How many times have you been told that all you need to do is have a blog, advertise a product in it, and you will make mountains of cash? Probably hundreds. Well, let me tell you, it just is not true. Writing blog posts by themselves will not make you a solid income. You can write every day, build your blog to hundreds of articles, and you might make a few dollars, but probably will not make anything at all.

The problem that most people encounter when they post articles to their blog is that their blog doesn't get seen by anyone. I know...I have been there. I had one blog that was ranked somewhere down around 20 million in Google. That means that for someone to see it, they would have to be searching for a very specific term that only I used in order to get it in their search results. Not much chance of that happening.

Anything that I was interested in promoting involved using the keywords for the product. Unless I wanted to pay for ads and use Pay-per-click with Adwords or some other method, I wouldn't have a hope of getting anyone to read my blog post. And then, it takes hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people to read it before someone would actually be interested enough to buy whatever product I was promoting.

Does all this sound familiar?

Do not get me wrong...you can still make a living with blogging. And you can do it for free using free blogs that are available from many places. They real key to earning an income from your blog is either to make sure that you are on page 1 of any Google or Yahoo search for whatever product you are promoting OR get quality, targeted traffic that is directed to your blog. When I say quality, targeted traffic I mean the type of traffic that is interested in reading what you have to say, and ready to buy whatever product you are promoting.

There are multiple ways to get that type of traffic. You can buy a service (I do not recommend this...it cost too much). You can write articles and hope that people will read them and go to your website to see what you have to offer. You can actually manipulate your blog to make it more attractive to the search engines so that your ranking gets much higher when someone searches for a particular product or service.

One of the most important things with blogging is to make sure that people come back to your blog on a regular basis to see what you are offering. Keep updating your blog at least 3 or 4 times a week. Keep the information appropriate. Do not advertise a product in every different blog post that you publish. Get people to return to your blog because you are offering advice and guidance, not always products. Make sure that the information you are providing is useful to the reader.

You do not want to promote dog and cat flea collars one day, and then weight loss products the next. Try to keep the theme of your blog pertinent to the reader. If your passion is pets, then keep most of the content of your blog about pets. Talk about grooming one day, training in another article and so on. If your passion is weight loss, then keep the focus on what that.... you can review different diets that you have heard about and what other people have said about the diets. You can talk about what works or you. You can document your actual progress using a particular product. If people are interested, they will come back.

I will discuss other techniques in greater detail in future articles. You can earn an income with blogging. It is not as easy as people say but it doesn't have to be difficult either! Once you start and establish yourself as an authority in a subject area, people will come back, and people will buy what you offer. It takes time.