How do you know when you’ve made it?

One of my recommended ways of making money is by blogging.  With blogging there are a lot of different ways that you can use it to earn money.  The most common way to make money from blogging is from Google Adsense.  You put Google advertising on your site and when people click on the ads you earn money.  It’s that simple.  You can also monetize your blog through other advertising networks like Chitika, Yahoo Publishing Network and others as well.  Affiliate marketing is also popular through links on blogs.

All this is great, but if your blog doesn’t have many readers you won’t make very much!  Well, if you just stick with the game and keep putting in time to improve your blog, after you build it up, you will gain more and more traffic.  Remember what the ghosts kept telling Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams?  If you build it, they will come!  That applies to your blog too.   Keep working, and also read other blogs to learn more about promoting your own!  Readers will come, especially if you can show that you have some expertise about the thing you are writing about.  One of my favorite mottos is:  If you do what you are passionate about, the money will follow.

So, how do you know when you’ve made it in the Blogging game?  I have two indicators that tell me a Blog has gained a decent amount of readership:

1. If your blog has more comments than it has posts.  For the first months (and months) that you blog, you won’t get many comments, if any at all!  But, when you get to the point where you have more comments than blog posts, then you know that you are successful!  For example, one of my blogs has really began to take off in recent months.  At this point, that blog has about 1500 posts on it.  It also has over 2300 comments!  So, it’s a measured success!
2. When you start getting a lot of comment spam, that means that you’ve made it!  But, who wants comment spam?  Well, there are plug ins and filters to take care of that, but when you can see that you are getting dozens or hundreds of comment spams, that means that the comment spammers feel that your site is relevant enough that they can make money by spamming it.  If it’s good enough for spammers to be able to earn from YOUR blog, you should also be able to earn a living from it!

Good luck with your blogging!  And remember, don’t quit too soon… it takes time!