Not exactly.  One common mistake made by noob bloggers looking to start monetizing their sites is getting over excited by how easy it is to put up ads.

9 time out of 10, the new blogger joins every ad network they find and starts putting up one skyscraper after another.  Before you know it, there’s 8 ads on a single page from 4 different ad networks.

It’s a flashy, animated, blinking, weight loss, acai berry drinking good time all right.

Unfortunately, that means they’ve made one of the critical mistakes in blog business.  They took their eyes off the ball.

Content is your #1 priority.  Your users come first.

Don’t get me wrong, it is really exciting.  Here’s all these companies that want to hand you money just for putting their ads on your website.  Who wouldn’t get excited.  That’s why I can’t believe everyone isn’t blogging.

However, focusing all your time and attention on stuffing every available inch of your site with ads is a proven way to drive away the traffic you have worked so hard to attain.

When users feel like they are being bombarded with advertisements, they are going to get distracted from your content.  Eventually, they will lose interest.

Another problem that is often overlooked is the page load time of your site.  If you have a lot of different ad networks running on your blog, you have to make sure that they are not causing any page load delays.

Remember that each time your website is loaded by a user, a number of call outs to the ad network server are happening.  Each call out can ad loadtime and overall page weight to your site.

You can pretty easily spot these issues when you visit a poorly optimized blog.  The body content will load almost immediately.  Then it might be another second or two of delay before the right sidebars finally load.  Or perhaps only part of the sidebar loads followed a couple seconds later by the rest of it.

Page load time is a great way to drive away even more users.  The longer someone has to wait to surf around your site, the less likely they become to ever do it again.

When you are first starting out, try to resist temptation and just go with one ad network.  You can always switch or add more later.  From there, just pick 2-3 ad units and leave it at that.

There is the IAB standard pack that includes:  729×90 Leaderboard, 160×600 Skyscraper, and a 300×250 Square.  Just go with those and you will have all of the basic IAB standard sizes covered.

Bear with me on the following journey.  I promise, there is an important lesson to be learned that will make you money.

I happen to find myself at a variety of business networking events in New York City through out the year.  I tend to go there because I have to go.  I’m usually dragged there by co-workers.

Hey, if there’s an open bar, why not.

Inevitably, someone ends up trying to force a conversation on me about their business.  Most of the time, I could really care less.

Can you tell I am not in sales?

Well, since I’m not in sales, I end up telling these guys what I do, and start asking some questions about their websites (or lack thereof) because I really don’t want to them give me their hard sell anymore.

Here these guys are, more excited to talk about their business, what they do, and why I should be just as excited about it as them.  They can go on and on for hours about every mind numbing detail about their industry.

Finally one day, I cut a guy off and asked why none of this information was on his website.

Here’s a guy that knows everything you would ever want to know about (in this case) supply chain management.  A nice enough guy, of course.  But here he is chatting my ear off about the subject.  I’m a web developer and content producer.  I am never going to need his services.

Which brings up the point of this little rant.

This guy is a wealth of professional knowledge.  As he told me many times, he has 17 years of experience.  Yet when you look at his website, you would never know it.

Finally, I had a come to Jesus moment with him.  I explained how much business he was potentially losing because he was wasting his time chatting one on one with me rather than sitting at home writing about it.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking face to face networking at all.

However, I am sick and tired of running into these guys all over town that really know their stuff, but don’t realize how to properly channel it.

I explained to him how he should start a blog on his company website and write one new post per day about supply chain management subjects.

Personally, I would never read it.  You would probably never read it either.

But, there are people out there that would read it, and be very glad to be reading it.  That is the point.

Your customers are out there actively searching the Internet for information about your specialty.  Get in front of them by giving them the expert information they are looking for, and give it to them for free.

Before you know it, the person reading your stuff is going to think you are god’s gift to supply chain management.  Guess who this guy is going to call when he’s ready to get someone hired as a consultant?  You big boy.

Talk to the right people!  They are desperate to find you.

So that is my point.  Most professions are fairly specialized, such as this one.  Most people will not care one bit about what you do.  However, there is a group of people out there that are extremely interested in what you do.  They are searching specifically for the knowledge you possess.  They are out there searching right this very second.

Let’s put it this way.  You could spend your time traveling around to supply chain management conferences and networking events.  First of all, how many of those could there be?  And how much is it going to cost you to get there?  How much is the cost of admission.

Or, you could actively seek out your audience online.  Not only can you supplement your website with great info, but you will actually start generating unique traffic through search engines.  Those other people as obsessed with supply chain management as you are will find you.

I guess the point is to spend less time talking to lots of people and focus on talking to the people who want to know what you know.

Trust me, it does not matter how specialized, bizarre, boring, abstract, complicated, geeky, lame, or insane your profession is.  Everyone is an expert at something, and there are others of you out there.   Even more importantly, there are people out there that need your help in the form of products and service.

Talk to them.

[Photo Credit]

To sum it up, design by committee is the killer groundbreaking ideas.  Period.

Sure, some great products and/or services have come out of committees, but think how much better they could have been.  Think about how many amazing ideas have been smashed to bits in the board room.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Too many cooks in the kitchen?

Maybe.  More often, it is too many cooks that think they are gourmet chefs when in reality they don’t even know how to make a turkey sandwich.

Without fail, the design by committee process quickly devolves into a contest of who can sounds smarter.

Unfortunately, in this troubled economy, people feel an urgency to justify their employment.  All to often, it is the people that are just mediocre at their jobs that realize they need to quickly step up and appear to be valuable.  They know that the boss is looking to cut back on expenses, so they need to appear as involved as possible.

For every 1 smart, talented team member, there’s usually about 9 mediocre teammates.  They’re really the C students of the group.  However, they’ve gotten to where they are because they can talk a good game.  They were the popular kids in school.  But when it comes to actually putting together a good idea or working on a project as a team, all the talking and “ideas” get you no where.

Out numbered.

The talented person gets overrun by the other 9 all the time.

I’ve saw this happening more and more in 2009, especially in the advertising world.  The video (above) is not that far off the mark.  There are too many brand advisors getting in the away of the real message.

On my team, I’m lucky enough to have a group of guys that don’t need to be the center of attention.   They have great attitudes, value the best idea even if it isn’t their own, and don’t care who get’s the credit. It really is a blessing.

Smaller can be better.

Design by committee has defined the way BlogCraving chooses to do business.  We’ve focused on smaller niche publishers in order to avoid the larger bureaucratic companies. Instead, we focus on assembling a very small group of key decision makers committed to getting the project done right.

There are a lot of niche publishers out there.  However, they tend to be smaller one or two person teams that have very little (if any) technical expertise.  Often, they are excellent writers and publishers, but they have no idea what it takes to bring their site to the next level.  At BlogCraving, we help them understand the technical and design elements that will help transform their hobby site into a real business.

The publisher gets to keep doing what they do best: publish.  Blogcraving takes care of the technical details.

Since the publisher usually consists of an owner or a very small team, there’s very little “committee” to deal with.  The publisher knows that they want, and we make it happen.  As long as the publisher trusts our expertise, everything works out perfectly.

I’ve actually turned down business from site owners that are unwilling to trust our expertise.  I become very invested in the clients we support…probably more so than I should.  I want to see the site succeed and grow almost as much as the site owner.  Because of that, we refuse to work with folks that are too stubborn to act in the best interest of the site’s long term growth.

For example, you can’t expect to run a top notch site with 150,000 daily pageview on a $4.95/month hosting plan.  The hosts are not reliable enough, technical support sucks, and there will be downtime when you need to be online most.  Publishers refuse to make the investment in proper infrastructure even though it will pay for itself ten fold.

You also cant litter your homepage with 23 ad units plus paid contextual links and popups.  I know you think one ad is great, so two must be better, but it doesn’t always work that way.

Sharp images are great, but they can’t all be 400kb.

Google Image Search is fun, but you can’t just steal photos from other sites.

You get the idea.

I know it can be hard for publishers to trust a company like ours to have their best interest in mind.  That’s why we offer certain money back guarantees and performance based payment options.

I advise anyone looking for technical help, a web designer, or consultant to really grill the company on what exactly they are guarantee.  Make sure you have them put it in writing.

Don’t be afraid to shop around either.  Ask other publishers who they use.  80% of BlogCraving’s business is referral based.  People love to recommend people who do great work.

No seriously.  That’s why.

No one cares that you got stuck in traffic, the dog made a poop in the living room, or that your kid made a funny face today.  There’s nothing more boring than that kind of site.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write it.  If it makes you happy, go for it.  Some people just like to keep a diary, and if others want to read it, fine!  However, you shouldn’t expect people to come flying to your site in droves.

If you DO want to have a high traffic site with this format, it better be damn good.  The writing and stories better be phenomenal.  You had better have me falling off my chair with laughter each and every time.  Then, maybe you have a shot.

Otherwise, just be happy with what little traffic you have.