I’ll stop short of calling these people snake-oil sellers, but many share a common theme. They all say yes, you can make lots of money, they quote either massive page volumes, or unfeasibly high CPM rates, and give pretty boilerplate advice. They all say things along the lines “If I can do it, so can you!”

All of these top results pages sell the dream, but they all seem to stop short of showing actual figures.

It’s easy to find sites that tell fairy tale stories of earning many “thousands of dollars a week” by blogging, and how the owners “quit their day job” to make blogging their only source of income. Coincidentally, many of the people who claim to be making a fortune by blogging just happen to be selling a product/service you can purchase which tells you how to make a fortune by blogging and they never tell blogging myths.

Doesn’t it seems a little weird that the people who say you can make a lot of money are all people who claim to be experts on this and derive all their traffic from people asking this question?

Outside of flashy pages telling you how much money you can make, or how they can sell you the secrets to being successful, their blogs don’t really have any content other than the pages that tell you how successful they are at blogging! (and remember, if you visit these sites you are generating revenue for them even if you don’t take up one of the affiliate offers on their site). It’s like watching those late night TV infomercials about how to start a business and make money, and self-referentially, they make money by selling the system about how to make money!

The entire business for some people is a site that makes money by selling (or talking about) a system that tells you about a system to make money. I’m not saying these few people don’t make money, maybe some do, but these self-referential sites are anomaly outliers and don’t give guidance to ‘average’ bloggers.

What most people seem to be looking for is an estimate for how much money an ‘average’ blogger with a moderate amount of traffic could expect to generate. From there it’s possible to scale up to see how much traffic would be needed to get to the self-sustaining dream of full-time blogging business.

Here are few evergreen tactics you should implement in your blogging business that pays you.

CPM – Pay Per Impression Advertising

Your website receives revenue as and when you generate impressions for the sponsor. This rewards a website for every thousand impressions that it generates. You may get paid anywhere between $1~$7 per thousand impressions depending on your sponsor’s industry. Most well-known CPM advertising network is BuySellAds.

PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

You make pennies every time someone clicks on a banner or link. It generally works out to a higher amount per click when compared to CPM but it might depend on your niche.

You can run adverts on your site with of one the many ad networks. Google AdSense, The Blogger Network, Rev Content, Undertone, and AdBlade are few of the options available to you.

For those of you who use WordPress as a platform to run their websites, you can try out BuySellAds. If you’d like a free plugin, check out Advanced Ads.

Selling advertisements via contextual ad networks is best when you have a site that covers a large spectrum of subjects. If your site targets specific niche or keywords, you’ll find that Affiliate Marketing is probably a better money-making a strategy for your site.

Affiliate marketing (the gold mine)

Affiliate marketing is your opportunity to effectively market products and services online. The key advantage is the performance-based commission model.

As an advertiser, you can increase your sales and leads and you only pay when you get paid.

As a publisher, you can monetise your online traffic by promoting advertiser products and services

It all starts with changing the way you think and right attitude about your blogging business,life and success. Once you start delivering the correct mindset to yourself, you can find the success of your dreams. It is a long road, but the rewards make the journey worth every second.

What do you think? How does success in blogging compare to success in other things in life? How does your state of mind affect your chances at success? Let us know in the comments!