Today I made the decision to get a lot more serious about building up my income from this blog. Thus far it has really just been an outlet for my creativity and a way to share some of the things I’ve learned and experienced from my personal development studies in life.

Now I want to get a lot more serious about building an income stream from this blog long term. I will be focusing heavily on providing highly valuable content to my fellow readers and in the process also demonstrating another possible income stream available to pretty much anyone.

I do not intend to turn this blog exclusively into another one of those “Make Money Online” blogs because that isn’t my specialty. My speciality lies more around the mental and spiritual aspects of learning how to find your purpose and passion in life and learning how to make money by doing what you love.

For most people, doing what you love isn’t going to be Blogging. Blogging is a great way to make money for the right person, but it isn’t for everyone. Can anyone do it? Absolutely. It is super easy to setup a blog for free and you can be up and running in a matter of minutes. However, starting a blog and being passionate about blogging long term are two totally different things.

I believe that to really make money by blogging you need to be passionate about it for some other reason besides the money. For example, I’ve been writing articles on this blog on and off for 6 months now and I’ve made less than $100 so far from this blog. Now, granted I wasn’t trying to make money with it in any serious way, but still a hundred dollars is hardly big money for me considering how much work I’ve put into this site. If I was in it for the money, I would have quit a long time ago.

So I think if you’re looking at blogging as some super easy way to make money quick, you better run the other way. However, if you are drawn to blogging as a passion and you would like to learn how to make money with it, then that’s awesome and that is exactly what my “Make Money Blogging” articles are going to be about; learning how to make money online.

I think people who are fairly new to blogging and just getting started, having less than 100 RSS feed subscribers and making pennies from Adsense, still waiting for that first $100 Google check to arrive are going to get the most out of these articles because I’m basically starting this thing from scratch.

I’ve had a few other blogs I started before I really got clear with my coaches as to what I am really passionate about, but really I just started this thing in October 2007 which is just over 6 months ago. So this is really a start from zero type of thing as today is really the first day that I’m setting a goal to actively pursue monetizing this thing.

Is Adsense Dead?

One of the first things I’m going to do is to really wrap my head around Google Adsense. Most of the top A-List bloggers have dumped Adsense saying that it’s now useless and that it doesn’t pay as much as it used to and all that, but my intuition tells me that mastering Adsense is still the best path for brand new bloggers just getting started. I’m sure people could give me all kinds of logical reasons and so-called “proof” that Adsense is dead and that it’s a waste of time, but I’ll just follow my intuition on this one and see what happens.

Mastering Making Money With Adsense

So, if I’m going to put in time to master Adsense, I might as well model someone who has already spent years studying and perfecting the use of Adsense and leverage off of his work and research and expertise to get at least an intermediate level of understanding of Adsense. Beginner level Adsense is pretty easy for most people to setup, but I want to get to Intermediate fast, so I looked into Joel Comm.

If you’re not aware of who Joel Comm is, he’s the New York Times best selling author of “The Adsense Code” and the host and executive producer of the reality show “The Next Internet Millionaire“. Joel just released the 4th edition of Google Adsense Secrets 4.0, which has been completely revised and extended for 2008 with the latest content to take advantage of Adsense income TODAY.

He sold the first edition of the eBook for $77 and $97 for the second and third editions. This fourth edition has now been expanded out to a whopping 222 pages (it’s thick man!), and he’s currently running a promo (no idea for how long) where he’s offering the book for $9.95. When I saw that, I was sold. Exactly what I was looking for to get really clear on how Adsense works and a super deal too.

Anyway, I picked up a copy of the eBook and I’m almost half way done through it now. It’s really good. I was reading through it and having tonnes of “aha” moments realizing all the mistakes I’ve made so far with Adsense. I’m kind of kicking myself because I’m never going to get back the 6 months worth of lost income I didn’t make because I didn’t know this stuff when I first launched this blog. Oh well, what can you do.

So yeah, I’ll definitely be implementing all the stuff that Joel recommends and I’ll report how my income is growing. If you’re interested in getting a copy of Joel’s book for yourself you can check out the details here:

Adsense Secrets 4 – What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense