The biggest advice I can give is to pick a small niche, set up a site and start experimenting. Make mistakes and learn from them. That’s the only way you are going to succeed. Of course, have realistic expectations. It took me more than 1-2 years to start making decent money. But the beauty of it is that once you make that first dollar, you know it works and at that point it just becomes a matter of scaling it up, working harder and smarter to scale up your business.
Blogging is something that requires patience, persistence and discipline. It may mean writing everyday for over a year before you really start to see any money from it. There are exceptions to the rule, but from my dealings with other bloggers, it seems to be pretty common to spend one or even two years building your blog, your brand and your authority, before making any serious amount of money.
I personally like this one for some spare cash. It does not take much to earn an extra $20 – $50 a week. Some claim that they are able to make a living by dedicating their time to different jobs at mTurk. You will have to go through a learning curve, but once you get comfortable, you will find plenty of good and interesting HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) to work on.
Then, if my piece of content is so unique and valuable around hiking backpack recommendations, that other reputable outdoor websites are willing to link to it and build the page’s authority, then I’d have a very real opportunity to rank high in organic search for these search terms (meaning, my page will come up first when someone searches for hiking backpacks).
