Do you get any real return on the time you invest in blogging? The Internet is overflowing with stories of people who make millions by blogging, but how many bloggers make any substantial money?

Yes there are people who have and continue to make large amounts of money from blogging, but there are decisively more people that invest a lot of time for very little or no return.

So what is it that sets these two groups apart? It is in fact very easy to identify the why some people have successful blogging careers and why the vast majority don't.

Successful bloggers:

• Know their subject
• Publish original content
• Engage readers with quality content
• Build a large reader base

Unsuccessful bloggers:

• Post content based on the perception that certain topics are more valuable
  
• Have no real understanding of the subject
• Cut and paste content
• Post the same content on as many sites as possible

How can I back this up you might ask? It's really not that hard, I have a community blogging site (http://www.justapickle.com) that I created to allow people to raise awareness and discuss issues that are important to them. It's a relatively small site that enjoys good search engine interaction, recently I noticed that the same users were making multiple posts about totally unrelated subjects so I decide to do a little investigation.

I turns out that the bloggers in question claim to be professionals, although most of their posts seem to be about how 'they are professionals' and how to 'make money from blogging'. None of the posts have any real substance to them and none of them receive any real traffic, the site statistics tell me this. Posts that went up three months ago about real issues are still receiving more traffic to day than these junk posts.

If these guys were serious, if they really were professionals they would know that the way they are going about things is not going to make them rich. After all a lot of their posts explain these these things, perhaps they should take the time to read their own posts instead of just cutting and pasting.

If you want real return on the time you invest in blogging find a blog site that is relevant to your chosen subject, create quality original content, post consistently.