Blog marketing. What is it? Well a blog is sort of like a website that you can get for free. If you can make frequent posts to it with original, fresh content, then you might attract visitors and search engine interest. This gives you an opportunity to promote your business opportunity.

There are millions of blogs online today with seemingly hundreds starting up each week. My question is why?

Answer. Money! Thousands of people think blogging is the magic bullet they have been missing to make their online businesses work. In fact they are encouraged in this by many experts online. They have all started to ‘blog for money’. You see, blogs are so simple to start that a pre-teen could start one.

However, there is a downside to blogging. It takes a lot of time to keep up regular posts and drive traffic to your blog, and a lot of effort to convert some of these into paying customers.

After a few days you begin to realize that the money is not flowing in. You have probably spent a lot of time working on your new blog and have not made a single penny. It’s about now that you realize that this is about hard work.

If you are not making money and you put a value on your time you are now losing money every time you sit down and post to your blog. If you spend 30 minutes a day posting to your blog, you will spend 15 hours in a month and have nothing to show for it.

However, don’t despair.

A really good blog is one that, once you start it, you would keep it up if you never made any money at it. The reasons for this are that the topic of the blog is a passion for you. It is not just about blog marketing. You should have an interest in the subject matter. You should be an expert in what you write about and your expertise shows.

Your readers come back over and over to see what you will say next. They pull out their credit card to buy a product you recommend. They click on a Google ad or subscribe to a newsletter. It is much easier when your blog is kept up to date with useful information. Do this and you will avoid the downside to blogging.

However that’s the problem. You have to be passionate about your subject and you have to keep it updated regularly. Many of us will never write 30 posts in the first month or maybe ever. The Internet is cluttered with blogs that were started with good intentions and abandoned like an orphan.

If you can combine your passion with hard work you can blog for money. However the money side of it should appear to your visitors to be somewhat secondary – almost an after thought.

Blogging is work. Don’t be the victim of the downside to blogging. If your prime purpose is blog marketing and it doesn’t work immediately, then persevere. Make a commitment to post at least once a week instead of daily. If you are passionate, this should be achievable.