For nearly a year now, I’ve been writing here on YoungDough. Blogging has proven to be a really cool experience, and I’m extremely glad that I decided to take it up. I recently started taking a deeper look at this ongoing project of mine, forcing myself to make some bigger decisions about my future as a blogger.

My blogging goals up until recently were somewhat undefined. I started blogging for several reasons:

1.) I absolutely love to write- especially about subjects that I’m really passionate about.

2.) I felt I could utilize my writing and my quick learning ability to develop an income-generating site.

These were my two main objectives, but for a long while I didn’t put forth the type of effort required to successfully meet both. Here are my two big rookie year mistakes in blogging:

1.) I didn’t invest enough time to expect much for results. As some of you may know, I was blogging on Oildummy as well until recently. I finally realized that with my limited time I was stretching myself way too thin by trying to successfully grow 2 blogs. As a result, I put OilDummy on hiatus to concentrate solely on this blog.

2.) The time I spent was almost always spent on brainstorming and writing content. I didn’t put forth much effort to grow my readership base. To make money from a blog, one must consider it a business- and businesses need to be marketed. No matter how good your content (or product) is, there must be a plan to get it out there. There are a gazillion blogs on the net, with millions more popping up every day. Interested readers aren’t going to find you by accident.

Keeping these in mind, I laid out the basic steps I want to take to really build a better blog:

1. Really evaluate what I write about: I finally accepted the fact that writing the same old regurgitated finance articles wasn’t going to get me very far. In order to attract and maintain a loyal readership base, I need to offer deeper, more insightful thoughts that aren’t widespread across the web. This means much more effort must go into my writing, but it will be worth it.

2. Work on building a larger readership base: I need to communicate and reach out with other bloggers even more. I have been doing this some, but I really need to make some more connections with related bloggers. I also need to spend some time learning other traffic building techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO). As tedious as this stuff is, it would most likely help get me get some more free traffic.

3. Finally, after making some good progress on the first two areas, I can begin to focus on monetization strategies.

I’ve evaluated my options carefully, and I’m prepared to put in more disciplined work on this blog than I have been. It would be much easier to put in smaller efforts, but that route would only lead to major frustration at some point. I either need to get serious about this or drop it completely. I’m going to do the former.