Everybody have a blog these days. And everybody wants to make money with that blog, if possible, the very next day after the first post. Well, I’ll say it straight from the beginning: it’s not that easy. It’s doable, of course, but it’s not the easy peasy piece of cake you see advertised all over the net. You need persistence, trust, self esteem and a positive attitude. You need to make a profession out of it, like any other profession out there. You can blog from home, of course, you can set your own hours and chose your own topics to write about, but fact is you have to take it seriously. Otherwise the compensation won’t be serious at all.

I started to blog in a “serious” manner 6 months ago. I consciously chose to switch from being a full time business man owning my own online publishing company to a full time personal development blogging career. I knew from experience that this won’t happen over night. Every important achievement comes after a decent amount of work and needs a certain timeframe to start, get a momentum and bloom. Having my own business for 10 years was surely a big advantage and we’ll see later in this series of posts why.

Oh, yes, this introduction is the beginning of a series of posts about my first 6 months of serious blogging. I reached my first main milestone and I want to share my findings. Overall, I’m more than satisfied with the progress of my blog so far. For me, it’s a personal success, regardless of the traffic / money numbers, although those numbers are pretty big for a 6 months old blog. There are other sources of satisfaction and I’ll try to cover them as I go along.

The series will cover several topics, including writing, promotion and, of course, making money. I bet the making money post will be the biggest surprise. Well, here’s how is going to be:

1. Writing
2. Promotion
3. Money
4. Tools (including a wordpress plugin I wrote)

The first article, Writing, will focus on the aspects related to the actual activity: your writing routine. Having a blog means writing blog posts. It’s fundamental, you can’t really avoid it. I will describe my experiments with several posting speeds, how a posting speed can be maintained with self-discipline, and how the writing can become a very organized and fulfilling activity, instead of becoming the biggest burden and source of worry for the average blogger.

The second article will be about Promotion. Promoting a blog is something that most people seem to ignore big time. They expect to write a good article and then to be flooded with visitors. In good Law Of Attraction terms this will happen at some point, if you keep writing good content, that’s a fact. But it can happen quite late if you don’t speed up the process a little. The problem is that there are tons of good articles out there and you must find a way to let people know that you exist in the first place.

The third article will cover the blogging Money. I will tell you from the beginning that money wasn’t my main focus when I started to write this blog. It is something that I want to happen at some point, but I want it to happen in a certain way. In the money post I will talk about my revenue streams, about my strategy and about my short and medium term intentions in creating and maintaining more revenue streams from this blog.

The final article will be the most technical one, about the Tools. I left the technical stuff in the end on purpose. Not all bloggers have a strong technical background and things like writing and promoting can be done without strong technical know-how. With the latest progress in the software development and server maintenance, they don’t actually need to be geeks anymore. But they need to have the ability to use some basic tools for various tasks. It will showcase some of my traffic numbers, traffic tracking tools, browser extensions and some of my own designed tools (a brand new wordpress plugin).

That’s it, stay tuned for the first article.