I have a confession to make.

Not only do I not care that much for reading blogs, I also don’t really like reading e-books.

For a Life Coach that has a self development blog and has written 3 e-books, with another due out next month, that is a moderately shocking confession.

I have a folder chock full of e-books that have been sent me to review that have never even been opened.

Some have even been sent by friends and I feel the occasional pang of guilt when I see them still sat there all forlorn, unread and unloved.

It’s not that I don’t like reading, I love reading, just not so much on my computer. Maybe its an age thing seeing as I never even had my first PC until I was 33.

I’m so old, that when I first started school I had a slide rule to take to math class, and no, unfortunately I’m not joking.

For the last four months I have been running a special offer in which I have taken on 50% of the risk to work with other solopreneurs and bloggers. In other words, 4 clients per month only paid me 50% of my normal fee and the balance was due ONLY if they saw fit at the end of the process.

Fortunately, nobody has yet said they didn’t think it was worthwhile, although a few are still ongoing, so I guess that could still happen.

I have closed the offer for the time being, but I want to replicate a small part of the sale page for the blogging and soloprenuer offer because it is relevant to what I’m about to say. If you have already read it, just skim it anyway so all will make sense.

You Too Can Be A Successful Entrepreneur!
You Too Can Make Money From Your Blog or Home Business!
You Too Can Benefit From Working With A Life Coach With A Proven Track Record!

IF and I agree it’s a rather large IF, you have the right attitude and mindset.

But if you have a belief your business (or business idea) will fail, it probably will. That you’re not up to the task, you probably aren’t. Or that you can’t make money in a recession, you probably won’t.

Some people do run successful businesses and make lots of lovely money. Yes, shockingly, even in a recession!

You’re not much different to them in anything other than your belief system. We’re talking about bloggers and business people here, not Chess Grand Masters, Quantum Physicists or Nobel Laureates.

Take a trip to your favorite blog and ask yourself these questions:

* What are they doing that I can’t do?
* What skills do they possess that I don’t, or at the very worst, can’t learn?
* Where do they get their magic fairy dust from and will they let me have some?

I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with at least two of the answers.

It takes about the same amount of energy to fail at something as it does to succeed.

Successful people simply focus their energy when and where it’s needed most.  They make themselves accountable, they regularly step outside of their comfort zones and they ASK FOR HELP when they need it.

All things that a good Life Coach can help you with, and all things I regularly help clients with from all walks of life.

You can sit around twiddling your thumbs, checking Twitter and commenting on as many blogs as possible. Hoping that one day your Adsense payment will cover your Internet access.

Or you can do something different, a bit like successful bloggers and business people do.

The paradox with blogging at the moment in my opinion, is this:

It has never been harder to make money with a blog than it is now and it has never been easier to make money with a blog than it is now.

I think you’ll agree that as paradoxes go, that is right up there with the best, but what the hell do I mean?

It’s Hard

There are tens of millions of blogs out there.

Some are great, some are ok and some are terrible.

There are blogs with great content and few readers, and blogs with poor content and lots of readers.

There are blogs covering every topic you can imagine and some you can’t.

And there are blogs that make lots of money and millions more that lose money.

In other words the competition has never been stiffer with millions of bloggers running around like headless chickens most of the time, trying to drive traffic to their blog.

When I owned a record store we would have people bring in old vinyl to sell. I’d ask how much they wanted and they’d reply with some absurd figure.

Then they’d tell me they knew it was worth that  because they saw the same item advertised at that price in Record Collector. They never stopped to wonder whether the seller got the asking price.

When people are new to blogging they see what everybody else is doing and then replicate the behavior presuming that is what they should be doing. They never stop to consider whether it actually works.

I was on a consult call a few weeks ago and the person who had contacted me mentioned a product produced by another life coach that she had bought.

The product was designed to stop procrastination. I asked what it was like and she said:

“Oh it’s really cool”
“Did it work, have you stopped procrastinating?”
“Er, no, not really”
“Then it wasn’t that cool was it?”
“Probably not, no”

Ask yourself on a regular basis whether what you’re doing is working. I’m not just talking about blogging either. Is your life working like you’d want it to? If not, you’ll have to do something different because replicating the same behavior will produce the same results.

I suppose I should throw the famous Einstein quote in here and say:

“The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

Over the last 3 years I have thrown a lot of money at my website and blog, probably somewhere in the region of $7k. In terms of direct ROI, it would cause an accountant to have palpitations.

I average about 2 book sales per week and make about $10 per month from Amazon sales. Not amounts to get overly excited about I think you’ll agree, but I’m not that bothered.

The reason I’m not bothered is because about half my clients come to me through my blog. As an average client spends about $600 with me you can see the value of my blog to me is different to people selling products or offering affiliate links.

So whereas I make no money directly from my blog, I do make money from contacts that arise from my blog, as well as having a load of fun writing for it and interacting with people like your good self.

It’s really hard to make money directly from blogging, especially if you do what everybody else is doing. That means you have to usurp the bloggers already in situ at the top of the heap.

Unseating Problogger, Copyblogger or Zen Habits is the blogging equivalent of deciding to set up a cola company and going head-to-head with Pepsi and Coke.

Can it be done? Sure it can, but not just by dropping your vending machine next to the big boys machines in a shopping mall. You have to change the rules of the game to suit your strengths and adopt guerilla tactics.

How To Make Money Blogging

So now I have told you it’s damn hard being successful as a blogger if you do what the crowd are doing, let me tell you how easy it can be.

A while ago I wrote a post called ‘Stack the Deck’ In it I talked about doing whatever you can in your life to stack the deck in your favor.

That could be getting a mentor, hiring a life coach, learning a new language, reading more books, attending seminars and workshops or whatever it is that would give YOU the edge because all the information and help you need is ‘out there’ if you can be bothered to look for it.

I can, and have, helped bloggers become much more successful. If somebody has doubts, lacks self-belief, can’t set goals, needs to be held accountable or simply needs more clarity in their life, then I’m the man.

On the other hand, not everybody wants or can afford to hire a Life Coach. If all they need is the ‘How to’s’ of making a successful career online then, there are people infinitely better equipped than me to offer that advice.

About 6 months ago I reviewed Jonathan Fields book ‘Career Renegade’ To me it was a groundbreaking book for anybody looking to start an online career.

Since then I have no idea how many people I have recommended it to, but it’s a lot and I could name at least 20 clients that have bought it, loved it and benefited from it. It helped them stack the deck.

I was surfing my e-book folder this weekend and thought I’d better read one of the books. Cloud Living by Glen Allsopp caught my eye mainly because I run an advert for it on my blog and didn’t like the thought of doing so without having read the book.

I had scanned it when I first got it and did read Glens last book, so I was confident the content was going to be substantial.

Wo-hoo baby! If I’d only read this a year ago (it wasn’t out then, but whatever) I could have saved myself or more likely made myself, thousands of dollars.

Learn From Those Who Have Already Done it

I learned more about making money online in three hours than I have in the last 6 months poking around with trial and error on my own.

Cloud Living is packed with advice on how to make money from blogging and affiliate marketing.

It has lots of how to’s and demo’s and walks the reader through processes as simple and complicated as buying a domain, choosing a host, setting up your blog, attracting traffic and most importantly, making money!

If you have self-belief, if you are accountable, if you are prepared to get your head down and work and understand how to set goals, then you probably don’t need somebody like me. I still think I could make a difference, but then again, I would, wouldn’t i?

If you haven’t already got Cloud Living and Career Renegade and you are wanting to start or grow your blog, then both of these books will help you stack your own deck and make life a lot easier.

Oh and before I forget, yes the links are affiliate links.

If you have read Cloud Living I’d love to hear what you think about it in the comments. I’d also welcome a heads up on any other great books that can help people succeed online.

Image ‘Blogging Research Wordle’ Courtesy of Kristina B