If your blog isn't making money and you can't seem to get it started, go read The Biggest Reasons People Fail At Making Money Online on John Chow's blog.

Really, go read it. I'll still be here when you get back…

Did you see any of yourself in that post?

The one I see most often is this:

They're Just Blogging For Money

Now, you need to understand what John's talking about here. He isn't talking about building a niche site using Wordpress as the platform.

He's talking about an honest-to-goodness blog, where you make regular posts on the topic, or even on completely unrelated topics that you think would be of interest to your visitors.

A site where you're trying to build a community of readers who take part in the blog.

Building a website about some high-paying niche and using Wordpress or some other blogging system as the underlying platform is fine, but if you're going to truly blog on the topic, it gets old really fast if you're not interested in it personally.

This blog is a good example. I'm interested in the whole idea of internet business and I enjoy writing about it. Frankly, at the moment I make nothing from this site - there's practically no monetization on it at all.

I'm sure that will change in the future, but money is certainly not my top priority right now…

If you've got a blog that you're putting some serious effort into and haven't seen any returns, keep those reasons of John's in mind. Whether they convince you to stay the course or cut your losses and move on, you'll come out ahead either way.