Category: Wordpress

I have never and will NEVER offer paid courses or coaching. I show you how I do things, give you the tools to do it yourself and recommend services. Wordpress is the most important environment I use to build my business.
Wordpress

Don’t build a niche store, Google killed them

No, the title isn’t an error, I did intend to say “Don’t”.  Let me explain…The internet is a constantly changing place.  One day you may find yourself getting more than 2000 visits to a site per day and earning money like there is no tomorrow, then the next day, both traffic and money are suddenly all gone.  This is what happened to my top earning niche stores in August of 2011.

Niche Store

I’ve been holding on since then, hoping that by making various site changes and by getting more links that the traffic might return.  After more than a year of waiting, I’ve realized it just isn’t going to happen.   I’m accepting reality: Google has successfully killed niche stores and I will no longer be recommending them as a viable source of side income going forward.

Frankly, I waited for far too long, and shouldn’t have held on as long as I did.   Someone moved by niche store cheese, and rather than getting up to find the next “new cheese”, I stayed around hoping it would come back.  Big mistake, that caused me to waste a great deal of time.

Update 1/1/2014: After two months straight of no income and very little traffic on the site, I shut it down.   I’ll be focusing more on my niche sites and blogs going forward.  Keeping reading, and I’ll share with you how well they are working and how to get started.

Update: 6/4/2014: Instead of Niche Stores, I now recommend building out Niche Sites.  You can read more about this and follow along with my in my Niche Site Case Study.

Build a Niche Store

Building a niche store was all the rage beginning around 2006/2007.  I jumped on the bandwagon during a great time in 2007.  I initially built two niche stores, followed by a few more over time.  A few of them did pretty well, a few others never took off at all, but one of them earned me more than $8,000.00 over the course of  5 years.  Not bad for a site I hardly spent any time on.

I started off using a software package called Build a Niche Store (BANs).  BANs worked great and made building an eBay based niche store really simple.  Google soon caught onto BANs though, and around 2008 or so, Google started de-ranking BANs sites on their SERPs. Seems Google has this obsession with only having sites they (the key word being they) feel are beneficial to “searchers” at the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs).  The problem is,”beneficial” is subjective and often debated.  Now, in Google’s defense some of the BANs stores out there were terrible and did not provide a good user experience.  While perhaps I’m partial, I felt my did.  Others must have agreed based on the traffic and sales I was getting.

Once Google made the change to start black listing BANs sites, I saw my niche store drop from the #1 or #2 position on Goole for it’s primary keywords, to somewhere on the 4th or 5th page within a few weeks, then ultimately not being listed at all.  Many other BANs based sites were seeing the same thing.  As a result, BANs soon lost a lot of activity and the owners moved onto other things.  People were leaving BANs left and right.  I didn’t stay on it long after I started seeing my traffic die off.

I converted my sites to use using WordPress, Thesis, and the phpbay plugin.  My niche store was actually my very first Thesis based site.  This turned out to be  a smart move for me.  I submitted a request to Google to have my site “un-blacklisted”.  A few days later, my niche store began to recover quickly and became very successful again, even more so than before.  I attribute this mainly to having a better design on the page than I had with BANs, but also primarily due to Thesis being an excellent SEO theme.

2010 and 2011 were the highest income years, the niche store was ranking in the #1 spot for it’s primary keywords and also ranking very high for secondary keywords as well.  I was shocked at how much my eBay affiliate payments were each month.  The niche store quickly became my number one earning site for over a year, even exceeding my consulting/development income.

In August 2011, that all changed very suddenly.  I logged into Google analytics one day, as I had noticed my eBay commissions dropping and here is what I saw:

Niche Store Traffic Drop

See the big downward plummet (looks like a cliff)?  I honestly have no real explanation why.  I didn’t lose any back links and all of the ones I had were still very credible.  I changed nothing on the site, and I literally mean nothing.  My only theory is that the Panda changes Google had been making over the prior few months finally hit me.  The traffic slowly decreased.

I recently shut the site down completely due to only a small trickle of traffic, and no income for over 2 months.

No visits = no buyers = no income = time to move and try new things.

Instead of building niche stores, I’ve started building out niche sites and blogs.   Keep reading, I’ll explain below.

Why doesn’t Google like Niche Stores

Let’s talk for a second about why Google doesn’t like Niche Stores.  This will play into why they do seem to like Niche sites though.

I mentioned earlier that Google is focusing on putting sites they feel are the most beneficial to their customer base at the top of the SERPS.  The problem with a niche store is: They aren’t real stores.  They are sites set-up to resemble real online stores, but the products offered are really sold by someone else, commonly Amazon.com or Ebay.  So when you click on an item for purchase, the niche store will direct you to the actual item for sale on EBay or Amazon.

The other big problem with niche stores is that Google spiders, and algorithm love high valuable and rich content.  Niche stores generally don’t provide a great deal of highly valuable content.  Instead they provide listings of products for sale, which are more eCommerce sites than content sites.  As a result, Google doesn’t rank them high.    I thought adding a blog with lots of good content would help, but it didn’t because the content isn’t front and center.

I would assume based on my own results that Google doesn’t feel that niche stores are credible or valuable sites for their search audience.  Thus, Google ranks niche store sites lower on their SERP pages.  Personally I disagree, but Google never asked me, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Time to move on…

The future of affiliate based niche stores

There isn’t one.  Google may change their stance in the future, but I doubt it.

A better niche option is to explore building out niche sites instead.  Niche sites can be broken down into two types:

  • Review sites
  • Micro-blogs

Review sites provide detailed and comprehensive product reviews.   This includes detailed text about the product, valuable feedback to readers about the product, and lots of pictures.   The reviews themselves generally contain affiliate links out to product companies like Amazon.com.  These types of sites, when the right niche is chosen, can receive a large amount of search traffic, and earn a great deal of monthly income.

Micro-blogs are similar to larger and more general blogs (which Google seems to love), in that they focus on providing visitors with information about a particular niche, but the niche is tightly focused.   I converted one of my original niche stores into a micro-blog about improving gas mileage.   Traffic and revenue, while still not significant, is growing and well above what I was earning from the prior niche store design.  I also enjoy learning about and writing on the topic.

I additionally built out a micro blog about bed bugs to help educate people on bed bug detection and treatment.  This micro-blog/information site is doing very well and uses Amazon.com affiliate links for bed bug related products along with Adsense for monetization.

I you are interested in learning more about building out niche sites, check out my niche site category pages which as all of the articles I’ve written about niche sites.  In particular, I’d recommend these:

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Jon January 2, 2014 4 Comments
Wordpress

Types of WordPress themes

Deciding on a WordPress theme can be one of the most important choices you can make for your blog.  One of the great WordPress features is that you can make your WordPress based site look anyway you would like by installing a new WordPress theme.  A WordPress theme leaves your content the same, but changes the way the website and content is rendered.  Themes can literally make your website look like a completely different website with a simple click.

In addition to controlling the look of your blog or website, WordPress themes also play a critical role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO is the process of optimizing your blog or website so that it ranks high on the search engine result pages (SERPs) of such search engines like Google and Bing.  The higher your site ranks for various keywords on the SERPs, the more traffic your site will get from those search engines.  This will become a key factor in earning a side income.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself…back to WordPress themes, we’ll discuss search engine traffic and monitizing your site later in this series.

There are basically three types of WordPress themes:

  1. Premium
  2. Free
  3. Custom

Let’s dive in and look at the various pros and cons of each option.

Premium WordPress Themes

I personally prefer to use premium WordPress themes over any other type.  Premium themes are very high quality WordPress themes that are developed by small or large companies and in most cases you pay for.  Premium themes generally range from: $50 – $100 for a single site license.  To me though the cost is well worth it, as premium themes offer the following benefits:

  • High quality code
  • SEO Optimized
  • Implement the latest and greatest web standards
  • Highly optimized and performance focused
  • More flexible customization
  • Full Support

Anyone with a little PHP and HTML knowledge can hack together a WordPress theme and make it available.  Let’s face it though, some people know what they’re doing, others don’t.  Poorly written themes can really hurt your sites performance, cause it do to crazy things and negatively impact your SEO efforts.

Premium WordPress themes often come with an extensive array of options and customization features as well.  These features allow you to really tweak the functionality and look of your website.  In many cases the options let you change the colors and layout of your site with a simple point and click interface.  Most free themes do not provide these types features and capabilities.

One of the key areas where free themes are lacking is support.  If you run into an issue with a free theme, you’re often on your own to figure out how to resolve it; however premium themes often come with forum support and/or email support meaning the answer to your question is just a post or email away.

For Side Income Services, I generally use whichever theme my client’s prefer, but I always recommend the Genesis to them when asked for building blog sites.  For my authority niche sites, that promote products, particularly those that use the Amazon Associates Program, I use the Income Galaxy Framework theme, and their add-on products.

Free WordPress Themes

There are literally thousands of free WordPress themes available on the internet.  The easiest way to find most of them is to visit the WordPress.org themes directory.  The great thing about free themes is that they’re 100% free (bet you could have guessed that huh?).  As I always tell my kids though: “Nothing is free“.  The big downside to free WordPress themes is that you have to be careful which ones you use.  Some free WordPress themes are top notch, being put together by professional developers that really know what they’re doing.  Others though are done by amateurs and hobbyist that don’t always understand the importance of doing a theme correctly.

WordPress Themes have a big impact on: site performance, SEO, look and feel, and extensibility of a blog or website.  Given this, don’t just pick the best looking theme, read about it, research it, and read the reviews.  Do your research to make sure the theme isn’t just aesthetically pleasing, but also performs well and is SEO optimized.  Failing to pay attention to these basic criteria can really hurt your blog.

If you don’t have the money to purchase a premium theme and aren’t comfortable deciding on a free theme, the free themes included by default with WordPress are both good options, especially the Twenty Twelve and Twenty Thirteen.

Custom WordPress Themes

Custom WordPress themes are the way to go if you want to give your site a truly sophisticated and unique look.  Custom themes are often required for online stores and other unique types web sites.

Custom WordPress themes are developed specifically for a website by web designers and developers and offer flexibility and options only limited by money and technology.  On the downside though, custom themes can be very expensive, generally running $500 – $3,000 dollars depending on how sophisticated they are and how skilled the designer is.  The more custom graphics they have, generally the more expensive they are.

Another option you should consider to get the look and feel of a custom theme but with a lower cost is to customize a premium theme.  Many premium themes provide a large amount of customization out of the box in their options pages.  Where you need more, you can generally higher a web design and development company to do the additional customizations for you.  This is the type of work I do at Side Income Services.  This site is a great example of this option.  Side Income Blogging is running Thesis, but it’s hard to tell!  Another recent client customization I did was for Mandy Rose at House of Rose.   Her site is running a highly customized version of Genesis.

WordPress Themes – One size doesn’t fit all

Which one of these WordPress theme options is right for you?  As usual, the answer depends.  The option I like best is customizing a premium theme like Genesis.  Premium themes have a reasonable cost and provide the base infrastructure so that customizing your theme, or having someone customize it for you, is far less costly than a full custom theme.  This option is a great compromise between a free WordPress theme and full custom WordPress theme.

If your funds are limited (i.e. you have none), than a free WordPress theme is going to be your best option.  Just do your research and pick one that looks nice and is properly optimized.  Use this theme until you grow your blog enough to afford a premium theme, then migrate over.

For complex and specialized sites or if you you have deep pockets, going with a custom theme is probably the best option.  Custom themes will give you that unique and professional look.

Fortunately switching themes in WordPress is really easy so you can play with different options…which leads me into the next upcoming article in the Start a money making blog series: How to install a WordPress Theme.

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Jon November 13, 2013 6 Comments
Wordpress

How to customize the Metro Genesis Child Theme

UPDATE: The changes in this article will not work for Genesis Metro Pro, as it uses a completely new style sheet and HTML layout.

As I mentioned in my article Genesis child themes – My top three, the Metro child theme is my favorite.  Metro looks great “out of the box”.  Metro has great typography, support for two menus, and a good amount of white space and lots of widget areas.  The theme is clean, and I like a good clean theme.  Best of all, Metro is fully responsive.

I’ve found myself using Metro a lot lately as I’ve built out new niche sites for myself but also for building out new sites for clients.   I just finished up a new crafting website this weekend for a client that integrated with her Etsy shops.   The site was built on Metro (affiliate link).

As I’ve built out more and more Metro based sites, I’ve found myself doing the same types of customizations to it over and over again, and thought it might be beneficial to share a few of those with you.

Changing the Metro Header Image size

One of the first things I do for new Metro based sites is install a graphical header.   The good news is that Metro supports graphical headers “out of the box”, and you can find the menu option do that under Appearance >> Header from your WordPress administrative console.   By default, Metro wants a header image that is 1080 pixels wide by 87 pixels high.   In most cases, 87 pixels just isn’t tall enough for me and I often have to modify this to support a taller header image.

I typically use header images that are around 150px tall.  If you try to upload a header image that is 1080px x 150px, Metro will force you to crop it to 87px tall.

Metro can support taller images, with a few minor changes.

First, you’ll need to edit the functions.php file found in /wp-content/themes/metro.  One line #31, you’ll see the following code:

// Add support for custom header
add_theme_support( 'genesis-custom-header', array(
'flex-height' => true,
'height' => 87,
'width' => 1080
) );

Note the 87 value. That is what we’ll want to change. Assuming your are using a header image that is 1080px X 150px, you’ll want to edit the 87 to be 150, so this section of code looks like this:

// Add support for custom header
add_theme_support( 'genesis-custom-header', array(
'flex-height' => true,
'height' => 150,
'width' => 1080
) );

Be sure to save your changes. In order for the image to show correctly, we’ll need to make two more changes, but this time in the style.css file.

Open up the style.css file located in /wp-content/themes/metro, and navigate to line #156 where you’ll see the following code:

.header-image #title,
.header-image #title a,
.header-image #title-area {
	display: block;
	float: left;
	min-height: 87px;
	overflow: hidden;
	text-indent: -9999px;
}

Note that line #561 has “min-height: 87px;”. You’ll want to change that 87px to be the height of your new header, in the case of the example here, we’ll change it to 150px, so it looks as follows:

.header-image #title,
.header-image #title a,
.header-image #title-area {
	display: block;
	float: left;
	min-height: 150px;
	overflow: hidden;
	text-indent: -9999px;
}

Save your changes. If you visit your site, you’ll note that the graphic header still isn’t showing, and most likely you’ll see a big colored square instead. To fix this, you’ll need to decide which Metro color theme you’re going to use. If you don’t like any of the colors, I’ll tell you how to change them below, so just pick color for now, and we’ll modify it later.

For this example, we’ll just use blue. The style sheet for metro contains all of the common styles first, then has specific color styles towards the bottom. The blue color starts at line #1573 and the blue specific color styles are defined here. You’ll note they all start with “.metro-blue”.

For this example, we’re using “Metro blue”, and you’ll want to remove all of line #1620 except the { and also remove the comma at the end of line #1619, so that the section of CSS looks like this when you’re done:

.metro-blue a.social-buttons:hover,
.metro-blue button:hover,
.metro-blue input:hover[type="button"],
.metro-blue input:hover[type="submit"],
.metro-blue .btn:hover,
.metro-blue .genesis-nav-menu .current-menu-item a,
.metro-blue .genesis-nav-menu li a:hover,
.metro-blue .genesis-nav-menu li:hover a,
.metro-blue .navigation li a:hover,
.metro-blue .navigation li.active a,
.metro-blue .post-comments a,
.metro-blue .sidebar .enews-widget input[type="submit"] {
	background-color: #5bb1f9;
}

Save your changes. Now when you preview the site, you should see your header image. If you still don’t, double check your changes. If you still can’t get it to work, re-install metro and walk through the changes again.

Clean up the unused color styles

Once I select the color I’ll be using, I remove all of the unneeded color specific styling.  For example, if I plan to use the blue color, I remove all of the other metro color specific styles like “metro-green”, “metro-pink”, etc.  You can just delete these from your CSS file.

While not a large amount of CSS, I prefer to keep my CSS files as small as possible to optimize the site loading time.

Changing Metro Colors

To be honest, one of the things I don’t like about Metro is it’s colors.   The blue isn’t too bad, but all of the prebuilt colors are just a little too bright for me.  I prefer to only use bright colors for highlighting, not for primary colors.

Also, for all color themes, the menus are a black background.  While this works for many sites, I often change the menu color as well to make the site unique looking.

Changing both of these colors is easy.  First off, get the HTML color you want to use as the primary color.  You’ll want the # color value.  For example, white is #FFFFFF.   You can find these on a site like Color Combos.  Once you have the color you want to use, open up your style.css file.

We’re going to modify the blue color to be what we want.  The blue color code that Metro uses is: #5bb1f9.  To change the color, just find all the instances of #5bb1f9 and replace them with the color you want.   These will be in the style area specifically for blue, and all styles will be preceded by “.metro-blue”.

The black used by Metro is #333, and replacing all instances of #333 with a color will replace the black used in the menus, footer and other metro widgets.  I typically make this a highlight color, something a little brighter than the primary site color.

Wrapping Up

There you have it, your own custom version of Metro.   I love this strategy as it allows you to build off all the hard work done by the StudioPress team, yet customize the site so that it looks unique and unlike every other version of the Metro theme.

If you don’t have Metro yet, I would highly recommend you buy it (affiliate link).  Metro is a very nice looking and easy to customize theme, that comes with some powerful pre-built widget areas.  Best of all, Metro is fully responsive, meaning it will adjust to any resolution and/or device, including your iPhone or iPad.

Metro is definitely well worth the money paid, and I’m not one to purchase things very often.  Yes, I did include a few affiliate links in this article, and I will get a commission if you use the links to buy Metro.   There is not additional cost to you, and I only use affiliate links for products I personally use and trust.

If for any reason you get stuck, or the changes as written in this article don’t work, just drop me a line and I’ll help you out.

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Jon August 12, 2013 10 Comments
Wordpress

How to delete a WordPress page or post and not lose your traffic

Heraclitus once said: “The only thing that is constant is change.”  This applies to your blog as well.  I find myself making constant little tweaks, adjustments and changes to my various blogs and websites.  In some cases you can just delete things and change things with little to no risk.  However, there are a few changes you have to really be careful with, and this is especially true if you have any search engine traffic coming to your blog.  In particular, you have to be very careful when renaming or deleting WordPress pages or posts.

Don’t worry though, I’ll show you a trick that allows you to rename and delete and not lose any search engine traffic as a result.

Delete WordPress Page

The problem with renaming or deleting WordPress pages or posts

When you rename or delete a page or post in WordPress, that page or post is gone and no longer accessible using the prior permalink or URL.  The problem with this in most cases, is that the search engines have already indexed the page and have it stored.  When search engine users search, find your page or post, then click on it, they get the dreaded 404 error page which basically says “Page not found”.

This is not the experience you want visitors to your blog to have.  You always want to do your very best to avoid having your visitors ever see an error message.

How do we fix this?  Fortunately there is an easy solution.

301 Redirects

301 redirects are a way to tell your visitor’s browser: “Hey, the content you asked for isn’t here anymore, but here’s the permanent replacement page”.  The great thing about a 301 redirect is that to your blog’s visitor, the whole thing is seamless.

Fortunately, a 301 redirect works for search engines and search engine bots as well and is Google’s recommended way of handling renamed or deleted WordPress pages or posts.

A 301 redirect is done by adding a special statement to your .htaccess file.  The .htaccess file is a double edged sword though.  While you can do some amazing and powerful things using that little file, you can also really mess up your blog.

Unless you really know what you’re doing, I don’t generally recommend updating or changing this file directly.

For 301 redirects, I recommend using a plugin instead.  There are a number of 301 redirect plugins available.   The one I use and find easy to use is: Simple 301 Redirects.  I did notice that as of the writing of this article, that the plugin hasn’t been updated in more than 2 years.   I still actively run it though, with no issues.

Once installed and active, this plugin will add an option to your Admin console’s Settings menu named: 301 Redirects.  Clicking on this will display the following screen (although your fields will be blank).

Simple 301 Redirects

Adding redirects is easy.  You just put the changed or deleted URL on the left and put your new URL on the right.  You can see from my screen shot above, that I’ve renamed categories, renamed a few articles and deleted a few things.  The deletes are the redirects that go from a page URL to my main site URL, as there isn’t really a replacement for them.

While it might be temping to redirect deleted pages or posts to other unrelated pages or posts, I don’t recommend this as this could confuse or frustrate your visitor.  I always recommend redirecting deleted pages or posts to your main site URL.

Also, be sure to never redirect to a page that is redirected.  This will result in a circular redirect, and an error being displayed to your visitors.

Test your redirects

Once you have your redirects in place, I recommend testing them.  First confirm that your redirect works and that your browser redirects to the expected URL.  Then I recommend that you test out other related URLs to insure they are still working.  For example, if you redirected a category page, test out your other category pages.

If you want to be double sure, you can also use a redirect check tool.

Redirects can cause havoc with your site if you aren’t careful, so testing redirects is important.

Why delete or rename WordPress posts or pages?

If you’re fairly early in your blogging journey, you probably haven’t needed to rename or delete pages or posts just yet, but I can almost guarantee you will at some point.  One of the most common reasons for renames is for search engine optimization.  You may find that a keyword phrase that you initially targeted isn’t working or that you’re getting traffic for a different set of keywords and want to optimize for those instead.  Including your target keywords in your permalink or URL is an important strategy in ranking well on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Unfortunately, I also find that sometimes what I think are great ideas, turn out to be, well, not so great.  This often results in a delete and redirect to my home page.

In 99% of the cases, you should always redirect your renames or deletes, even if the traffic is minimal.  While I am unable to confirm this, most search engine experts believe that 404 (page not found) errors can negatively impact the quality of your site from Google’s perspective and cause your site to rank lower on SERPs.  Given how easy these plugins are to use, there really aren’t any good reason not to use redirects.

Photo credit: Ben Gillin

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Jon May 13, 2013 8 Comments
Wordpress

Build a blog you’re passionate about or don’t even bother

I love to visit other blogging blogs and read their articles.  I enjoy seeing other blogs in my niche, reviewing their designs and reading about the unique perspective and writing style each blogger brings to the table.  The knowledge I gain from these visits helps me to better help you build a blog.

Build a blog

Here’s the problem though: the blogging advice on the internet is a mixed bag and you really have to be careful.  Some of the information is great, some is just frankly terrible.  This brings me back to topics that are discussed too much, and which are not.

The more popular topics are things like: making money blogging, build a blog, make money fast blogging (which is next to impossible by the way), and other make money online topics.  Why?  Because they are popular search topics and are often filled with affiliate offers or ads to earn the blogger money.  Do these articles serve us the general reader population?  Perhaps a little, but in general often not very much.  The articles are all the same and on the same boring old content.  The content is just re-churned a million different ways, but it all says the same old thing.  Boring….yawn, comma inducing.

As Google begins to move away from the older search model of back links and keywords, to a new model based on social popularity, authorship and author rank these dime a dozen articles will begin to move down the search results pages.  What will begin to rise to the top are articles that provide real value and substance to readers – the really great and popular content will rise to the top.  Based on some tracking I’ve been doing and a number of other experts I’ve been interacting with on Google+, we are already seeing this trend.

What’s the key strategy to writing this great and popular content? 

Build a blog you’re passionate about

Writing content that people want to read about is important, but what I feel is even more critical is writing on topics that you, the blog owner and blog writer are passionate about.  If I could teach you just one tip or lesson about how to start a blog, it would be this:

Build a blog you’re passionate about or don’t even bother building it

Seriously, if you don’t love the topic and you aren’t passionate it, you’re just wasting your own time and the time of thousands of readers on the internet.  Don’t be that guy or gal, there are too many of them as it is.  Everyone will know you’re not passionate, everyone will see it, and you’ll just be miserable.  Oh sure, you might make money in the short term, but I guarantee you’ll make a whole lot more in the long term doing something that you absolutely love.

All of those top ranking re-churned articles I mentioned earlier?  They are full of great keywords, but in most cases they are not written by writers passionate about their topic.  How can you tell?  Easy, just read them.  I personally can tell pretty quick whether or not a blogger is passionate about what they’re topic and I’ll bet you can too.  I’m not really sure  what specific qualities  tell me this, I just know I can pick it up, and pretty quickly at that.  I’ll bet you can too.

Guess what?  Google can tell too.  With Google Plus, Authorship and Author Rank, they are going to get a whole lot better at it too, mark my words.

Is making money from your blog your reason for blogging?

Did you start your blog to make money?  If so, you started it for exactly the wrong reason.  If you blog only to earn money, you will most likely fail.  Why?

  • You have to write almost everyday about the topic.  If you aren’t passionate about what you are writing on, you will quickly get bored and writing will become a chore.  Once that happens, your readers will know and they will leave.
  • You repeat the same stuff over and over.  See, if you aren’t passionate, you content won’t be varied.  You won’t spend time reading and researching like you should and you won’t explore the outer fringes of your topic where the new and unique content ideas live.
  • Writing about something your passionate about is easy.  Writing about something you’re not passionate about is hard…really hard.  Writing about something you’re not passionate about is work.  Blogging shouldn’t be work, it should be fun, exciting, and enjoyable
  • Making money blogging is all about converting your readers.  Converting means telling them about something and then them buy it.  If you aren’t passionate about the topic you’re writing about or the product you’re telling your readers about, they won’t buy it.  Why buy something the author isn’t even excited about?  That’s why I only promote products I personally use and love.  Sure, I could do tons of reviews of various products, but they would be boring and you probably wouldn’t click on them.  I’d rather write up a few reviews/recommendations on things I’m excited about and provide value, and have you buy those.

Do what you love and blog your passion

One of my favoriate books is called No More Mondays by Dan Miller.  The book targets people who dread going to work on Monday because they hate what they do.  The book walks you through a plan to help you find what you love to do and how to start doing it.  Once you are doing what you love to do, there are no more Mondays.  If you haven’t read this book, I’d strongly suggest you pick up a copy.  No More Monday’s is an quick and easy read, but it will change the way you see things.

Perfect example: Me.  When most people have spare time, they read a novel, work on a hobby, watch TV, etc.  Me?  I like to work on this blog – that includes writing, making design changes, looking at my Google Analytics data, and participating on social media.  I would love to do this full-time and hopefully someday I will.  I’m passionate about blogging, running websites and writing.  I’ve been that way ever since I started my first blog and that blog literally changed by life.

My passion about how important passion is…

As I was surfing and reading some of those “no passion” blogs last night, I got really frustrated.  I thought to myself, I know I blog about earning an income blogging, but I really hope my readers know it’s not about money, it’s about doing what you love.  I hope they know that doing what you love can lead to money.  I hope they know that while I love earning money (who doesn’t?), what I love more is helping you and interacting with you.   I was so passionate about making sure you understood how important this concept of passion was, I immediately started drafting this article.

For those of you that that have been blogging for a while, you’ll understand exactly what I mean – Have you ever sat down to write and article and the content flows out of your head so fast you can barely type fast enough to keep up?  For me, this was one of those articles.  I am so incredibly passionate about making sure you write for your readers and be passionate about your blog topic that I literally couldn’t wait to publish this for you.

If you walk away with just one thing from Side Income Blogging, again, walk away with this: Build a blog you’re passionate about or don’t even bother building it.

If you are passionate about what you write on, success won’t be something you’ll have to work at it, you won’t dread sitting down to the computer to write “yet another boring article”, you won’t have block off time just to do social media.  All of that will just happen and you’ll like it….no, you’ll love it.

What topic should I build a blog on?

A topic you’re passionate about!  

Kidding…kidding….I know, sometimes that’s not always easy to figure out.  If you’re like me, I’m passionate about a number of things.

Fortunately I’ve already written an article that will walk you through a process that will help you come up with a blog you are passionate about and can earn money from.  Just read my article: What should I blog about?

Being passionate about your blog and your topic will be critical to your success.  I beg you to chose a topic you love, chose a topic that you can write on effortlessly and most importantly choose a topic that you would write on even if you didn’t make money.

Are you passionate about your blog?

Photo credit: OakleyOriginals

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Jon March 11, 2013 13 Comments