So you have built yourself an awesome-looking blog, you have flooded it with fantastic and informative content and you have told all of your friends and family members about it. But you are still not making a single penny from it, as The Hurricane from WWE might say “What’s up with that?”

There are a number of potential reasons as to why you are not making any money from blogging and to be honest the majority of these reasons boil down to lack of effort on your part.

You can not simply put up a blog, write a few posts, throw a couple of advertisement banners & affiliate links around and expect the money to come rolling in, because it just does not work like that. It requires a ton of effort.

You might think that what I have just said is such a simple statement and that I am treating you like an idiot for saying it, but you would be surprised at just how many people think that making money online is just what I have described above.

Let us go over a few things to see what we can do to get those pennies streaming in.

1 Not Enough Traffic

People who have been in the affiliate marketing business for years will tell you how content is king, but I actually think that traffic is even more important. After all what use is all that awesome content if you have no traffic to see it? I’ve seen plenty of sites with great content but little traffic, so it can happen.

Traffic will not just help you shift your product(s) but it will also help you sell advertising space on your blog, advertisers won’t want to buy advertising space on a blog with low or no traffic now will they?

If you sign up to my free newsletter today then one of the free e-books you will receive will detail seven methods of generating more traffic for your blog.

2 You Have Gone Overboard With Adverts

We have all done it at some point. You join a ton of pay-per-click advertising networks and you stuff as many ad units as you possibly can into each page. Sadly doing this has two major drawbacks.

a) It slows down the loading time of the page.

b) It makes your site look incredibly ugly.

This is something that will take time for you to sort out. You will have to add/remove ad units and edit the code to find the correct formula that is right for you. Every theme has a different formula.

3 Your Theme Does Not Look Professional

If you have an eye-catching theme then this will help you encourage readers to return to your blog. Don’t put in as many banner adverts and flashy images as humanly possible. I have found that a minimalist approach is often the best.

4 What You Write Does Not Inspire Confidence

This is something that I struggle with quite a lot.

If you are selling a product, or trying to encourage your readers to join a network, then you must give the reader the impression that you have belief in the product in question. If they sense that you are not confident about it then they will not take a chance on it.

For a perfect example go and read one of the many product reviews from John Chow’s blog, look at how he oozes confidence when talking about a product. That is why he makes $40,000+ a month from his blog.

5 Are You Promoting The Right Products?

That might sound like a newbie thing to write but a lot of people make that mistake. If you are running a blog about MMO then you should be promoting products designed to help people make money, not products about acne or fatburner pills.

6 You Are Not Reviewing Enough

If you are promoting a product then you should review the hell out of it. Not just on your own blog but on articles directories and anywhere else where they will allow you to post articles for free.

Have you ever logged into your Twitter account and found that you can only read the tweets for a couple of minutes because you have so many followers that there are just too many tweets to read? Eventually they start to look like they are about to join together and form one huge ugly unreadable tweet.

This can be a problem if you run a “follow me and I will follow you” policy.

A lot of people will follow you and once you follow them back, they will unfollow you, believing that they have scored a major victory over you and that you will never find out.

Recently I had to take action because I had followed over 2,000 people and all I saw when I logged into Twitter were tweet after tweet of adverts and general spam. People trying to get me to click on paid links and buy various products that are of no interest to me. I am a man so why would I want to buy a sex toy that women use?

I did not fancy having to go through the mundane task of manually unfollowing people one by one. But thankfully I found a nice little program that can mass unfollow people for me. All I have to do is press a couple of buttons and the job is basically done.

The program is called Twitter Follower and what it does is it unfollows everyone who is not following you.

It does require signing up to the site for a free account but this takes about a minute. Once you login all you have to do is click the Mass Unfollow and within ten minutes those that you are following that are not following you back will be removed.

Use Twitter Follower Today

I think it is safe to say that we all want backlinks. Backlinks are a major factor that Google takes into consideration when they dish out the Page Ranks every three months or so. It is very clear, the more backlinks you have then the better your chances of increasing your Page Rank will be.

But the question is just how do you go about getting these backlinks? Do you pay those backlink selling companies $300+ for the privilege of them putting your link on their network of faked Page Rank sites?

I have one rule when making money online: Don’t spend money to make money.

There are a number of free ways to gain backlinks, I am going to go over three of those methods in this post.

Comment On Other Blogs Related To Your Niche

Many blogs will happily allow you to drop a link to your blog when you leave a comment on one of their posts. Blog owners see this as a kind of swap deal, they get a comment on their blog and you get a free link to your blog.

A lot of these blogs will have do-follow turned on which means it will count as a backlink. Some blogs might insist on a couple of comments before turning on do-follow.

It is important not to spam when leaving comments. Always try and write something other than “great post” or “nice site”. This will only get your comment put in the spam bin.

This blog, for example, is a do-follow blog. Feel free to comment and gain backlinks.

Swap links with related sites

Do you know anyone who runs a blog that is in a similar niche to yours? If you do then why not contact them and ask them if they would like to swap links with you. You put their link on your blog and they carry your link on their blog.

If you don’t know anyone, but you know people who have blogs on other niches then you could still ask them to swap links. Although unrelated linking will not be as effective it will help bring in traffic.

Do-follow Forums & Book-marking Sites

I recently published a post featuring a list of message boards (forums) and book-marking sites that offer do-follow. This means that leaving a link in one of these message board signatures, or book-marking one of your posts, will count as a backlink.

If you know of any other methods then feel free to leave a comment.