Is it easy to make a blog?

No.

It is not.

First, you need time.

Then you need determination and motivation.

It is definitely NOT an overnight next-next-next-finish job.

And it will not pay you a penny in the first months, if you want to monetize it.

Actually in the first 4 months, this blog made less than 1 Euro.

Why?

Because of article quantity. And article quality.

Why would anyone expect that making 2-3 articles per week is more than enough to make a living from a blog. It is impossible. At least not in the beginning. And if anyone in the Internet tells you, that you will start “earning” $4000 per month NOW, they simply lie because they want your money. This is most definitely SCAM!

For the four months I mentioned (16 weeks) this means 30-50 articles. What if every article is visited once per day? How many of those visits will actually make money? (make people click on ADs)

None.

It takes 100000 visits to determine accurate CPM (Cost per 1 thousand visits). And believe me. No Chitika, no AdSense, nor any affiliate program can make you rich from 1000 visits.

What do you need to make a Blog profitable?

Readers.

How can you get readers to your blog?

Content, pictures, videos, puzzles, FUN, HOWTOs, curious stuff, game walkthroughs … whatever you are good at… and you are good … DAILY.

If you can do it, you will probably meet with successful “blogging-for-money” one day. But if you think that writing 100 articles and leaving your blog to make money will actually work – you are wrong.

A blog does not go alone by itself. The so called “automated moneymaking” – without human intervention is impossible. It takes months to establish some position as a blog-site and can take twice as long for the people to even notice you. My first few comments (happily) were friendly advices. Those advices kept me motivated and led me to find some online data about SEO (Search engine optimization). Search engines are driven by few factors. Here are few tips:

1. Uniquity of an article. If all of the articles are copy&pasted from somewhere – you will fail. Search engines hate copied content. If you are not the original writer – you will be indexed too, but your articles will not go high in the search results. And you may get warning from the original owner to remove the article.
2. Key words. If you don’t speak about what you mean – you will fail. You can’t stray from the base article heading. If you speak about trains, use the word “train” all the time, without spamming or getting weird and annoying.
3. Page [short]links SEO (search engine optimization). If you have article links www.blah.org/?p=8129 and www.blah.org/cute-mini-train-stations the second article link will show above the first in the search engines, regardless the content in both article is about “little train stations”. If the link name and article name are relevant to each other and the article content – the search engines will push you up in the results, when someone searches the keywords your article is about.
4. Usefulness. If someone clicks “Like”, “+1”, “Stumble”, tweets about you or simply posts a link on his own blog to your site – you will feel it soon. If your friends and readers tweet about your articles and link to your blog, their friends and friends of their friends may come too.
5. Page rank. Whatever site links to you – your page rank will raise a bit. If  a big site posted a link to your site – your page rank will definitely jump. And that means higher place in most search engines. If you don’t know what page rank is, refer to the Wikipedia article.

It actually took me 4 months to go from page rank ZERO to page rank 1. When Google increased my PR – The raise in visits to my blog was like 300%. I can’t disclose exact numbers because of the policies I agreed with, but it was visible in my graphs… So. To make It clear – Advertise your site to your friends and readers owning blogs. Let them link to you to quick start you a bit. You may not get High levels of traffic by just few links, but this will pay in time. This is important, regardless what the others say. If you are often linked and discussed – you WILL be noticed. And Page rank DOES matter.

If you are interested in how many backlinks do you need to attain page rank 1 with Google, have a look at this blog post.

The hard task I had put on my shoulder was to make a blog that speaks about EVERYTHING that interests me. I did not plan to make a “niche website” enslaved by few keywords. The good part is, that more keywords will enter the search engine criterion. The bad part is – big part of the blog is irrelevant to most of the readers. I am sorry to say, but part of my RSS subscribers expect new Slackware howto or game walkthrough, but instead of this – they receive a recipe for a food or some story about Me going somewhere with the bike and shooting few photos.

Sorry folks. Please come back! Don’t leave! 😀

Another important thing – You must be aware that 1 blog post takes the attention of the people interested in it for no more than a week. Than the visits drop back to normal. I’ve already seen that when going to a see resort and not posting for 2 weeks. If you don’t update your blog regularly, the search engines will put more recently updated blogs in the same niche before yours. And search engine traffic is very important. You may have some dedicated readers, but you want them to grow. And if no one can find your blog – you can’t get more readers. You will only grow by “word of mouth” from your readers that tweet about your posts or post links to your blog elsewhere.

And that growth is simply not enough.