If you’ve been blogging for some time but aren’t making any money then there’s a reason for it. In the majority of cases it really relates to not having enough traffic but it’s not always as simple as that.

You could get thousands of visitors a day but if they aren’t targeted or they don’t like what you have to say it’s not going to equate to sales.

To start making a decent income online you need to step back and analyze your site to see what it is that is holding you back. Use the following list to get you started…

#1: You Have Little or No Traffic

We have some beautiful blogs with lots of content but they get very little traffic. As a consequence we don’t make much from them. When we see a burst of traffic to these sites (for whatever reason) the sales start increasing. A lack of traffic can affect not only product sales but also advertising spots you may wish to sell on your blog. Traffic is key to your blogs success and should be your number one priority. (For some solid methods for increasing traffic, sign up to our newsletter (in the right sidebar) to receive our free traffic generating ebook.)

#2: Your Site is Full of Ads

Now at this point you’re probably wondering how having too many ads can affect your income. Just remember that people are becoming blind to ads, especially banner ads. They are also more likely to click the back button when they see a blog full of flashing ads and Google Adsense plastered right in front of their face.

If you want to truly start making money you need to remove a lot of those banner adds and instead start using affiliate text links within your content. (You might want to take a look at our review for Ninja Affiliate if you want a quick and easy way to add affiliate links to your blog.)

#3: Your Are Not Reviewing Enough Products

It doesn’t matter what your blog is about, there are usually products that relate to it. If you have an internet marketing blog then it’s almost certain that you have purchased an ebook or signed up to a membership site of some sort. If so, write a review about it – people love to read real reviews. If you have a blog about travel then you can write reviews for luggage, airlines, hotels, restaurants. If you have a blog about dogs you can write reviews for dog beds, dog leads, dog food. If you have a recipe blog you can write reviews for recipe books, cookware, kitchen utensils. You get the picture!

#4: When You Do Write Reviews They Really Don’t Provide Value

I’ve been on the net since 1994 so I have seen a lot of product reviews in my time. The ones I like the best are the ones that have been written by people who actually use the product. You can pick them a mile off as they really provide a lot of detail compared to those short reviews you see where the writer only lists the features and benefits of the product and nothing more. Even if you have never used the product, you can write a review but make it different from everyone elses and make sure you really do your research well so that you can provide value to the reader.

#5: Your Site Looks Amateurish 

I don’t know what it is but it seems that no matter how nice a template is, there is always someone who can totally mess it up. They might add a header but it really doesn’t fit the theme width. Or they might change the colors so nothing matches or add some ads in the sidebar that are three different sizes so they look out of place. Or they will add Google Adsense to the top of each post but won’t left or right align it so that it fits in with the post.

The reason that you picked that template was that it looked good so don’t play with it. If you have to play with it and it doesn’t look right then hire someone from Rentacoder or Elance to fix it – it shouldn’t cost much. Remember that an amateurish looking blog doesn’t inspire confidence and readers can easily click away.

#6: You Don’t Inspire Confidence

People want to be told what to buy. They want someone who knows what they are talking about tell them that something is worth buying. If you aren’t confident in your approach then your readers won’t feel confident enough to buy products that you recommend. Become an expert in your field and it will reflect in your blog posts and in your reviews.

#7: You Aren’t Promoting the Right Products

How many blogs have you visited where the ads on the page have nothing to do with the content on the blog? This often happens when the blogger finds an affiliate program that pays big dollars and just throws the ad on their site in the hope of a sale. This will rarely if ever work. Promote products that relate to your blog topic and you will have better success.

FINALLY RELEASED - Our complete guide to making money online by promoting Amazon products. Head over to the AMAZONIAN PROFIT PLAN website for all the latest info.

Have you ever read The Emperors New Clothes? Many of you might have been read this story as a kid.

For those that have never heard of it, basically it is the tale of two weavers who promise the emperor of the town that they can make him the finest clothing he has ever seen. In fact, they promise the emperor that the clothing is of such quality that anyone who is unfit for office or a simpleton will not be able to see the cloth…it will be invisible to them.

So the emperor, on being presented the clothing and not wanting to appear stupid or unfit for office, pretends that he can see it as does the rest of the town. It is only when the emperor is parading through town and a young child in the crowd shouts out that the emperor is wearing no clothes that everyone starts to agree.

Now you’re probably wondering why I’ve started this blog post with a fairy tale and what it has to do with blogging. Well simply what I’m trying to do here is use this fairy tale as an analogy for some of the hugely popular blogs out there.

Have you ever gone to one of those big blogs in your niche and wondered what all the fuss was about? I know I have. Some blogs get hundreds of comments per post and you sit there wondering why when you read some of their articles. They really could have been written by anyone.

Some of these bloggers are so big that they can write about what they had for lunch and still get a substantial amount of comments.

And then there are other top bloggers who have obviously gone past the point of caring  anymore and are more concerned about making the dollars with the number of ads and pop-ups they have on their blog. In fact, there is one top blogger in the money making niche that has so many ads on his page that it takes forever for the page to load up and I get a script error message when it finally does. I just don’t bother anymore….but others do.

So what is it that attracts people to these blogs and continue to leave comments? Oftentimes it’s not because they are getting value from that blog but simply because:

a. they want to be seen on that blog as it will get people to come to their blog
b. they want to make friends with that blogger simply for the status it will give them
c. everyone else is following that blogger so they should too

So it can be all about perceptions rather than that blog being of any real value to that person. That blog is simply used as a tool and nothing more.

Which brings me back to The Emperors New Clothes…are we just following these blogs because like the Emperor we don’t want to appear foolish…or because we want to be one of the crowd or for any of the other reasons mentioned above. The blog may no longer provide any real value but we think it does because everyone else thinks it does.

I must admit, that I don’t often visit the bigger blogs – there’s a couple that I like – Problogger.net for instance as he always manages to maintain the consistency of quality as does Yaro Starak from Entreprenuers Journey.

I tend to prefer the up and coming bloggers as they know that they continually have to improve to suceed and some provide some excellent content.

What about you? Do you follow the top bloggers because they provide value or simply because you feel like you have to…or a bit of both?

I have decided to start adding a regular Friday post with some of my favorite links for the week. So here is the first:

• What Shall I Include in My About Page? – Some nice tips here on the types of things you should be adding to your About page. This page can often get a lot of traffic but it is often neglected. It’s worth taking the time to create an outstanding About page.
• 5 Things That Will Change Your Life With Money – I like the Famous Debt Snowball which is a quick and easy method for getting out of debt.
• Comments – The Lifeblood of a Blog – A post about commenting including a list of the different types of  comments and also some good tips on how to encourage quality comments on your blog.
• Slave of the Mind – An excellent post about living in the now. Walter talks about how our mind can enslave us through our emotions.
• Deep Linking Gives Old Posts New Life – An article about the importance of linking to old posts – something we personally don’t do enough of.
• Squeeze Page 101 – Are You Squeezing Your Email List? – Apart from the fact that Keller has featured our Squidoo 7 Day eCourse in this post, this is a really good article on squeeze pages.
• One Day Off Will Not Kill Your Blog – Take some time off now and then from blogging – as Brandon says in his post…’your blog won’t die’.
  

We have previously mentioned that we have over 20 blogs and some make money for us and others don’t. Actually to be fair they all make money but some only make a few dollars a month whilst others make thousands.

So it stands to reason that over time we have learned a thing or two about owning and running a blog but it took a lot of work and we made quite a few mistakes before we got to where we are today.

Out of all of those mistakes, there was one really big one that affected our online business for many years…and it was unfortunate that it took us so long to realise what we were doing wrong as it really affected our income potential and kept us in our day jobs for a lot longer than we really wanted. Once we caught on however our income started to grow significantly and we knew then that we were well on our way.

So What Were We Doing Wrong?

It’s simple really…we weren’t providing value to our readers. Now, I can just hear you all groaning right now thinking that you already know this. However, I can guarantee that if you have been online for a while and you aren’t succeeding, it’s more than likely that you aren’t providing your readers with enough valuable information to keep them coming back for more.

Don’t get me wrong, a bit of promotion helps but all the promotion in the world won’t do any good unless you have something worth promoting.

What Does ‘Providing Value’ Actually Mean?

This is not an easy one to answer because one person’s definition of ‘value’ will be different from the next. It’s a bit like saying ‘how long is a piece of string’.  So all I can do is give you my definition of ‘value’ – this is what has worked for us.

Value means:

• giving away your secrets
• going the extra mile to help others
• writing honest and unbiased reviews
• providing way more than your readers expect
• focusing on your reader first before focusing on the money
• linking to other blogs if it helps your readers (even if they are in competition to you)

Show Me the Money…

We were definitely guilty, in the past, of not providing quality content and to be completely honest,  it was only because our primary focus was on making money. After all that’s what everyone involved in affiliate marketing aims to do. But once we turned our approach around, the money just started to flow.

I really love this blog post which sums it up beautifully using a real life example – Focus on Providing Value,  Not Making Money.

Are YOU providing value?

If money is your primary focus then step back and take a look at your blog posts. Are they short and lacking any real substance? Are you just churning out content just for the sake of creating as many pages as possible so you can get a few Adsense clicks? Are your reviews simply rehashed information listing the features copied over from the merchants website? Are you copying content from article directories or worse still, from other peoples blogs?

If you are doing any of these things, then you will never really make the big dollars online.

Change your approach to what you are doing and the money will follow.

We were asked just recently to write up an interview for Famous Bloggers Club and today it finally went live. You can read the interview here: http://blog.newmediabloggers.com/affiliate-blog-online/

Famous Bloggers Club was an idea put together by Hesham from Zebida.com to highlight bloggers from around the internet in the make money online, SEO, blogging and social networking niches.  The club is exclusive and limited to only 100 members.

This is the philosophy behind Famous Bloggers Club:

FBC has been created for the sole purpose of unifying bloggers that are proactive, dedicated and committed in helping each other to prosper on the blogosphere. It is not by all means discriminatory, as we will gladly accept those who will abide by this code.

If you are proactive, dedicated, committed, honest, pro-Google and willing to help other bloggers, then you definitely meet the criteria and deserve to be a proud member of FBC.

Hesham has interviewed around 40 bloggers so far so it is well worth taking a look to see why they blog, whether they make any money blogging and a bit about how they got to where they are today.

Head over to the Famous Bloggers Club now to read our interview.

Some of you may not be aware that this isn’t our only blog. We actually have over 20 blogs and websites…way too many really. To make money online you don’t really need to work that hard and in fact if you are you really are spreading yourself too thin. We were doing just that for quite some time and it wasn’t getting us anywhere.

When we stopped to think about how hard we were working and the little return we were getting for that effort, we realised that we needed to do something about it. So we decided that we would take just a couple of our blogs and give them our absolute full attention.

We knew we needed to do something big to get these blogs to the next level. We were stagnating and not really making the income we wanted.

At about the same time, we read a blog post about two guys who were writing 20 blog posts a day for their blog and how well they were doing because of it. This kind of gave us the idea that maybe we could do the same, but 20 blog posts?!…this seemed like an enormous task.

We could have hired writers to do it but at 20 posts a day over 7 days at even $5 an article that would have been about $700 a week…yikes! So instead we decided on 10 articles a day…still quite high but something we could manage.

Was it Worth it?

Definitely!…within two months we had doubled our traffic and within three months we had effectively tripled our average monthly traffic – prior to this we were averaging around 10,000 to 15,000 unique visitors per month. It also became our best earning blog from that point on….and still is for that matter.

You can see the results in the image above. We started adding the posts at the beginning of October 2008.

It was the boost we needed and it paid off. Over time we reduced the number of blog posts – to continue with that many posts would have resulted in major burn out as we were writing them all ourselves.

Would this Work on All Blogs?

I don’t think so. The blog we chose was purely a product based blog which is quite different to the blog you are reading now. If I were to start adding 10 blog posts a day to this blog the information would be quickly lost and regular readers would get annoyed pretty quickly in their effort to keep up.  However 2 or 3 blog posts a day could work and would still result in an increase in traffic.

How to Implement It

It’s pretty simple really…just keep adding content. This is particularly good if you have a brand new blog as it can get you traffic quite quickly.

The trick is providing lots of content but also content that has value. It’s all very well getting lots of traffic but if what you are providing is just garbage then the visitor is just going to hit the back button and never come back.

If you have some extra cash then consider getting a writer to do at least some of the work for you. You can hire a writer at Elance.

Just keep at it for at least 2 months but preferably 3.  Once you hit the 3 month mark you can start reducing the number of posts to a more reasonable level but do it slowly over time. Although, if you are able to stick at it then keep going by all means.

And finally…

This method really illustrates the value of content – it got us to the next level in our affiliate business so it was definitely worth it! Give it a go…I think you will be pleasantly surprised.