|
Before you start to write a blog, you should
seriously consider the topic you're going to cover on it. Lots of different
blogs offer information on the technical aspects of blogging as a business:
these are mostly people from the IT and advertising worlds who are very good
at understanding concepts like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), keywords,
traffic, and ad revenue.
These blogs-- which can be found by a simple
search engine that will provide you with more how-to articles than you can
ever read in a lifetime-- are geared towards the business-minded
individually who will see blogging, first and foremost, as a business. This
has been my essential problem when looking for advice on how to start a blog
for profit: On the one hand, I've enjoyed dozens of blogs over the last
decade that both engaged me as a reader and reportedly have made a
significant income for their creators.
The thing that drew me into blogs like
dooce.com, Daily Dish, DailyKos, or Awesome Zara had nothing to do with my
perception of their business models, and that's one of the trickiest parts
of starting such a successful blog. The interest I had in any of these blogs
was their engaging content. Dooce.com, for instance, was started by a
graphic designer who was frustrated with her job working for a PR firm in
Utah. She set up the blog essentially as a way to vent her frustrations
about her job, and gained such a following that her boss fired her for it.
Within a year, Armstrong was able to leverage
revenue created on her blog-- where she chronicled her struggles with
depression over losing her job, coupled with the stress of being a new
mother-- into covering the costs of the mortgage she and her husband had
previously been paying through each of their jobs. While it's true that
Armstrong had knowledge of the tricks and blips to keep her site going
without having to invest in it herself, what drew me and countless others
into her readership was her ability to tell storie4s about her life that
kept us wanting to read more. Daily Kos' unique community of people, while
they seem to share a certain political perspective that gained massive
popularity during the end of the Bush years, has much the same draw: at the
root of it, the writing on both of these sites is what increases their
traffic and keeps me as a loyal reader.
Both of these sites are centered around strong,
unique content. In Armstrong's case, she found a passion in juggling the
duties of being a mother and being a businesswoman with a flair that caught
on among the circles of women who found reflections of themselves in her
story, which she told with such a dizzyingly honest and abrasive tone that
she kept the readership entertained and concerned about her. In the case of
Daily Kos, the writers there all had significant and topical things to say
about the way the bush administration was running our country into the
ground, they marketed their viewpoints through networking, and have since
become one of the go-to sources of political blogging on the web.
They key to these blogs' successes was
primarily a matter of the passion with which their contributors told their
stories and expressed their viewpoints. So while , yes, technical notions of
how to optimize on popular themes and incorporate them into your blog are
important, the first step to starting a blog for profit is finding something
about which you're passionate that you think others can be passionate about,
too.
Want to
Make More Money By Blogging?
Learn how to make more money with your
blog. Get a step-by-step tutorial on creating a highly profitable blog,
Click Here. |
|