Steve Pavlina Provides Blogging for Money Tips

Posted on May 3, 2006

Steve Pavlina blogs that he is now making $200 a day from his blog. In the same post he also provides detailed advice about how to make money from your blog. Steve makes a lot of good points in his article. We have summarized a few of them here.

Depressingly high failure rate: Steve says "99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail."

"You don't need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies." Good advice. It isn't to hard to get caught up if are new. Blogs are free and full of information. Steve also recommends reading Problogger and we do as well. Problogger, written by Darren Rowse, has a terrific beginnner's section for novice bloggers. Rowse does a does a great job of explaining blogging concepts in a way that beginners will be able to quickly understand them.

Traffic: "Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you'll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it's really hard to fail." Steve has an article on building traffic here.

Multiple revenue streams: Steve says don't just focus on one revenue source. In other words, don't just use Google AdSense or just Amazon.com but use multiple methods including affiliates, contextual ads, donations, etc.

Blogging Software: Steve recommends Wordpress but not Blogger.

Steve doesn't use comments. We agree.

Steve does lots of testing and optimizing to see which ad vehicles work.

Steve says don't focus on too small of a niche or you won't build enough traffic.

Steve Pavlina also explains his views on post length.

Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency. Some bloggers say it's best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more. I've seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite. I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you're reading right now). That's because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles. I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic. It's true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value.

Pavlina obviously doesn't object to longer articles since this one was over 7,000 words long. Long authoritative articles might have an advantage in that they can generate more inbound links than brief posts if they are well-written.

In other blogging for money news, J Wynia reports that Wynia.org is now a four figure site.