Strategery for personal blog

Why would you want spend money making a personal blog Search Engine Friendly?

Google love WordPress anyway and if you're not making money from the site why invest money. A better option for you may be to set up your blog and then be active online and share your content using Social Media, Blog Hopping, Chat in online communities where the members have similar interests to yourself.

I think you're overthinking this a bit. If you want to start a personal blog, fine. But you seem confused about whether or not you want to monetize it.

Just monetize it. Simple enough. Not something that you have to keep working on (the monetization part of it).

JoeMack

If you want to be a successful blogger, you'll have to earn from it, of course. If you want a blog that will reach many people, you surely have to invest money for it, although not that big but still, money is a factor. You'll have to put that blog to good use and use it for extra income so you can also spend for it to increase its value.

If you want to work out a personal blog - go for it. But from a business revenue perspective,
and a practical way of funding your personal blog hobby - scale up your amazon affiliate blog.

If you really want to spend the money, build a following off of your personal blog, make sure
that it's relevant to people and then built out an info product from it once you get momentum.

The best method to monetize a personal blog is product development and ads. Do a mix of
both.

If you really want to get rid of your Amazon affiliate blog and get some cash out of it, sell it on
Flippa and walk away from the long term revenue.

Could it help to make the topic of your blog more specific? Think about who you want to attract to your blog, what are their interests, what do they want to read about?

In terms of spending money: blogging can be done without spending anything on marketing. As Kerryrus says; just being active in online communities will bring in traffic - if done properly.

Also, what does "succeeding as a blogger" look like to you? As in, how will you know when you are a successful blogger, do you have specific objectives you want to achieve?

From the personal blogs that I enjoy that have really taken off, it seems like the best ones start off without any money-making scheme involved. That's just not the point of a personal blog. If it takes off, then you can start thinking about profits, but that's a long, long way away.

Just my two cents.

Good luck!

No one wants to read about your very average life in high school and if you try and blog about all those things you mentioned, comics, TV, gadgets etc you're just casting the net too wide and blogging about everything and anything. This won't attract MORE people it will attract less as you're not specific enough and there will be too much stuff people aren't interested in.

Keep it specific and on one topic.

Forget about SEO that's not the way to go with this. Focus on figuring out what you want your blog to be about (and be specific not 100 different things), something other people are interested in (so not your normal life for example), post really great content once a week at most and spend the rest of the time promoting your blog by finding out where your target audience hang out and getting your content in front of them i.e. guest posting / article syndication, forum posting (signature links), blog commenting, banner ads, social media, video marketing, solo ads, Reddit or wherever else they are.

Tbh probably never but it's impossible for anyone to give you a time frame on this because it depends if anyone likes your blog, you promote it well, you can get traffic and how much work you put in.

If you only want to talk about your personal experiences, create Squidoo lenses and promote Amazon products there.

This is a way to use your personal stories without spending money, but making money because Squidoo pays you to create lenses, and you can sell affiliate products. Squidoo likes personal stories.

Of course, these lenses are not really yours, but you can create a few of them to tell your stories and then, drive the traffic from your lenses to your own pages.

You will find many free lessons online about how to create perfect Squidoo lenses.

Don't exaggerate, though. It’s not a good idea to create many lenses and depend on Squidoo because they have many irritating rules that keep changing.

You can mix almost every interest you have with your personal opinions and create your blog around it and monetize it, for example lets say you like fishing, just write about your fishing tips, which lures you use, which rods, where you go to fish and then provide affiliate links to all that. Create your bass fishing guide and sell on your blog for $9.97, or better yet give it away and build your list.

I took fishing just for example, you can do the same with any other niche: golf, IM/MMO, model airplanes...anything.

For this kind of blogs you do not need any seo budget, just connect your blog with your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pintrest and G+ accounts, then on these social networks find people with similar interests (in my experience once you go over 100 friends on these networks people will start adding you on their own), each post you make on your blog make a small Tweet or FB post. Each picture of a huge bass you catch post on Pintrest etc.

Post your fishing articles on Squidoo, and Hub pages and other top web 2.0 websites and link to your blog, offer to write guest posts.

See, no $$ SEO, 100% white hat and working.

Try not to worry so much about the link building for now. Focus more on setting up your blog and getting content high quality onto it.

Think about maybe registering on a few forums where your readers are likely to be. Interact with them, use social networking to connect with them.

If you follow this model you probably won't need to do much link building. Instead the marketing will flow organically from your social media and forum marketing.