How many hours does it take:
Before I make money?
To build a blog?
Until I know I have done enough?
How many hours indeed.
What? You want a number? Shall I round it up or down? Would you like your magic number gift-wrapped while I am at it? If I give you a number like 3437, will you take it as truth?
Look. Whatever ideas you had about this business before you came in, it would be advantageous if you put those fanciful notions out of your head.
Anyone who claims that garnering big profits from the web is simple, is a lying scammer. This shit is work, dude. Get used to it.
I do not know what level you are at but I am speaking to the newbies here.
Those of you with some experience under your belt understand exactly what I am talking about.
There is a fuzzy period for the new bloggers, where they have not yet realized exactly what they have gotten themselves into.
Some come out cocksure and completely deaf to suggestion. Others get mad when it occurs to them that no matter how clever they are, their plans to circumvent the natural process will not work.
The serious ones see the scope of the task before them and decide to keep going.
Q: How many hours could a webmaster work if a webmaster could work well?
A: As many hours as you can afford.
I get it. I have been there: Working the day job by day and blogging by night. It is not easy.
There is so much to learn and so many skills to master. No, you can not just read a few tutorials or buy some pre-built website template and start making cash blogging immediately.
Becoming a successful webmaster takes time, effort and perseverance.
You can set goals now but, after you have done this for a while, those goals become unrealistic.
For example, if you set plans to quit your day job after three months of blogging, well, tell your boss that David says “Hello”.
I have no statistics but I will make an educated guess that there are far more people who have quit blogging than there are those who have stuck with it to make a living.
Perhaps if I doled this thing out in sections, you will have a better overview of the workload you are facing. In three sections, here is what is required to become a successful blogger:
Acquire Knowledge
I do not care what skills you came in with. Do not care. Heard it. Heard that too. Oh?
You have a decent sum of money to invest? Your money is worthless.
You say you are from the tech sector? The entertainment field?
Golly, you were in advertising? Pfft.
Not gonna help you that much.
You have to learn new things in a new way, a lot of new things.
You have to learn to build websites, master code, create and edit graphics, make page layouts that sell, follow rules, lease domains, pay for web space, upload files to your server, pick a niche, select a sponsor, submit your pages to the right places, track your stats and traffic, analyze your hits to determine marketing strategies.
And when you have learned all that, it dawns on you that you some things can only be learned by trial and error and repetition.
Trial And Error And Repetition
Now you are hooked. In your awkward newbie fumbling you have made a sale.
After all that fucking around and time spent studying tedious, boring shit, one of your blog posts or free sites convinced another sucker to open his wallet and stick his credit card into the magic machine.
Now you have to figure out what you did right and do it again and again and again for infinity.
It suddenly occurs to you that the trick is the repetition.
You are beginning to get it. 50,000 guests visited your awesome blog. Out of those 50,000, 2058 clicked your sponsor’s banner.
Out of the 400, one person bought a membership.
A conversion ratio of 400:1 is common but it is not very good.
Either you need to polish your promotion mojo (Trial and Error) or you need five times the traffic. What is it gonna be? Work. Work. Busy. Busy.
Work. Work. Busy. Busy.
This is where a lot of bloggers give up. That is a shame.
It is one thing to bail at the start when you see how hard it is going to be. It is damned pitiful to give up when the puzzle comes together.
Work. Work. Busy. Busy.
Such is the life of the prosperous webmaster.
Until you retire there is no stopping.
Even when you evolve into a paysite aka membership site owner, you will still have to update/design, monitor/maintain, deal with customers/affiliates and reinvest your profits responsibly. To attach a set number of hours to this journey is like trying to calculate Pi.
How many hours are you willing to sacrifice?
Do I have to tell you that you will probably have to put in hours every day?
You see the long road at your feet.
Start out easy with three hours a night, each night, until you work it out.
Try not to turn into one of us assholes that spend every waking hour in front of a computer monitor. Adjust to something in between the two extremes and you are good to go!