This next guest post is from my enterprising young friend from the UK, Adnan of Blogtrepreneur. For many of you, he probably needs no introduction. Check out this great post on the realities of blogging.

Take a search for “Make Money Online“, a popular phrase for many search marketers, and you’ll see that there are literally hundreds and thousands of sites telling you how to make a quick buck from the net, or something along the lines of “Follow these guidelines, and you’ll become stinking rich like me.”

Whilst an extremely small minority of these may be true, the rest are hype and only hype – where the website owners are themselves looking to make quick money through eBook or information product sales. Unfortunately, many people have also seen blogging as an effective way to get a few bucks using Adsense without looking at the real way to create a viable income source using this new medium of information exchange.

So, why the short term pain? Well if you do want to create a truly successful blog, then it’s necessary to invest some time in making your website reader friendly and beneficial to those that arrive at the URL. In effect, each unique visitor is a customer, and your aim as an entrepreneur should be to look after each visitor and make sure that they leave with new found knowledge.

Here are a few things that you could do as a newly established blogger in order to prepare yourself for future benefits:

• Write pillar articles – these will form the spine of your website and will hopefully cause a flurry of links to point to your address if written correctly.
• Write linkbait – appealing to social media sites such as the ever-blossoming Digg and others such as StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us can help drive a large amount of traffic to your blog in a short period of time. This can cause rapid growth but beware, linkbait articles are not necessarily sustainable for the long run.
• Comment ferociously – be up-to-date with other blogs in your industry and make useful comments demonstrating your expertise in the subject field as well. This can help visitors to click-through to your site and hopefully sign-up as RSS subscribers.
• Form relationships – using trackbacks to point back to a relevant article on another site will show that you value other bloggers’ knowledge and will be a surefire way of developing friendships with other owners. Instant messaging can also help to build friendships which can be useful if you need someone to look after your site whilst you’re away or if you need some advice.

Of course, the above list isn’t definitive by any means, instead it should provide you with a starting point as a newbie blogger in order to sustain a good figure of growth.

But what are these long-term gains you mention? These will differ from blogger to blogger, but many of us set monetary goals. The topic of monetization can take up a blog unto itself, but simply put, you need to dedicate the hours of writing material in order to rack up some income. Search engines like Google love new and popular content, so by writing lots of posts, you will increase your chances to get some free organic traffic.

After 3-4 months of blogging, programs such as TextLinkAds can help you to knock-up consistent link sales, and sponsored review programs like PayperPost and ReviewMe love websites which have a decent authority on the net. On top of this, once you have a solid information base, you can expand your monetization with Private Advertising, the notorious Google Adsense and many other programs which are still being released today.

Of course, you may not be after the money. Long-term benefits may also include self-satisfaction as you achieve good Search Engine Placement Positions after months of hard-work, or new relationships formed on a daily basis – it’s up to you, though, to set your own aims so that you can feel happy once you have achieved them.

To conclude, blogging should definitely not be considered as an easy way to make a quick buck. Constant dedication and nurturing of your blog is needed in the present, in order to achieve the benefits in the future.