remain unconvinced!
Diane Foster |
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