I’ve got feedback from newer bloggers who are having difficulties generating consistent income from their blogging efforts.

Blogging can be a profitable and fulfiling venture. If you have a strategy in place, you’ll not only see your pool of regular readers grow in time, but you’ll build a community of readers and learn from them in the process.

Given that blogging is an established traffic generation method and compliments many income monetization business models, here’re some points for consideration as you’re building up your blogging proficiency.

• Positioning/Branding

It’s important to establish the positioning of your blog.

I’m seeing that “Internet Marketing” is too big an umbrella to blog under, or at least to provide the amount of depth of coverage that would be useful for blog readers like yourselves.

In the last couple of weeks, you might’ve detected that this blog is moving more along the lines of

• Blogging
• Affiliate Marketing
• Traffic Generation (especially social traffic)

If you’re blogging within a broad category (such as golf, internet marketing, the legal profession), choose one or two niches and focus on those.

However, if you’re picking a niche such as “pet geckos”, you might want to go horizontal in your focus, ranging from gecko grooming, nutrition, exercise (a cradle-to-grave approach if you will).

• Content Building

I realize there’s a great temptation to load a blog up with adsense the moment it’s created.

Resist the urge.

If you have 10 visitors a day, your CPM rate will not be very high.

It’ll serve your long term interest better if you focus on building quality content for at least 1-2 weeks, establishing yourself as a content creator before looking at the monetization aspect.

Quality content should help your readers in the following ways:

• It helps them solve a problem they’re currently facing (the more painful the problem, the more valuable the solution)
• It helps them do something they’re already doing faster,more effectively,at a lower cost. Maybe all of the above.
• It’s something unique and you’re the only person they can get it from.

You’ve probably already heard my refrain that Content is King, Queen and the Crown Prince too.

• List Building

Building a list helps you maintain contact with your visitors/readers. If you create a compelling reason, they’ll opt-in to your list. This gives you the opportunity to follow up with them, build a relationship and if you recommend useful products or services, you stand to benefit from the relationship.

I’d suggest going with Aweber or GetResponse for your list building solution.

• Blog Monetization

Although blog monetization is important, I suggest that it should factor into your plans, but be the last aspect you look into. That’s because if your blog degenerates into a daily updated sales page, you’ll ultimately turn off your readers.

When choosing to participate in a marketing promotion, ask yourself the following questions and answer them truthfully:

• Does this product/service provide value to my readers?
• Have I invested my own money and time into this product?
• Did it work? Was it effective?
• Would I promote the product, even if I didn’t benefit from it?

If your answer is “yes” to all the questions, by all means go ahead. Your readers will know you stand behind your recommendation.

On the other hand, I’ve seen affiliate marketers whose blogs consist of one promotion after another.

I don’t think they’re in tune with their readers at all. (And their traffic numbers tell the story).

Whatever you might consider doing, think this through:

Would you watch a TV program if it consisted entirely of ads? Would you read a book or magazine if every page asked you to buy something?

Have mercy on your readers (and ultimately yourself) by sparing them the neverending sales pitch.

They’ll thank you for it too.