When I first started blogging about 11 months ago, I was pretty clueless. Many bloggers starting out have no plan at all and they never get anywhere with their blog. They want to make money blogging because they see others "supposedly" doing it and it looks easy. They think they can write well, gain a following, start charging for ads, and build an empire. All they end up with is an abandoned blog and no money.

Several months ago I was thinking of giving up and selling my blog as I was hardly getting any search engine traffic. You need Google search engine traffic to make money with a blog and anyone who tells you differently is lying. The only way you don't need it is if you are somehow able to become famous and make a name for yourself. But that is a 1 in 10,000,000 shot so good luck with that one. I will stick with Google.

Luckily, I decided not to sell and in fact I have just paid for another year of hosting. Maybe I should pay for 10 years because I think I can make some pretty effortless money with my blog for some time to come. When I started out I was just writing to be writing and writing to entertain. Write naturally, I read on other blogs, and readers will come. Well thanks for that misleading bit of useless information. Again, what you read on 90% of the other "how to make money" blogs is either wrong, misleading, or useless information. Everyone seems to have advice and online, you just don't have to back it up.

Sometime early this year I did what I should have been doing from the start. I started targeting several search term phrases and if I had only done that from the start I would have easily been on the first page for several of those terms. For well over a month now I have been getting over 100 search engine unique hits a day. I used to have trouble getting 40 and it is because of the phrases I have been slowly targeting and the increased age of my blog. I have to think that things will only get better in the future.

My posting frequency has gone down dramatically and now I only post when I feel like it. I will have to continue to get some links but for the most part I think I can do very little and still get the hits from Google because of the work I have put in to getting ranked. That is the difference between getting Google search engine traffic because you are ranked well for many terms and worthless StumbleUpon traffic. StumbleUpon traffic is tons of fun but it goes away. Then you have to write another hit post and another. Who wants to do that? It is a lot easier to keep your blog ranked for your targeted search terms than it is to keep on pumping out hit posts. And it pays better too.

All this is basically the reason why I just paid for another year of hosting and will not be giving up this blog anytime soon. The more work I put in building links and writing posts that target certain keywords, the more of a chance it will have of earning even more every month.