A 10-step guide to blogging riches
October 4th 2008 05:36
Masthead from the blog.fl-2 blog
1.
Step 1 is to understand that this guide, like any other guide likely to be read by a lot of people, has a misleading title. There is no guarantee of riches. Understand that the vast majority of people who start a blog with the hope of making a lot of money will fail to do so.
2.
Be patient. Be very, very patient. All blogs start out equal and even blogs destined for greatness will crawl at first. Your hit count and individual and link reader numbers will grow slowly. Think 12 months.
3.
Don't fall for the psychological numbers trap. You will be tempted to count down the minutes to the arrival every day of your numbers update. You will receive sage advice not to put too much store in these numbers. You will nevertheless stare catatonically at the numbers and will them to morph into four- and five-digit, steroid-bulked, mutant future descendants of themselves. This must be avoided. What I do instead is type the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet where I can stare at all the numbers, arranged neatly in chronological order. Use soothing background colours.
4.
Choose a 'niche'. This, along with content, is the most important advice you will receive. The world's two best-read blogs are about gadgets. Orble's most successful blog is about cars. The 850,000 daily readership Dooce blog is about motherhood. Write about your hobby; write about about the subject area of your PhD treatise; write about a focused area you know about. Search engines - and in the blogosphere they are deities with absolute power over your future - will see you better and more often and more regularly if you have a subject-specialised blog. If you want to write about three or four different subjects, start a blog for each of them.
5.
Choose a domain name. This will be the web address of your blog. The name should reflect the nature of your blog - www.chocolatebiscuits.com is not a good name for a blog on stamp collecting. Go to a domain-hosting site and do some domain name searches to see what is available (try Telivo).
6.
Buy your own domain name, which is a relatively cheap and simple experience, and register it on a hosting site, which is a relatively expensive and confusing exercise. The venerable and credible WordPress (see point 7) recommends bluehost. Congratulations, you now have your own presence on the world wide web. It may look like a picture of my wife in a blizzard with her back turned to the camera, but it's a start. Think of it as a blank page upon which your future will be writ large. A guide to this tricky stage is the book Problogger: Secrets for blogging your way to a six-figure income. This is another of those tantalisingly named books which promise the world, with those promises delivered in 200 pages of content which could easily have been distilled to 10 pages, but in this case at least you get honest advice. See also their related blog, itself a blogging success story.
7.
Install WordPress. This is optional - if you know HTML coding and are high-end graphics-capable, then by all means create your own blogging interface, not forgetting to optimise it for advertising, search engine visibility, visitor statistics etc. WordPress, a free, widely-used blogging interface, does it all for you. Read all about it here.
8.
Learn everything there is to learn about advertising on your blog (try this link for a start). Read all about Google AdSense and, perhaps, some if its competitors (this blog looks at the biggest alternatives).
9.
If you don't already write well, learn to do so. We can't all write like Hemingway or Hiaasen, but we can all try to write with sufficient technical accuracy to allow readers to focus on content rather than grammatical incompetence. This is where it all starts and ends. Content is king, queen and entire royal dynasty, and unless your content is unpublished nude photographs of Sarah Palin you are going to have to work hard at generating visitor numbers. That is done through quality material. It is a crucial message, and the eyes of most people just glaze over when they hear it. There are plenty of bloggers who have been posting regularly and diligently for two years with the expectation of making money, but their blogs still earn a pittance. Some then lament that, having built a blog, the riches didn't come. Why? It is about quality content.
10.
Blogging is one of the most gratifying creations of the internet. There are so many reasons to get into it, all with guaranteed success: we all need mental as well as physical exercise, and blogging is a great way to keep the neurons ticking; it is a community and therefore a way to meet people, especially people with similar interests; it is an ideal motivation for lazy writers, and there are many of us around. Just about the only reason to get into blogging that is not guaranteed success is to make money out of it.
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Comment by Dianna G
I Wish This Was 42
Fictional Worlds
Very nice. Especially the first one. May I just jump in and say that I've been blogging for over a year, and have fewer than two hundred readers some days? That said, I've been inconsistent when things got really bad in my normal life, but I do try, and my blog is pretty focused. Oh, and I have Google Page Rank 3. Still not many visitors.
So you have to work hard and be very, very patient; better yet, just do it for fun and maybe the money will come too.
~Dianna
Comment by Chris Champion
Vyoos
Zoomies
Bloggercises
The Blog of Lists
Newly Old
Money Whither
Hey, 200 readers a day sounds BIG to me
Yes, it takes time and it needs a lot of work, things not always understood by new bloggers. I liked Cibbuano's comment on another post, "I suppose the hidden truth behind making an income with Adsense is that it is easily as much work as a job in the real world."
I think also it's possible that the top shelf of blogging is becoming crowded, and these days quality content needs some savvy marketing to help it along.
Meanwhile, it's fun, and you can't put a price on that.
Best wishes,
Chris
Comment by Dianna G
I Wish This Was 42
Fictional Worlds
Amen.
~Dianna
Comment by moonglow
A Lot of Scrap
The Wily Wordsmith:Poems, Stories and Creative Scraps
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Comment by Chris Champion
Vyoos
Zoomies
Bloggercises
The Blog of Lists
Newly Old
Money Whither