Niche Blogging For Profit

Every family gathering is the same for me. Eventually someone asks me what I do for a living usually by saying something like “so-and-so said you work on the computer.” I respond by saying that I’m a blogger and an Internet Marketer. I pull out a business card as if to prove both those jobs actually exist. Then I brace myself for the next question which I know is coming, “How do you make money at that?”

How to explain that money trickles in from various sources – advertising, affiliate sales, freelance writing, product sales, paid reviews, and others? Explaining what I do to someone who doesn’t know a lot about computers and bloggers is a lot like trying to teach someone a foreign language within a fifteen minute conversation.

Have you ever had this same awkward situation? If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky but prepare for the day when some well-meaning but blogging-illiterate person asks you what you do for a living.

What is a blog? – For complete beginners

A blog is both very different and very similar from a regular static website. While the content is created in much the same way, blogs are more fluid to allow items to be placed at the webmasters whim and allows the visitors to respond to the writer’s content. This is beneficial for both sides as well as being quite fun. As a side note you can tell people that technically blog is short for web log and was originally intended mostly as an online journal.

Once people discovered blogs they gravitated that way because blogs were easy to create and powerful for gaining attention and traffic. Basically blogs were a dream come true for people looking to spread information over the Internet.

Since income can begin to dripping in slowly for awhile before you start to see any real income, people will ask you what it is that you do and how do you make money at it? There are several ways to make money with blogs. Selling other people’s products, selling your own products, selling advertising, using contextual ads like Google Adsense and selling your reviews to people looking for marketing.

Finally you will get the most annoying and I find the most insulting question: “Is that a real job?” Yes it is a real job. It is similar to crossing a copywriter and a journalist. I spend hours every week researching and reading. I also spend hours writing and rewriting articles before typing them into my computer and putting then where they need to go. And that’s just the pleasant part of my job. Forget about SEO, networking, marketing, article marketing, link exchanges and keeping up with Google’s frequently changing policies.