It is the legendary pot of gold at the end of the blogosphere rainbow, a highly profitable blog.
Why is it that some bloggers make lots and lots of money, enough to quit their day jobs and enough to live very comfortably on the earnings their blogs produce, when your blog barely squeaks out enough to buy a Happy Meal once a month? One reason for this may be that you are confusing two types of blogs.
Blog one is a Branding Blog.
A Branding Blog is designed to raise your personal profile, give you personal credibility and produce business for your offline operation.
These bloggers are often consultants, lawyers, or other professionals who are selling their knowledge and expertise.
Blog two is a Sales Blog.
A Sales Blog seeks to make affiliate sales or generate AdSense clicks from its visitors.
Where a lot of bloggers err is to blend the two concepts, which result in them failing at both ventures.
A Branding Blog must have a professional look to it.
In addition, it must provide the kind of content that gets the same visitors to return again and again.
It must also have a lead generation system to get people to sign up for an email list that is sent out on a regular basis.
A Sales Blog targets such a narrow niche that it can easily rise to the top of search engine rankings.
The blogger really doesn't need to write a lot of posts and continually be updating it with new posts.
Generally, after the blog has been indexed by Google and starts to receive some traffic from the search engines, the blogger really need only write new posts 2 or 3 times a month.
Moreover, with a Sales Blog, "pretty" can be a serious drawback.
I love to use free Blogger blogs for my niche sales blogs, because they are not pretty.
I want visitors to read my content, but I would rather they click on my AdSense ads.
A professional looking blog with lots of really insightful content does not elicit AdSense clicks the way an ugly blog with good content does.
This does not mean it is okay to set up "splogs" or blogs that are really thinly disguised spam content.
I write good content, filled with the right keywords in order to get search engine traffic, but I never lose sight of my main goal, which is to get visitors to click my ads.
If you do this, Google will "slap" you hard, take away your AdSense account and dry up your income stream faster than you can blink an eye.
The trick is to find the right balance between providing good content that will put a visitor in a buying or clicking mode, and good content that simply builds your personal credibility or enhances your brand.
If you keep your eye on whatever ball you are targeting, you can succeed.