Traffic, Traffic, Traffic, Why?

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven't scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you'll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it's really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you'll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn't build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn't even try to monetize my site for the first several months. I just focused on traffic building.

With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren't accessible for low-traffic sites.

If you're intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you'll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.