Let’s face it: While some bloggers blog for the sheer joy of having their say on whatever topics are dearest to them, other bloggers do it for the money. However, just because you are keeping that blog up for the sake of generating an online income, it doesn’t mean that you should be a sellout. Believe me, nobody gets that far in the blogosphere by being a sellout.
Your integrity as a blogger is one of the things that you need to protect if you want your blog to be taken seriously by your peers and your readers alike. As idealistic and naive as this may seem, your integrity is all you’ve got in this business. Lose your integrity and you will lose your credibility to your readers. Without any credibility, your readers will not have a reason to continue reading your blog. Without your readers, you will not be able to generate the web traffic that you need in order to create a decent income from your blogging.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t sell anything through your blog. The point is that you have to be careful with what you put up on your blog and what you sell to your readers. You can create a balance between making money with your blog and maintaining your integrity.
Can You Fake Your Passion
One way to do that is to write only about what you know. Staying true to the facts and not fabricating any detail for the sake of entertaining your readers is always a good practice. Also, you should stick to topics that you are sincerely passionate about. You need to have passion in your writing to make you believable to your audience. Passion is such a hard thing to fake when you are blogging.
Try Before Recommend
In addition, you should never, ever try to mislead your readers. If you want to push a product at them through your blog, you need to back up the hype with some good, solid facts. Actually, you should try out any product you promote to your readers before you sell it to them to make sure that you are giving them something of quality. No one likes to be played for a fool and you will lose your readers if you treat them like fools.
Lastly, whatever deal you come across, you should scrutinize it with extreme prejudice before you offer it to your readers, even if the chance to earn money from the deal seems too good to pass up. Sure, that banner ad that an advertiser wants to put up on your blog may yield you some nice profit, but it will not do you any good if your readers get to download a Trojan if they click on the banner ad. It will only backfire on you in the end.
Just because you are blogging as a means of generating some decent online income, it doesn’t mean that you have to sell your soul to earn a buck. You have to protect your integrity as a blogger at all times because your readership and the web traffic it brings to your blog depend upon it. Nobody likes a sellout and you will only end up losing if you sell out.