If you are like me and many other bloggers, you might have a tendency to be over optimistic about how easy it will be. I remember when I first started, I thought I could easily concentrate on a site or two work very hard and build it up, get massive traffic, and within a year or so collect a big paycheck monthly. Unfortunately, it hardly ever works in such a idealistic way.

First off, most of the bloggers who claim to be making thousands a month, started usually more than a couple years ago. I’m not going to make excuses, but they DID have it easier then ones starting out more recently. There are millions of blogs being started these days and it’s pretty rough to compete now. And not all the big guys like Pro Blogger and John Chow got there because they necessarily worked as hard as everyone. Sometimes its just by accident that they get some name recognition for some good articles, then suddenly people start linking to them and it’s a huge domino effect. In the case of John Chow he was paying people to link back to him and Google punished by removing rankings of his website for the keyword “John Chow”. In his case mostly has spread his reputation since then by name recognition and social networking, and I’m even talking about him right now, which just shows the power of it.

There is a lot of unplanned things that can happen too. For example, you may work hard on SEO and are on page 2 for a competitive word, but out of nowhere your rankings drop. You do good on social networking sites such as Digg, then suddenly your digg account is banned. You could be making substantial money with paid blogging and then all the sudden, you get your PR zeroed out by Google, making your income drop like a rocket. You can even get scammed or from an affiliate program. Blogger’s commonly also suffer from writer’s block, going weeks without a new idea. It’s easy to come up with ideas in the beginning, but post regularly for a few months and then it becomes hard. These are just some of the things that CAN happen to a blogger and these are just some of the things that I’ve personally experienced too.

While I don’t want to rain on anyones parade, what I will suggest is 3 honest things a newbie blogger should remember.

1) Try to create multiple sites. It’s much easier to make more stablemoney in the long run this way, then relying on one or 2 for all your income.

2) Use multiple advertising streams, so if something happens to one of them, you still will be making good money.

3) Realize you may have some setbacks, but in the long run you should keep increasing in traffic and website recognition, as long as you consistently keep at it.