When I first started my blog, I really had no specific ideas or plans for it. I started with a free blogger.com blog, then I moved to a free wordpress.com blog. I’m not sure whether that is still the case, but at the time wordpress.com hosted blogs did not allow Adsense or other forms of advertising.

So I started my blog on BrianWong.com. Back in the day, it wasn’t so easy to add Adsense ads to the blog themes that were available. You had to really know your way around the code editor. I’ve lost a great deal of hours just trying to figure out how to create and ad block and how to freaking insert it into the right place on my blog!

Today, there are many free Adsense plugins and widgets and even Adsense-ready themes where you just plug your Adsense ID in the theme and all the ads are added for you.

When I first started out, the Adsense income was pretty pathetic. I used to earn like $3.00 a month. I even tried to create a few dedicated Adsense websites around certain keywords but I could never create any consistent Adsense income from my sites. Mostly because I did not have a passion around the subjects of those blogs.

So in the end, I just left the Adsense model and started exploring other means of online income to see if it was better return for my time. I decided to just blog for fun and for the “therapeutic” value of being able to write of post about something and make it accessible to the world. That was over a year ago.

In the early days, like all new endeavors, I found it hard to maintain a consistent habit of blogging. It was almost a chore to keep it up each week and I was only blogging about once a week.

After sticking to it for a while though, things started to change. Today, it’s a lot easier and its just something I do once a week or whenever I have the time. I blog about anything I like really. There’s no plan or schedule for when and what I blog about.

Now in the meantime, I’ve noticed that over the last year, I’ve seen my Adsense income starting to grow. I was earning about $50 to $70 a month which was a welcomed income. Then I started earning over $100 a month.

The last check I received came to just over $180.00. Although its just a small amount of money, I never play down any source of income. It’s all good.

So, I think the take away point of the story is this:

1. Start a Wordpress Blog and Host it On Your Own Domain

It does not cost much to host your own blog on your own domain, so go ahead and buy a domain name and install a Wordpress blog. It doesn’t matter what it looks like or even if you have nothing “great” to say. Just get started. If you don’t start, you can’t learn and if you don’t learn, you can’t progress.

2. To Build and Audience, Passion is FIrst

If you have an interest in a particular area, just start a blog about it. There are many “gurus’ who tell you to do all kinds of market research before you choose a topic. While I think there’s valid reason to that bit of advice, I also believe that if you don’t have a strong passion around a subject, you will never create a big enough audience to make money from blogging about that subject.

3. Monetize

Adsense is just ONE of many ways you can monetize your blog, if you don’t have any product to sell or have any initial sponsors (might be hard get sponsor for a new blog), you could at least put up some banners to affiliate programs or add Adsense to your blog.

Finally, just enjoy the process of blogging. At the very least, if will help you to improve your writing and communication skills and to connect with other people from all over world. If you have any questions about blogging, leave and comment and I will try and help out if I know the answer.

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Tags: adsense, google