Treating Your Blog as a Business

by Steven Snell

Last week I wrote a post Is There a Career in Blogging? that examined the possibility of earning a full-time income with a blog (or a network of blogs). One of the keys that were mentioned for running a profitable blog was to treat the blog as a business, not as a hobby. This is probably a pretty obvious statement for those of us that are looking to make money online, but what is really involved? How can you put this into practice? Here are some of the elements that I feel are critical for treating a blog as a legitimate business.

1. Goals

Any traditional business will have goals that are set for a specific period of time, usually monthly, quarterly, and annually. Blogging should really be no different. If you hope to make a full-time income, or even a solid part-time income, you really should have specific goals of revenue that you need to produce. It seems obvious, but I think many of us don’t take goals as seriously as other types of businesses.

In order for your goals to be effective, they should be time-sensitive (meaning they end at a particular date), measurable, and attainable, although not too easily attainable. I think many of the bloggers who actually do set goals get a little caught up in the excitement and set their goals a bit too high right off the bat. As a result, many of them get disappointed and discouraged

2. Accountability

Along with goals comes accountability. As an employee of a business you can be held accountable if you fail to meet the goals that are established for you. This, of course, can mean anything from a loss of a bonus all the way down to being fired. Too many bloggers initially set goals and then never follow up with tracking them or holding themselves accountable. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you fire yourself if you don’t achieve your goals. Rather, I believe that we could all benefit by taking ownership and being willing to honestly evaluate how our performance is living up to expectations.

3. Priority

Almost all of us are willing to get up each morning and go to work all day for someone else in order to make a living. If we are willing to do this for an employer, shouldn’t we make it a priority to put an effort into our own business? Although most bloggers are doing so part-time, as a business it should take priority over some other things in our life (of course this is a decision that each of us will have to make according to what is best for us). If blogging is not on your list of priorities, it’s probably not a real business and your chances of making money are slim.

4. Scheduling

If making money with a blog is a priority, we should dedicate specific time for it. Blogging becomes much more difficult when it only gets your attention when nothing else of interest is going on. Make an effort to decide how much time you are willing and able to dedicate to blogging each week and create a basic schedule that will help you to get that time in throughout the week. It doesn’t have to be something that you follow exactly each week, but get in the habit of seeing your time as being occupied by your efforts of building your blogging business.

5. Time Management

Now that you’ve scheduled some time to work, it can be helpful to track exactly how much of your time is being spent on what efforts. Try using a tool like Toggl (it’s free) or a more advanced tool like Harvest to see where your time is being spent. Most of us waste a lot more time than we realize and these tools can help to increase our efficiency.

6. Spending

Businesses are willing to spend money in order to make money. Bloggers, however, are usually looking only for the free options. I’m not suggesting that you go out and spend loads of money to build and market your blog, but keep an open mind to products and services that can streamline your efforts and increase your productivity.

7. Bookkeeping

If your blog is a business to you, it’s important to keep good records of your income and expenses. As a business, your expenses will most likely be tax deductible (check with a tax professional in your country), so you will obviously want accurate records. Tracking your income can also be helpful for monitoring your progress towards goals and for confidence and moral boosts.

You can use a number of different tools for this purpose, including a spreadsheet program like Excel. If you’re making decent money with your blog and you want a more sophisticated solution, there are several online programs, including Xero. For most bloggers a simple spreadsheet system will do.

8. Outsourcing

Many successful bloggers have found outsourcing to be an effective way to manage multiple projects. Daniel obviously runs several blogs, and I doubt that would be possible for him without outsourcing some of the work to others. He is certainly not alone. Hiring writers can be a good choice if your blog is producing enough money to cover the expenses. It’s not the right move for everyone, and definitely not for all stages of bloggers, but be willing to consider outsourcing as an option to improve your business’s profits.

5 Reasons For You Might Fail in Blogging

98 % of the people who start of with the dream of Making Money online will fail, almot 69 % will give up within the first month. Now what are the reason for such failures while others succeed and make it big time.

Are you disappointed with the fact that, no matter how hard you try, you can never seem to get things done in a productive manner? If so, then acting now is the way to go because you can rest assured that things will not exactly get better if you just stand there and wait for a miracle. As a blogger, being productive is definitely a must if you are serious about long-term success and living in denial is simply not an option.

Where to start? Identifying the problem is always the first step and here are the 7 most common reasons why you might never be productive:

Reason 1: You Hate What You’re Doing

If you are not passionate about your work then maximizing results can and will prove to be quite a challenge. You won’t be productive, you will treat everything as a chore or, in other words, you will have a lot to lose as a result of such an attitude in the long run.

Reason 2: Your Priorities Are All Wrong
Simply being busy isn’t going to cut it. You can work all day and feel all worn out, only to realize that you haven’t actually accomplished anything worthwhile. Identifying the tasks which are worth your time and dropping those which are not is the way to go if you are serious about being productive.

Reason 3: You’re Not Used To Working
I’m sorry to break it to you but, if you were used to one of those 9-5 jobs where you sit at your desk but aren’t actually doing anything productive most of the time, then you cannot expect your current productivity level to be an impressive one. You won’t be able to see results overnight, no matter how desperately you would want to. Take
it one step at a time and you are on the right track.

Reason 4: You Are Easily Distracted
If you are unable to concentrate on certain tasks, if anything seems to be able to act as a distraction, then I’m afraid that you have a serious problem you need to work on. Try small things that will help you focus, like working on a specific room or time, removing the telephone from your surroundings and so on.

Reason 5: You Seem to Never Learn
Everyone makes mistakes, that’s perfectly natural and it’s all a part of human nature. Not learning from your mistakes, on the other hand, is unacceptable. You might fall into the trap of a certain time waster once, it happens. But if you don’t learn your lesson then, my friend, you will end up making the same mistakes over and over again and that is simply not an option.

Making Mony through Go Dady

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You can give these coupon at free of cost also for a service they rendered for you. e.g. forum posting, content creation, etc.
It is all up to you...

How to Make Money online (Part # 1)

This post has been taken by one of the top ranking websites and shares some good information and ideas. So just thought would be a good idea to share it here..



How to Make a Consistent Income Online by Writing Blog Reviews (Part 1)
Do you know that you can make a nice income with a blog without needed to make yourself or your blog popular, without getting massive amount of blog traffic, and without having to learn the blog monetizing strategies and busy testing which advertising programs work well for your blog.

By posting paid or sponsor reviews on your blog, it is possible to make $100 to $2,000 every month. But of course, there are some drawbacks if you build a blog specifically to post sponsor reviews only. Firstly your blog will not attract returned visitors because most people don’t like to read blog posts about product reviews. Secondly your visitors will not subscribe to your blog feed because again they aren’t interested to read review posts and finally your blog isn’t suitable for Google AdSense and other similar money making programs.

But don’t feel bad because of the above drawbacks as you are still able to make a good income just by focusing on posting paid reviews.

Starting a blog specifically to make money with paid reviews isn’t suitable to everyone. But if you do interested to make money online with this method, here are the steps you can follow to get started:

Step 1 - Start a Blog
Blogger.com is so popular; I bet you have heard of it. You can join Blogger.com and set up a blog absolutely free with a subdomain name of blogger.com. But I will suggest you use a custom domain name for your blog that set up in Blogger.com.

Using domain name for your Blogger blog will increase your chances of getting more paid review opportunities. The easiest way to set up your Blogger blog with your own custom domain name is by buying your domain name through Blogger. Buying a domain through Blogger will automatically set up everything for you and will attach you a new domain to your existing Blogger blog instantly. Below are the instructions from Blogger.com on how to set up a blog with your own domain name:

How to make money online

Since ages people have been searching for and asking for the best way of making money online or asking for the question of " How to make money?" the easy way.

Now its the age of Internet and they are trying to find a method which will help them earn huge some of money without making much effort.

I came across some valuable information from the internet do go through with this and see if you could take benefit from the Online Money Making Techniques..

There are numerous ways to make money online. Some are good. Some are really good!

In this article we are going to take a close look at one of the best ones. And by best I mean using this method to make hundreds to thousands of dollars a day!

Let's start off with one of the single best ways to make money online, affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a simple internet business model in which you find a product to promote and when you make a sale, you get a commission. It's that simple.

And there are all kinds of sites online that offer tons of products for sale that you can make a commission from. They have products ranging from self-help books to herbal cures books to mattresses to books and televisions.

Anything you can think of to promote you can find an affiliate product to join to promote that product and begin making money immediately.

So how do you make money with an affiliate program? With different methods.

You can do it with article marketing. This is where you right articles and promote a product from the article. This is a labor intensive method but it can work if you put the time and effort into it.

You can promote affiliate products with a blog. You can simply create a blog with one of the free blog sites online and promote your product from your blog.

You can build a website. This is a very effective technique. It's similar to the blog method. With the website method you simply build a website, link your affiliate product to it, and voila, you're off and running.

You can use Google Adwords. This is the big one. This is the single best way to promote affiliate products online. It can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. You just have to make sure you know what you're doing.

Using Google Adwords is a science. You have to study it and understand it before you start it. But it's worth is because you can literally make thousands of dollars a day doing it.

How it works is like this: You pay Google to advertise your product. The ads appear to the right of the screen whenever someone does a search on Google. Depending on how much you pay Google your ad can show up on the first page, thus getting a lot of valuable exposure.

This is an extremely lucrative online money making method but must be used with caution or the potential to lose money can become great.

These are some of the best method that you can make online money.