Blogging - My strategy

How do I turn blogging into a respectable second income big enough to make a material difference to my lifestyle, i.e., of the order of about 25% of my main earned income. I have drawn up my blogging strategy by following a couple of assumptions. Any seriously valuable opportunities on the web will be rapidly occupied by professionals. The only effective way to generate traffic is via search engines. The only way to keep the attention of people who find your blog is by offering them compelling content. These assumptions are based on my experience of doing a blog as a hobby and then simply seeing what kind of adsense revenue it generated. A couple of pages seem to attract a fairly regular stream of visits who find the site by entering keywords that don't throw up a huge amount of competition. Some of those visitors go on to explore the rest of the blog. The click rate on adverts is quite respectable. I am reasonably confident that I can continue to increase the size and the appeal of that blog and this is something that I can do gradually. It is also apparent that there is going to be a natural limit to what this blog can achieve, so I need to create some more blogs that address other niches. I don't think this strategy will work without compelling content and I want to create the content myself. I have read other people's blogs where they get content from elsewhere and either use it as is or customise it. I don't want to go down that route because you are intstantly creating the opportunity for someone else to come in and outcompete you. I also think that one of the features of a successful blog is a continual stream of new content. So I intend to create a regular stream of blogs. I will start them on blogger.com as that offers a free start up. I will monitor them and kill them off if they don't seem to work. If they generate traffic then I will set them up with a new domain. The challenge is going to be generating enough content out of my own head to give each idea a fair crack at becoming a success. This is going to take iron discipline combined with a fluid imagination.