by Natalia Jones

Created on: January 05, 2010

Wouldn’t it be nice to pack your little box of personal effects kept at the office and walk out knowing that you can and will make it as a full-time blogger? For starters, if you really want to achieve full-time blogging status, you need to stop day-dreaming and start planning.

The following steps will help you to ditch your job forever and start your new life as a successful member of the blogosphere.

Hold on to Your Day Job

You may be excited about quitting your job but leaving before you’re truly ready adds a lot of undue pressure that can actually hinder your performance as a blogger. If you have the luxury of working on your blog on a part time basis, while holding down a day job that takes care of the bills you shouldn’t give that up for the stress of trying to turn a profit because you’re afraid you won’t be able to pay next month’s mortgage.

Choose Your Topic Carefully

Professional bloggers are usually caught in a catch-22 because there is almost always a difference between the topics that interest them and the ones that make money. If you aspire to make a living blogging you should be sure that you commit to a topic that has considerable interest, but is not already saturated. Gaining hits and followers is hard enough without trying to compete with voices that are louder and more opinionated than your own.

Have Specific Bite Sized Goals

Goal setting is important to achieving success as a full time blogger because it breaks up an overwhelming task into more realistic targets. For instance, probably the most important goal to define if you are going to turn this into your full-time profession is how much you envision making in a given year. When you have this figure, drill it down per month, day and even hour. Then you can try to come up with ways to make your hourly rate instead of focusing on a large and seemingly unattainable figure.

Monetize Your Blog

Of course, to make a living from blogging you need to go about the process of monetizing your blog. Adding contextual or targeted advertising by using Google Adsense for instance, is probably the easiest and most common way of creating a cash flow from your blog. Alternatively you could try selling merchandize related to your topic from your blog pages or promoting affiliate links that make sense for your subject area.

Market Your Blog Like Crazy

Finally, all bloggers are a blend of writers and marketing masters. To have a wildly successful blog that gets millions of hits and generates new interest while holding the attention of past readers is not an easy task. It requires above average SEO skills and a superior use of social media techniques that drive traffic to the blog in droves.

Hundreds of thousands of people are already making a living off of their blogs so the question is no longer ‘Is it possible to make a living blogging?’ but rather ‘Do I have what it takes to become a full-time blogger?’ 

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