When you arrive at many restaurants, you are given the option to order appetizers, main courses, and deserts. Some people will enjoy all three, but others will go straight for the main course. I tend to follow the latter way of doing things as I want to get straight to the point. This is just as true with most people scouring the web for content, but many bloggers make the mistake of wasting the reader's time with unnecessary content.

It doesn't matter if you take a single paragraph or ten paragraphs to get you point across—each word, sentence, and paragraph should be clearly and concisely written. When people read a magazine, they generally expect lengthy, in-depth articles, but when people read a blog, they expect to get the information fast. If the reader wanted all the information, they would go right to the source.

Too Much Data!

The internet is a place where a single chunk of information can be massively spread within hours, and the bloggers that can get right to the point are the ones that will usually come out the winners. It is pretty much similar to how real newspapers work–all publications want the big scoop. Obviously, most normal bloggers are not getting the scoop, they are just sharing their thoughts about existing news, and this is part of the reason as to why blogs are so popular.

Think about it—bloggers are essentially competing (for a lack of a better word) against thousands of other bloggers, and many people subscribe to numerous blogs. People just don't have the time to dedicate several minutes to reading a single blog entry, and this is made more true if you are posting several times a day. If it took an average of three minutes to read 20 blog posts on various blogs, that would add up to at least an hour of reading time!

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There are nearly an unlimited amount of reasons why you might not read this, but if you want to know some tips on making your introductions stand out from the rest, then you should take the time to read it. Do I got your attention? Well, good, then let's jump right on in.

What's The Point?

The purpose of the introduction within any article should be to generate interest while informing readers of what you are writing about. It very well might be the single most valuable part to all articles, and because no matter how much effort you put into writing, if it does not grab the reader's attention, it wasn't much of a worthwhile attempt. In other words, you wasted your time. Make it habit to focus on creating a killer introduction for all your articles so that doesn't happen.

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Time is valuable to all of us, and for a part-time or full-time blogger, it might seem there are just not enough hours in the day. While none of us (as far as I know) have the ability to manipulate time, there are things we all can do to keep on top of things. Time management is a skill that anyone can take advantage of, and here are some tips to make the best use of the little time we are given.

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There are so many things that I have learned over the last two years I have spent as a full time problogger, and while some of them were easy to deal with, others were much more difficult.

I wanted to cover a few of the things I have learned over the last two years, in hopes that they will help others looking to join the problogging ranks.

Network

Networking is key. The only reason I was able to become a problogger was because Darren Rowse let me guest blog for him, and Jacob Gower hired me on after doing an interview with him for my personal blog.

Finding people in the same boat as you can also be very beneficial, not only for finding work, but also creating a friendship. When you are tied to the computer for twelve hours a day or more, it can be nice to talk to people doing the same.

Blogging can sometimes feel very isolating, but you can reduce its effect by connecting with people.

Find Other Activities

If your hobby is writing and you make it your job, then what will be your hobby?

Early on in my writing, I realized that I didn't do anything else. I was writing for work, and writing for myself. I didn't have any other hobbies to unwind with, and that quickly caused me to burnout. I didn't want to write. I felt that I was nothing but fingers strumming endlessly across my keyboard.

Since then, I have taken up reading novels, and playing a massively multiplayer online game, both of which I find help me relax after a long day of writing.

Finding activities off the computer, and away from a publishing platform is key to making your interest in blogging last.

Promote

The key to any blog doing well in both the short term and the long term is promotion. There are so many systems in place now to promote your best content to much larger audiences.

Recently, I found just contacting a few key bloggers personally works very well.

Create a list of people in your niche, and how you can contact them, and when you write your absolute best content, send them a link, ask them to look it over, and you will be amazed at the reaction. A recent article of mine did better through promoting it through bloggers contact forms, than it did on Digg, Reddit, or even StumbleUpon.

Calculate Your Value

Early on, I found that I was working hard and fast, but once I broke it down, I was really only making a few dollars an hour.

Later in my blogging career, I started calculating out what I would have to make for the whole thing to be sustainable.

I came up with a simple formula:
money per day = (posts per day/hours worked) * rate wanted per hour

Basically, this meant that if I did twelve posts in six hours, then I really only did two posts per hour. So if I wanted to make ten dollars an hour, my rate had to be five dollars a post, or sixty dollars a day.

Depending on your writing skill, and your expertise in the subject, you will want to refine this to come up with what you consider a fair value for you own work.

Also take note that this formula allows you to take into effect the time you took promoting each story and your research time by adding it all into your hours worked.

Conclusion

Over the last two years, so much has changed in the blogging world. There are more networks, more blogs, and more competition, but what has remained the same is the viability of blogging as a career prospect for some and if my experience has taught me anything, it is that anyone, with the right amount of patience, passion and effort can become a full time, paid blogger.

We all know the power of AdSense , the incomes it could bring and so on. But how many people really succeed in earning a living out of AdSense? a few, that's the answer . Understanding and knowing AdSense's limitations will help you cover any possible knowledge gaps you might have .

This guide is going to cover the 3 most important topics about AdSense including : choosing the right topic for AdSense , ad design , ad placement .

Before getting started I know that there has been a debate on how AdSense interacts with bloggers and if is the right choice . Now , from my point of view this depends on several factors : the audience you are writing to , the range of topics you are blogging about ( the wider the range , the harder it is for AdSense to know what ads to serve ) and last but not least ad positioning and design ( this could actually make the difference between great and horrible AdSense performance ).

The answer to the all above statements you will find through this guide , so , let us get started.

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Unfortunately, sometimes the logical thing to do and the "technically right" thing to do are polar opposites. Such is the case with those little tiny links at the bottom of your WordPress blog that send your reader into the pits of your archives. One must make a choice here... should I link to "page 2" of the blog archives using the words "previous posts" or "next page"?

Technically speaking, they are indeed previous posts. One would think that while a person is browsing the articles on your blog, they would naturally know what "previous posts/entries" meant, and would consequently know intuitively which link to click when presented with the options.

One would be wrong.

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