You have probably paid attention to the success that many bloggers are having. Bloggers like Jonathan Volk have managed to generate a full time income through hard work and dedication. While most bloggers will never reach that level of blogging success, it is possible to create a supplemental income stream by blogging online.

The key is to know the right areas to focus on and which ones to avoid. Let’s take a look at three of the misnomers that many new bloggers have about making money online.

 

This is hands down the biggest mistake that new bloggers make. They focus all of their efforts on making money off of their own blog and fail to make any money outside of their blog. New blogs are not money makers so you have to look for external sources of income.

I made more money in my first year of blogging about term papers for sale outside of my blog than I did with my blog. I spent the first year tirelessly writing for a lot of different sites. I wrote guest posts as all bloggers do but I also took on a bunch of staff writing jobs. It was a lot of work but well worth it. I ended up getting published on some pretty big sites like Forbes, Investopedia, and the New York Times. I was recently offered a featured writer position at eHow.

I was bringing in over $2k a month in my first few months of blogging just by writing for other sites. I wrote articles for a number of great sites in the finance niche. Doing this brought a lot of traffic back to my site and helped to build my site’s credibility. I started to have a steady stream of traffic visiting my site to read my content. As time went on, I wrote less and less for other sites and started writing more for my own.

The key to finding success with a new blog is finding the right balance between internal and external income. In the early stages, the majority of your money will come from external sources. In the later stages, the bulk of your income will come from your blog.

 

The biggest lie going is that all you have to do is set up your blog and the money will start rolling in from advertisers. That is definitely not the case! I thought my blog was going to make a ton of dough via ad income when I started it. The truth is I was only making a few bucks a month initially. Once your blog has been up for awhile and has decent traffic numbers, you can make some cash from ad networks but you aren’t going to make a killing.

The only way to make a large amount of money off of ad income is to have a large amount of traffic. New blogs just don’t have enough traffic to make decent money with most ad networks. I have seen numbers of bloggers apply to ad networks like Google Adsense and get rejected. They just didn’t have enough content on their sites or enough traffic for Adsense.

Instead of sitting back and relying on ad income, new bloggers are better off using the time to develop their own product to sell. You can create your own ebook, workbook, widget or software product. By the time that your product is ready for sale, your site should be flowing with traffic.

If you don’t have a product, that’s not a problem. You can be an affiliate for someone else’s product. There are a ton of affiliate networks out there. You will get a better payout in most cases than you will relying on income from most ad networks.

 

Another big mistake that new bloggers make is trying to write about every newsworthy event that takes place. New bloggers have a tendency to try and cover every topic out there. They will have a bunch of posts pertaining to sports, making money, entertainment, music, and cooking. If your blog is about entertainment then stick to entertainment.

Just because you stumbled across a popular money making website doesn’t mean that you should shift your content to making money online. Big mistake! Keep your blog’s focus narrow. You can occasionally post about random things but at least 90% of your site’s content should focus on your site’s theme.