The Greatest of All the Blogging Myths!

It is staggering that there are over 70 million blogs on the net. The vast majority, 99.5% do not make money, any money. Some make a little. A few, very few, make lots of money. What is the secret? I want to explore the possibilities of how to make money through blogging. There will be some hints and tips, some reviews and advice.

Make no mistake. I believe personal blogging is a good thing. My personal blog helps to keep me sane. Personal blogs let us explore the personal in the strangely impersonal world of the net. If you do not promote your blog no one else will read it and you can almost write what you like without fear of friends and family coming across it.

However, if you have a business blog you need people to read it, you need traffic, and you need to make money from it. I hope that this lens will help you understand how to make money from blogging.

The great blogging myth is that to make money online all you need to do is to set up a blog and the money just starts rolling in (I wish!). That simply is not the case.

There are upwards of 70 million blogs but there are few, very few, that make money. Rob Benwell has been blogging for 4 years and in is now making $34,000 a month through blogging.

He has updated his hugely successful Blogging To The Bank, but is it worth the money?

I bought a copy the day it was released earlier this week and here is my honest review.

At 58 pages it is not the biggest e-book that you will ever buy, but it is the content that matters.

That Rob is very successful is not in doubt. He obviously wanted to get his knowledge down on paper without waffle. There is a lack of ego in his book that is refreshing. He does not see himself as a 'guru' but as an ordinary guy. His ideas are presented succinctly but clearly.

In my view the the section about setting up a blog is better covered in other manuals. If you want a step by step guide to setting up a WordPress blog then I will suggest a few manuals in the newsletter, when I get time. Where this book scores is when Rob explains about the value of auto-responders and the holistic approach to blogging. He never takes his eye off the main aim of the book which is to help a blog owner make serious money.

Rob has a very practical approach to running a blog. He wants everything he does to either increase traffic or to increase the stickiness of his blogs. He says again and again that blogs must serve the readers and not be stale or boring. He does not want to spend hours on SEO (search engine optimisation) or chasing page ranking. He is pragmatic in his approach to SEO, he will do what is necessary and what will increase traffic but not spend hours 'fine tuning'. That is because after a point SEO is not time efficient and the traffic gain does not justify the time cost. (I like that bit!).

It may take a few reads until you get it but when you do it's just shear genius. Some of the topics in my opinion could have been covered a little more, then others went into great detail. You also get his 5 Blogging Commandments For 2009 that you must follow to give your blogs the greatest success in 2009 and keep them future proofed. This should be printed out and put on the wall of every blogger without a doubt!

If you want to improve your blog, if you want to know how to make money with your new blog then you really should look at Blogging To The bank.