No.  You get in there and exceed your goals.

I look at it this way.  I’ve got a daily goal of $50.00 per day and $250.00 per week for the next few months.  It’s not a lot of money, but it’s more than enough to supplement my wife’s incomes and keep us in happy things like insurance, web sites and dinners out.

If I make that $50.00 in the first few minutes of the day, I’m not going to stop adding to it as long as I have the opportunity.  Why settle for $50.00 when you can make $100.00 or more in a  day?  At the very least I spend the rest of the day optimizing other aspects of my monetizing efforts. And that means that tomorrow I can just go watch some T.V, right?

Wrong.  Tomorrow is a new day.  There’s a goal to be met for that workday and I intend to make it.  Becoming complacent because you’re a bit ahead is a great way to fall behind, and quickly.  It only takes one or two bad days, a cold or a family emergency to put you in the red.  Treating every day like it’s a regular day that’s only just on schedule will usually mean that when those bad days happen, your monthly goals will still be met.

I treat monthly goals in the same manner.  if I meet the goal, I set about padding next month out as far as possible.  When it becomes obvious that I’m consistently coming in over expectations, I adjust my goals. But in the interim, I walk into the next month with less work to do.

If you fail to push yourself, you’re not going to move forward

The name of the game is mercenary.  Opportunities to make money come in waves.  You need to be prepared to ride those waves whenever they present themselves, at least until the point where passive income exceeds your needs, at which point you can join the ranks of the Idle Middle class, but I’m not there yet.

So what do you do on the days when there’s no money to be made?

You find other things to do.  Write drafts for new posts or articles. Work on affiliate programs. Check your current affiliate advertising to see if it has made you any money in its current placement, if not, reorganize and remove any ads that aren’t helping you out.  Until the day that you make 100% of your monthly goals from nothing more than passive advertising, there’s work to be done.  Even then, there’s work to be done.  You still need to keep putting out content that someone wants to read.

In the end, content is still king.  If you produce nothing but chaff to fill in the gaps between posts that make a few dollars you’re not doing yourself any favors.  The ultimate goal isn’t to make a fortune making short term money.  You should be focusing on getting raffic, gaining readers, keeping them and building income streams that don’t require daily attention.  This usualy means finding every income stram that you can, including private advertising.

Having said all that, I’ll move on to achieving my goals for the day, then seeing if I can add a few extra duckets to the total before I’m done.  After that I have an ad server to set up so that I can pull a little more diversified income from other sources.

This is my day job after all, and I get to play CEO.  I like that.

More on this subject

• Just how do you make money blogging?
• The importance of standing behind what you sell
• I Call BullS**t! : Why I’m writing an eBook

The most common question I’m asked about how I make a living online is what tools I use to get paid, and I do get paid, each and every day. For those who might be skeptical of that statement, let me assure you that it is the God’s honest truth. The only reason I might go a day without seeing money deposited into my account is that I was too lazy to do something on a given day. I was paid yesterday, I’ve already seen payment today, and I’ve got several payments slated for tomorrow. I’ve gotten used to it, and it’s not something I want to live without any more.

Is it simple? To be honest, sometimes it is, at other times I end up feeling like I’ve moved mountains to get a check for the day, either way I push through and make sure that something that will make me at least a few dollars has been done. And folks, if I can do it, so can you. There’s no reason in the world that you can’t make at least a hundred dollars per month from your own hosted blog. (It may be a lot more difficult if you’re using blogger or some other hosted service.)

OK great, you get paid. Must be nice, but how do you do it?!?

Actually I use multiple streams to make an income through my blogs, and you should too. To rely on any one system of monetizing greatly limits your ability to bring in a regular paycheck and can, in times of difficulties with a given service, render you unable to make any money at all for days or even weeks. Spreading your efforts over different income methods provides not only the knowledge that there is something else you can look into on any given day to make a bit of cash, but at least for me it gives a sense of security. I know that if one of the services or companies I contract for goes under tomorrow, I’ve still got other avenues out there.

The methods available to make money through your blog vary in both type and in the amount of income they generate. Some methods are great for adding up to a hundred dollars a day to my account, while others accrue revenue more slowly over time. I use as many methods as possible, but they really break down into two categories, passive monetizing and active monetizing.

Passive and Active monetizing, my definition:

Passive Advertising:

Passive advertising is any form of advertising you “set and forget.” The most recognizable version of this type of monetizing is the venerable Google AdSense Ad. You simply set up an account, generate some code to add to your blog and forget you ever did it, while hoping that one day they will send you a check. This type of advertising also applies to ad networks such as BlogHer, TextLink Ads, Chitika Mini Malls and a wide variety of other services. The one that will work best for your blog depends heavily on your niche, bit it’s a good idea to look into as many of these services as possible.

Payment for these kind of ads varies depending on a variety of factors and the amount of income that they will generate for you is dependent largely on your audience and the sheer volume of traffic your blog receives. In a nutshell, the more traffic you get, the more likely these methods are to make you a good bottom line. There are rare cases however, where ads are so perfectly tailored to a site’s content that they generate a good deal of money even in low traffic situations.

Your mileage may vary, no warranty is expressed or applied.

Active Advertising

Active monetizing methods is the kind you actually have to put effort into each and every time you want to make money from it. The most profitable type of active advertising in my case is the Advertorial, or Paid Post. The most known companies offering this type of advertising dollar are companies like ReviewMe, SponsoredReviews and Izea. The premise here is that you write an article for or about a company that wants to generate traffic or awareness of their site in and around the bloggosphere and they pay you do do it.

There are a lot of people in the blogging community that feel this type of ad is the equal of selling out, or that posting this type of ad somehow dilutes the purity of all blogs everywhere. I disagree with this line of thinking. Advertorials are a part of every-day life whether you’re watching TV, listening to the radio or surfing your favorite blogs. They’re here to stay, and I’m more than willing to cash in on the method.

Crossover methods

Some types of advertising can either be active or passive, depending on how they are used. The most notable variety here is affiliate advertising. If you just slap some affiliate links in your sidebar, then you are using it as a passive method. (Say you toss up a few links to Amazon products.) You’re hoping that you made a good choice, and you run with it for a while, checking your stats from time-to-time.

If you’re adding affiliate links into your posts and comments, then it becomes an active method. It requires your time and attention a lot more frequently than it would otherwise. This method will generally give better results, since you can tailor what your readers have the opportunity to click on in direct relation to what they were interested in reading at the moment.

So what is it you’re using?

All of the above. If you look over my blog at Cooking, by the seat of my Pants!, you will see all of these methods in use after a few minutes of browsing around. I do a good job of keeping some of these ad types pretty subtle, but they are there nonetheless, and they’re making money.

My other blogs use different mixes of all of the above as well. some rely strictly on in-post affiliate linking, others that aren’t updated as often rely on AdSense and other passive methods, and still others make the entirety of their income from advertorials. It depends on the blog and how much work I want to put in to it.

I’m not going to tell you exactly who I go through, at least not yet. I’d rather cover that information on a company-by-company basis. It gives the opportunity to give the Pros and Cons of each on its own merit, and these companies and services deserve that courtesy. They are paying me, after all.

This overview should put you well on your way to finding a method of monetizing that works for you. Try doing a Google search for Blog Advertising Networks. It’s a good place to start.

More on this subject

• Don’t just achieve, exceed
• The importance of standing behind what you sell
• I Call BullS**t! : Why I’m writing an eBook