Making money by blogging

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Making money by blogging - Bloggercises

The exhausted blogger

June 5th 2009 05:58

My huge following of fans, and I'd like to thank both of you, constantly asks me to write more in the way of advice for people in small business.

I have always wanted to work for myself — to be answerable to no-one and reliant on nothing except my own skills and determination and will to wrestle with procrastination and win. It's been a lifelong dream and, showing an aptitude and canny understanding for business practices, I waited until 2009 and the world's greatest economic miasma to launch my company.

After four months, however, we here at Salient Point corporate blogging services have survived. Leaders of MBA courses at the world's elite universities ring regularly to learn our secrets, and the police watch constantly, convinced that anyone prospering in this business environment must have friends in the underworld.

They are all destined for disappointment, for my success is due to honest endeavour, and I have decided to reveal the secret for that success right here, exclusively to you.

I have found that the secret to business success is hard work. By hard work, I mean that, first, one must cut back drastically on the time spent playing Freecell and, second, one must write at least eight blog posts a day.

Do you find this figure shocking? Let me tell you that I do, and as fellow bloggers I'm sure you do too. I thought a blogging services consultancy would be like writing a few fun posts for Orble except people pay you for it. Instead, and this is the hard thing to grasp, running this business is more like a full-time job.

I need a holiday.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Blogging, Corporate blogs, Making money by blogging, Salient Point

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Is blogging the future of everything?

May 28th 2009 08:10

A few weeks ago I wrote a post here entitled "Will blogging rule the world?" It evoked a lot of discussion, and I have found myself thinking about the question ever since. This opinion piece is the result, looking at changes that the digital age and, in particular, blogging, may bring to many things that we now take for granted. It is the first of a two-part series, with the second instalment to cover media, publishing and opinion leadership.

--- oOo ---

Is blogging the future of news, publishing and the world?

To borrow from Mark Twain, reports of the death of newspapers and books have been greatly exaggerated. The world wide web was supposed to finish them off, but it has not done the job any better than radio or television before it.

As part of the Innovations in Newspapers 2009 World Report, released on April 29, Rupert Murdoch wrote that he was optimistic about the future of newspapers, and warned that complacency, rather than new forms of media technology, was the threat. Newspapers that continue to succeed in the digital age will do so, Murdoch said, by developing their traditional relationships with readers, no matter how they are delivered.

"Our success will still depend on the bond of trust between readers and our content, not on how many platforms we use."

Blogging is part of the social media revolution. MySpace and Facebook popularised it, LinkedIn corporatised it, and Twitter is heading into outer space with it. According to Australian futurist and University of Sydney associate Mark Pesce, social media heralds the start of a truly fundamental change, and one most companies have yet to grasp.

"Power flows in large organisations will change," Pesce says. "All their processes and marketing and advertising will change. Business as we thought of it over the 20th century made it to about 2007 and then started to shudder.

"The wheels came off, and the thing that comes out in 2010 or 2012 looks quite different. The power flows in business and how they're talking to customers is all changed."

Pesce sees three waves of change: the sharing of media, the sharing of knowledge and the sharing of power. The first two are "well under way" he says. The third thing, the sharing of power, is the "chasm that we've started to cross right now".

At first glance, the views of Murdoch and Pesce may seem opposed — the newspaper magnate arguing that there's life in the old way, and the futurist who doesn't bother mentioning newspapers at all. There is, however, a common theme, and it is perhaps the one theme to bind the old and the new; the way that news will be presented in future no matter what medium is used for the delivery.

The theme is engagement. It is what Murdoch meant by relationships, and it is the basis of Pesce's motif of sharing. In the new, digital, sharing world of news, the Letters to the Editor column has been promoted to the front page.

Social media is built on a platform of interaction, and engagement is the step up from there for any commercial application — selling anything from news to real estate to widgets which will net you 1,000 new Twitter followers per day.

Among the glittering young actors on the social media stage, the standout engagement star is the blog.

In the run-up to the US presidential election on November 4, 2008, the most read political commentary in America was a blog. Nielsen Online reported that The Huffington Post gained "the most unique readers among all outlets on a list of top 30 news destinations in October (2008)", ranking it ahead of news portals such as CNN. The Huffington Post had about 8 million readers during the election campaign, became the most linked-to blog on the Web. In January 2009, it was valued at about US$200 million.

Go to its web site today and what you see is a newspaper, future style. It looks like an online newspaper, and it reads like a newspaper, but there are two big differences with the online presences of mainstream papers such as The New York Times.

The first difference is The Huffington Post's Blogger Index tab. Click on that and a world of blogs opens, pretty much every one of them written by politicians, well-known political commentators or experts in some field or other. Many of these blogs have daily readerships in six figures, and those that don't will have just as soon as the blogs have been around a little longer and the search engines have a firmer hold. If your blog is accepted for The Huffington Post site, you are virtually guaranteed of that kind of success.

The Huffington Post has evolved from a blog to Blog Central when it comes to American politics and social issues.

The second difference is that The Huffington Post employs approximately 50 staff, an astonishingly small number for a $200 million company. Its blog writers and news gatherers don't work for The Huffington Post — they work for themselves and sell their expertise and views.

There is a telling third difference — at least there was today when we checked — which is that The Huffington Post web site was carrying an advertisement for The New York Times, but we could see no Post ad over at the Times site.

This post appeared first on the Salient Point blog by Chris Champion. Image: "The History of Writing", by Henry Noel Humphreys, 1810-1879; first published in London in 1853 by Ingram, Cooke and Co.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Blogging, Making money by blogging, Social media, Writing

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Will blogging rule the world?

April 15th 2009 04:34

the future of journalism - big call! although maybe thats what people are crying out for, more conversational, interactive news . . . something that a telecaster in a box cant provide maybe thats what people are crying out for, more conversational, interactive news. something that a telecaster in a box cant provide

Morgan Bell wrote the above comment in response to a quote on an earlier Bloggercises post by Mary Jo Foley, the widely known and read author of the All About Microsoft blog. Foley said, "For me, the future of journalism is blogging."

Morgan makes a good point, and we have only to look at the online versions of the major newspapers, where every news story has a box under it inviting comments, to see the trend.

As Morgan also said, Foley's statement is a big call. However, if blogging can be the future of publishing, and I think there's a strong argument that it can, then why can't it be the future of journalism? The Huffington Post was the most-read blog in the world during the US election campaign. It provided pure journalism and it was read by numbers which would leave some daily newspapers green with envy.

I think it's easy, in judging the present and the future of blogging, to think in terms of the millions of ordinary blogs rather than in terms of the thousands of extraordinary blogs.

Another thing which needs to be appreciated in judging the power and the future of blogging is the rapidly growing presence of blogging in the corporate world. Billions of dollars are spent every year on marketing, and blogging is the shooting star in the marketing firmament. When one appreciates that a blog can achieve everything that public relations can achieve, only better and with more accurate feedback, and that a blog can achieve everything that advertising can achieve, except much, much, much more cheaply, then things appear in a different perspective. (For those interested, read more on corporate blogging at Salient Point.)

Back in the publishing arena, consider this: newspapers are declining and blogging is growing. Every day, fewer people are making a living in newspapers, and more people are making a living from blogging. Will blogging ever catch up? I see no reason why not.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Blogging, Corporate blogs, Making money by blogging, Salient Point

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Dear Mr Google, please explain

March 23rd 2009 23:02

Just when I thought I was coming to terms with the slippery slope of AdSense methodology, I uncover evidence that everything I thought I knew may have to be discarded.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: AdSense, Blogging, Making money by blogging

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AdSense and other questions

March 21st 2009 07:48

AdSense can be confusing, and after a reasonable amount of research there is still much I don't know. However, I can offer the following. It's not the full story, but I'll aim to answer some common questions.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: AdSense, Blogging, Making money by blogging

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Blogging is fun. Big blogging is business.

February 1st 2009 01:21

This article will propose that blogging can generate a moderate or better income for any qualified person - no secrets, no luck, no scams, no magic potions required.

The key word, however, is "qualified". Success takes patience, talent and hard work. The hard work is especially important for the first two years or so when the blog will generate little income

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Blogging, Making money by blogging

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Can blogs make serious money?

January 31st 2009 01:56

Heather Armstrong, author of the Dooce blog

Blogs can make serious money, and many already do. There are now serious blog tracking and ranking services which show that many people are writing blogs which attract tens of thousands of individual readers a day.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Blogging, Making money by blogging

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The dark days of building blog traffic

January 27th 2009 00:43

I know the frustration of waiting for blog stats to grow. Unless you're Hugh Jackman announcing a new personal blog featuring daily shots of your underwear collection, there is no escaping a slow build-up of blog traffic. That is because it is all about search engine visibility, and that takes time.

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