Nigerian Entrepreneur

blogging for profit

What do you wish to accomplish through blogging? Okay, let me be more specific, what do you wish to accomplish with your blogging activity in the next 6months, 1year, 5years etc? As I study professional bloggers who practically live on the income they generate through blogging. I am beginning to appreciate one of the key factor that distinguish them from the hobbyist blogger.

Most people who blog just want to earn a little extra cash from the internet. Even though they work tirelessly at their blog, they do not really treat their blogging activities as a real business. After all, the virtual world is not the same with the physical world. Visitors to the blog are not viewed in the same light as physical human beings that enter a shop will be viewed. But are they really different? Come to think of it, they are actually physical human being sitting behind some keyboards and screens and making choices! They are as human as they are in a physical shop.

A professional blogger unlike the hobbyist treats his blog as a business. He takes time to apply proven business principles that have yielded result in offline businesses to his blogging activities (making modifications where necessary). He concentrate on building a system instead of just creating another job online that replaces the 9 to 5 he does in a physical place of employment.

Professional bloggers don’t make their blogs an end in itself, instead, they use it as a foundation for a real online business that is capable of running with or without them. Of course that is a lot harder than one just punching at the keyboard and churning out articles daily. Skills other than typing at 50 words per minute or copying articles from online article directories are required.

A professional blogger once advice me to ensure I am building a business with my blogging activities instead of creating another job online (It is possible to do 9am to 5pm daily online earning peanuts). That advice is beginning to make a lot of sense now. Blogging can actually be the foundation of a business that eventually runs on auto and produces residual income that will enable you live the kind of lifestyle you desire. Done the wrong way, it can also become an online job that turns you into a workaholic that earns peanuts while living as a slave tied to endless online activities.

Now is the right time for you to pause and ask yourself what your blogging goal is. If your answer is something like “One million readers”, “Two Million page views per month” or any of such statistics, you are just creating a job online, and you may end up slaving at it. A better goal will be “Creating an authority blog that earn you the respect of your niche market” “Building a subscriber list that can be turned into an online marketing system that generates leads”.

It is a choice. You can either create a business with your blogging activities or another job online. I made my choice already. I am not going to slave online for peanuts. I am focusing on building a business that can exist without me. One that I will still enjoy running 5years from now. Such takes time and skill to build, but pays huge dividends at the end of the day. If you doubt me, go ask, John Chow, Yaro Starak etc.

I read Yaro Starak’s Blog Profit Blueprint some four months ago. Now I am reading it all over again. I tell you the truth, I am appreciating the points treated in the material better than I did four months ago because, I have seen what it is like to slave at a blog! Many newbie bloggers dream of becoming successful within a month of blogging. Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way. It takes time and effort to build a successful business online.

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Tags: Blogging, Entrepreneur

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Blogging, Entrepreneur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.