I’m reading "How to make money from your Blog" written May 3rd 2006 by Steve Pavlina who, as of October 29th 2006 was making $1000 per day via his blog website stevepavlina.com. Yesterday I made $1.23 combined off of 10 websites. I have 16 websites in total. I used to have 19 but I’ve recently sold 3.  Mr. Pavlina is talking about a single website when he talks about making $1000 per day. Here I am barely pulling a dollar a day total across 16 websites. So what am I doing wrong? Or is it not a case of doing something wrong? Could it be that I’m just not smart enough and that, no matter how hard I work at it, I will never be among the 1% of people who actually manage to make decent money from their blogs?

Pavlina writes in his post about how to make money from your blog, that he agrees with those who say that 99% of people who try to make serious income from their blog will fail. He even apologizes for the seeming contradiction between his statement and the theme of his blog, "personal development" explaining that his blog focuses on personal development for "smart people"; and he maintains that while most people can’t make any serious income blogging, smart people usually can. The question is, what does Mr. Pavlina mean by ’smart’?

In the sense that you need to know something that people find useful, I’ll agree that you shouldn’t expect that you’ll be able to turn lack of knowledge into money. For a blog to have any hope of being successful, whether you measure success in the value of income your blog generates, or in your readership numbers, it needs to be about something other people want to know something about. If only you are interested in what you’re talking about, you’ll pretty much be as someone alone in a room talking to himself.

If you’re going to blog with a goal to make a living doing it, you’d better know more about the subject you’re blogging on than the average person, and you’d better have a way of sharing that information in your blog that attracts readers rather than repels them.

Here is where I am not so sure I have the goods myself. Most of the sites I’m left with now that I’ve sold my dating websites are blog type websites. The majority are celebrity gossip blogs, a subject in which I am not personally interested. When I started in that field I was writing about people I had never heard of before, and I was writing with the attitude of someone who disdains the celebrity culture. I was always afraid that someone who knew me might discover I was running celebrity gossip blogs and might draw the conclusion that I was one of those celebrity obsessed people. And I dreaded the possibility of being mistaken for someone who gave a damn about celebrities and what they were doing with their lives; but I’d heard there was big money in celebrity gossip blogging and I wanted to make big money so I transformed a domain I’d bought for a different purpose into the first of several celebrity gossip sites.

Originally I’d intended on hiring bloggers to do the writing but that did not work out so I got stuck doing the writing myself and that wasn’t a good thing considering I knew next to nothing about what I was writing and I was embarrassed to be writing celebrity gossip.

You can’t be uninformed in the subject you’re blogging about; and you can’t hate what you’re doing and expect your hate is going to turn into profit. It just doesn’t work that way. I’ve since worked on getting over the embarrassment and treating the matter sensibly; but I haven’t fallen in love with the subject matter, so I’m still basically blogging on a subject in which I take no personal interest and about which I have no more knowledge than the average person, which makes the sites just another bunch of obscure celebrity gossip sites.

The point here is, if by smart Pavlina means more knowledgeable in the field you’re blogging about, then yes, if you don’t know more than your readers, they can’t possibly respect your opinion more highly than their own, so they won’t read your blog, because you have nothing to tell them they don’t already know at least as much as you do or more. People who know more than average in a particular field have a better chance of making an income blogging about it, assuming it’s a subject that other people are searching for information about. They have a better chance of making an income, because their resource will be more trusted than that of someone who obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The trust will turn into traffic to their site; and the traffic, assuming they are monetizing their site, turns into money.

An easy example would be this blog vs Pavlina’s. No one looking to find out how to make $1000 per day will listen to someone making $1.23 per day across 16 websites over someone actually making $1000 per day with a single website. Only a fool would listen to a poor man, or woman, who tells him what to do to make money.