Blogging is simple. You start a blog. You write a blog post. You publish the post and spread the word, promote your post. People come and read your blog post.
Some visitors might subscribe to your blog via RSS, and maybe leave a blog comment that they enjoyed the post. You write your next blog post, and the cycle begins again. But what then?
What Happens Next?
What happens when your blog has 100 subscribers? What happens when you have 500?
For many blogs, the answer is… nothing.
Apart from writing the next post. And the next. And the one after that.
If you are blogging for fun, to share your thoughts with others, this might be enough.
But will you have the motivation to keep going if there is no bigger purpose?
Probably not.
This is why millions of blogs that are started each year, end up closing doors when the blogger loses motivation.
To keep going, you need to go beyond blogging. You need to think about blogging as a business.
Take Your Passion and Go Beyond Blogging
What if you could earn a living by doing the things you enjoy the most, doing the things you are most passionate about?
Going beyond blogging means taking that passion and turning it into a way to make a living.
To earn money, you need to sell something. Whether its products or services, you have to offer something for sale. When you are offering something for sale, you have a business.
This can be anything from selling advertising on your blog, directly or through contextual advertising, promoting affiliate products or selling your own products and services.
When you think about your blog as a business, each blog post gets a purpose. Each blog post now promotes your business, and has the potential to earn you money.
And the reason why you want to earn money is the key.
For some the money is the purpose. For others, money is just a way to support the purpose, the lifestyle of your dreams.
When blogging becomes a way to support your ultimate lifestyle, you will have no trouble finding motivation.
It’s a different mindset, but this is what the most successful bloggers do. They have taken their passion and turned it into a profitable business.
It’s time for all of us to take that step too and change the way we think about blogging.
2010 and Beyond
There’s a new eBook, called Beyond Blogging, sharing the ins and outs behind 15 top-notch bloggers and their businesses, how they are doing what they doing and how they make hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars every year.
I have gotten to know both the authors of the Beyond Blogging –eBook, MikeCJ and Nathan Hangen, through Twitter and their blogs.
Nathan was recently featured in a blog post by David Risley, a problogger featured in the eBook, when David listed 4 bloggers doing it right. I couldn’t agree more.
And Mike, a published author and professional blogger himself, is doing equally good job helping people to get started on Twitter, giving valuable advice about blogging and about making money blogging. Mike is the kind of fellow who keeps it real, without all the hype.
With these two authoring the eBook, after buying the eBook myself and reading it, I'm proud to recommend it to you (and use my affiliate link). Now that the eBook is available for everyone, I've also written a full review of Beyond Blogging, so you might want to check that out too.
To give you just an example about the things to come and where blogging is going, check out the free report called 2010 and Beyond – The Truth about Blogging in the Next Decade.
I read the '2010 and Beyond' PDF the morning it was released and it was the driving force for me to write this post. The 15-page report is free, quick and easy read and I hope it will be as inspirational to you as it was to me.
