Alright, you’ve heard the popular phrase “content before cash” thrown around all across the blogosphere. Well, here’s a controversial spin on the matter… I’m taking the money!

Sure, I’m all for the utopian, lovely, happy world where you can sit peacefully at your desk… writing articles for others to enjoy… all day long. Sounds fantastic. Unfortunately, anyone who actually believes this is living in a dream world. As a blogger, you need to be focused on number one. Cash Is King!

I want to reverse this phrase on the ‘make money online’ niche. Understandably, if you have a personal blog or if you are writing about landscaping or aquatic sports… you may have something else in mind. Nevertheless, if you are writing in this niche, you need to focus on cash… here’s five reasons why:

1. Your Focus Should Match Your Goal
If you are writing about making money online, but aren’t even focused on making money off your blog… you are in the wrong line of work my friend. The make money online niche is all about, go figure, creating cash flows on the internet. I really doubt your readers are going to be offended if you are making cash off of their traffic, in fact, they probably want to hear about how you are doing it. As a blogger in the area, I’m going to be more concerned about what I am bringing in than anything else. People telling you “I’m not in it for the money” are either lying to your face, or aren’t the kind of people you should be taking advice from.

2. Writing to Make Money Produces the Content
Go figure, if you are focused more on cash than content, who’s to say you are going to be writing bad material!? Not me. I write with the intention of getting a lot of traffic, subscribers… and ultimately ad revenue. Guess what? This ends up producing some pretty awesome blog posts. The fact remains, if you are really focused on making cash, than writing really good material is going to come naturally as an extension of this goal. Nobody ever made a dime rambling off uselessly. As much as readers want helpful content, it’s not going to come at the hands of some blogger who isn’t dedicated toward making online revenue.

3. You Can Make Money Off a Bad Blog
There are plenty of popular blogs out there that are making better money than me, and writing content that is sub-par at best. Look at John Chow for example. The man clearly isn’t too concerned anymore with offering new, original or useful content to readers, and people are literally eating out of the palm of his hand. This situation cannot exist under the doctrine of “content before cash.” Right? People who read ‘make money online’ blogs want to learn how to make money, not how to write content. So while it’s always important, you can definitely make a better living by focusing on your paycheck than by simply writing well.

4. Marketing Can Be More Important Than Writing
I’m not going to say “marketing IS more important than writing” because I’m not into getting hate mail… despite the fact that this is probably true. Consider this, theNetFool.com has been around since October 2007. But when you look at my traffic/RSS graphs, I had about 10 subscribers and less than 50 unique visitors per day until I started actively marketing my blog in March. Things exploded, and people comment all the time saying my content is great. But guess what… nobody can read your content unless you let them know it is there. The goal of marketing is to make money, and marketing is the key to owning a successful blog. Therefore, putting the transitive property to work shows us that focusing on money will lead to a more successful blog. Now there’s math you can bank on!

5. Cash Drives Blogging Motivation
Here’s the bottom line about blogging, things get old fast when you write articles that don’t bring home the bacon. Perhaps you just enjoy writing… but being in the ‘make money online’ blogging niche should mean that you are trying to make money online. Again, if your blog isn’t doing this for you, where is the motivation!? Steady cash flows make for a more inspired blog, better writing, more interactivity, increased traffic, the list goes on and on. By focusing on cash over content, you are going to put a good amount of work into your website and make things better all around.

Sorry to be so blunt, but I am not writing to spoon feed my readers what they want to hear. The fact is that in the blogging realm, it can be really cut throat. If you are focused on content over cash, you are doing something wrong and are going to be left in the dust. New advertising campaigns, referral programs, traffic sharing schemes and the like pop up all the time. If you are too concerned with writing good material all the time, you are going to end up missing the boat. People won’t wait for you to play catch up.

-The Net Fool

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