Before we look at the different revenue streams that are possible with blogging, the first thing to sort out is your mental attitude. Blogging for money, like any other entrepreneurial activity, is hard work. It is in fact, the single hardest thing that you will have to face if you are serious in transitioning from a passionate blogger to a professional one. This does not mean that you leave your passion behind. The only difference being that now your passion is now going to be a source of income also.

The key factor that separates successful bloggers from the unsuccessful ones is commitment. Of course, success can be defined in many different ways but for the purposes of this Article we consider a successful blog as one that has hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. A blogger who is successful with his blog (or blogs) has primarily committed himself to being passionate about his interest and providing visitors with relevant information.

Note that at this stage revenue is not an issue. Transitioning from just sharing your passion on a subject to actually making money from your passion may sound simple but in actual practice, there are complications.

When you are passionate about blogging, you may find that you have ambivalent feelings about earning money from your blog. If you believe that using your ‘passion’ to earn money is ‘wrong’ then you first need to decide whether you do want to use your blog to earn a living or not. Once you commit yourself though, the sky—literally—is the limit.

Commitment not only involves a desire and willingness to be a professional blogger, it also means being consistent with your postings. A blog is a service. Albeit, in many cases a free one but nevertheless it serves an audience. In one sense you could consider your site visitors as ‘customers’ who ‘pay’ you by visiting your site. This means that you have to be consistent in your postings to attract an audience.

Once you begin posting regularly you will attract an audience of readers who will form the initial base. This trickle of readers will continue to evolve and grow and many will come to your blog expecting fresh content on each visit. This expectation of your audience you can control to some extent by deciding how often you are going to post. Remember that it is difficult to scale back from posting several times a day to once a day to several times a week without having an impact on your readership.

A better approach would be to start slow and increase the frequency as you get comfortable with balancing blogging with the rest of your daily schedule. Give yourself sufficient time and be realistic about how often you can post. If you can initially post once a week, make sure you stick to the once a week schedule until you are comfortable with it and are ready to increase the posting frequency. Remember that your visitors will come to expect your posts according to the pace you set. A once a week post will attract a once a week audience and so on.

Another technique is to set goals for yourself. Take the time to write down a monetization strategy and commit yourself to certain time bound goals on what you would like to achieve in that time. For example, you may decide that you want to be in the Technorati top 10,000 in six months. Once you define specific goals you can then focus your energies in working in that direction.

Once again, we would like to stress that getting your blog to be successful requires hard work and a serious commitment on the blog author’s part to continually keep the content of the blog fresh and updated.

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