You may have heard that you can make your first million dollars online as a blogger in your spare time. It's true - that is, if your spare time equates to about five years of spending at least 60 hours per week in front of a computer typing until your fingers are numb. Not to mention the link building and marketing that is required to generate the amount of traffic you need in order to actually start seeing money trickle in.

Yep. Piece of cake.

Here are some myths about making money online via blogs or websites and what you need to do in order to really be successful:

1. People can't wait to hear about my life.

Wrong. No one except your mom and dad want to read the blog that is all about what you ate yesterday. And even they probably get bored with it. I see and stumble across blogs like this all of the time. I may or may not find a useful piece of info from it, but most of the time I click the "back" button and move on to the next search result.

It's not that this kind of personal blog is not useful and fun. Updating others on what is going on in your life is a great way for others to get to know you and for information and thoughts to be shared. I also see this as a useful tool for people who go in mission trips to keep their supporters informed about what has been happening each day of the trip. And, while I'm thinking about the positives, I can see people learning from other's failures and successes just by reading stories.

If you are blogging about your life right now or have been contemplating doing so, then by all means, keep up the good work! I encourage you to take it and run with it. But, please, don't quit your day job. You're probaly not going to make a lot of money (if any) unless you change your tactics.

Make sure your expectations are in the right place.

2. Write it and they will come.

Wrong. OK, so lets say you write a blog and it's all about helping women find products for clear and healthy skin. You blog every day about new product reviews and have good looking advertisements all over your site in order to monetise it. You have put your heart and soul into this thing and expect people to start popping into the pages like kernels in a microwave (you know where it just keeps getting more and more frequent as it cooks).

A month goes by and you have 20 visitors to the site. You blow it off with a, "Well, it's just the first month. Next month will be better."

Next month comes and goes. Once again, 37 visitors to your site. "Alright, seeing some growth!"

Third month comes and goes. Back down to 19 visitors to your site. "???"

The whole "write it and they will come" does not really apply here. If all you did was write a new article in your blog every day, you would need about ten years before you started to see enough traffic to generate any kind of income. (Unless you started out with 5,000 Facebook freinds who all love you and want to support you so they visit your site every day in order to help you out.)

You thought that Google, Yahoo, and Bing would just find your site and send searchers to it every day automatically. The truth is that while Google and the other search engines are extremely smart and will find your site whether you manually show them or not, they are not going to rank your blog or site at the top of the results until you play by their rules. And statistics show that most people do not move past the first page when searching for something, so even if you are on the second page you are not going to be found very often.

These "rules" require tons and tons of time building popularity via link building and SEO marketing techniques. Most of this type of marketing has to be done manually or it is frowned upon by the major search engines. After you have spent every countless hour writing, researching, and link building, maybe then you will start to see some "popcorn" results. Growth of a blog starts very very slowly.

3. Once I get lots of traffic, I will be banking!

Wrong. Let's say you end up getting into the top 100,000 on Alexa rankings. You will probably be seeing around 50,000 visitors per month! This is awesome and few bloggers will ever see these kinds of results. But lots of traffic does not necessarily mean lots of money in your pocket. It all depends on the look and feel of your site.

If you site appears to be too much of a sales pitch, then most people will end up hitting the "back" button. If the ads on your site are all Google adsense ads (you know, the ones with blue, black and green ink) you should only expect to see around $.05 to .$.50 per click on those ads. AND studies show that only 2% to 4% of your visitors will click on the ads. If we go with the high numbers, this means that you will only be making $1000 per month. Sick! All that hard work for that?

However, there are ways to increase your click-through rates on your ads and to get more ads that produce better results and higher payouts. Once you have large amounts of traffic, you need to reevaluate how you can better monetise your site. Traffic is valuable, and many advertisers are willing to pay for it.

Do you have a blog? Share it with me by submitting a comment below and let me know what you are doing to help monetise it. If you don't have a blog but would like to start one, or if you need help marketing or monetising feel free to ask me any question that you may have. I'd love to help.

-Griff