Blogging

Blogging is another component to my earning strategy. Though I don't expect it to generate a large stream of income, I consider it to be free advertising for my other online endeavors, a way to connect with other people trying to do the same thing I am, and a place to test out what I learn. I know that using Blogger for a monetized blog is considered a bad idea. In fact, almost all of the information I've read about profitable blogging encourages you to stay away from free hosts like this and wordpress.com in favor of your own site. Sound advice, but I decided against it (at least for now) for a few reasons:

• Blogging on your own site, while a nice idea to drive brand-based traffic, costs money. About $10 for the domain registration, plus monthly hosting fees. I don't have any money to funnel into this enterprise right now, so that's out of the question.
• Even if you have the money for upkeep of your site, you'll need to know some basic HTML or CSS to get it running - or pay someone else to do it. Whether that means hiring a graphic designer or just buying one of the many templates available, it's more money I don't have. I know there are a multitude of free options out there, but if I were paying for a site I'd want it to look as good as possible - and the free templates I've looked at have been largely unattractive.
  
• I kind of like the idea of a bare-bones approach since that also means I have no overhead and can blog purely for enjoyment.  If I were planning to use my blog to draw in clients for an existing business (and therefore affect my livelihood), I'd probably be a lot more concerned about going about it professionally. For right now though, it's more of a fun way to showcase the other things I'm doing for money. If it incidentally earns me more money, wonderful - but I don't expect the blog itself to be the feather in my online-earnings cap.
• I only expect this project to last for 2 years. Even if I gain a large readership, I assume that a lot of those will come based on the countdown involved with my goal. With that taken out of the equation, there may be less reason for them to continue visiting. Why come to my site and read my amateur tips and lousy writing when you could go to Brian Clark or Darren Rowse any of the other experts out there?  At that point, my domain and hosting costs would just be for vanity's sake - but with Blogger, I could keep my content up indefinitely for free.

That's not to say I wouldn't love to garner a large enough audience (or enough profits) to justify migrating to an independent site.  I'd love to be one of the lucky few who gets to blog for a living.  Setting your own hours, never having to get dressed for work, not having to deal with all the crap that goes along with working at a traditional business - traffic jams, layoffs, water cooler gossip, or (most of all) a boss.  I don't think it'd be a walk in the park by any stretch, but being 100% responsible for your own success still seems nice.  As I said about the successful eHow writers making $1,000 and up every month, knowing there are people out there blogging for a living is inspiring.

I've read that it takes most people at least 1 year to start seeing an upswing in readership and earnings from a blog.  It seems to me that there could be a variety of different reasons for this, or I guess a combination of things.  It makes sense that a year of regular blog posts would lend you more credibility with the reader, and therefore make them more likely to value what you have to say.  Plus, a year gives you a long time to really figure out your "voice" and hit your stride in terms of your writing style, paragraph layout, etc..  Little tweaks like those over time may help teach you what does or doesn't attract readers.  In my case, I hope that this first year will give me time to better understand my subject matter.  Right now I'm very passionate about what I'm learning about the different aspects of online money making and business strategies.  But that passion is all I've got - no formal training or education, no proven track record, not even a full understanding of what I'm talking about since I'm so new to this.  I'm hoping that after a year I'll at least be beyond the novice stage, and can begin to really offer my readers valuable content instead of just dorking out about how this or that works.

Another point of consideration in building a popular, profitable blog is in the hands of the search engines.  I'm still very fuzzy on how a lot of this works, but as I understand it your search engine "page rank" and visibilty improves based on how many unique visitors you receive.  I know having links to your site from more popular ones helps somehow too, but again I don't quite understand the equation.  Things like proper keywords and page titles help you get seen for the "right" searches, but receiving a certain number of visitors pushes you up the search results.  I don't know if who gets the #1 spot for any given search is based on the number of views that page has already received, or a level of "trust" in that content provider based on their site's rank, or what.  I assume that with a larger subscriber base, unique views to your site would go up - but I am not sure if your subscriber count itself improves your visibility.

This may be inaccurate too, but I've read that if your blog is through a free host (Blogger, TypePad, etc), Google will only index and rank a few of your pages - therefore keeping you at the bottom of all but the most obscure search results.  I don't know if it's possible to have a free blog with a high search engine visibility, but I certainly can't think of any off the top of my head.  That's one issue that makes me question if a free blog is such a great idea after all, but sinking $50 or more into a domain and hosting for a year still isn't something I feel prepared to do right now.

I've already accepted the fact that I'll probably never make any money with my blog.  If that's the case, it doesn't necessarily matter if I'm pulling in more viewers from search engines.  That seems to be a way to generate more money after you've already become financially successful with your blog to some degree.  I'm hoping to generate views more from the back-end I guess - having viewers find me not through search engines, but through word of mouth and other ways of linking to my content.  I could be going about that all wrong too - but if I'm not expecting to earn with this blog either way, does it really matter?

This post wound up being a way bigger mouthful than I thought it would be.  That's kind of how the range of information about blogging has proved to be too.  Initially, I thought it was a pretty straightforward sort of thing - you log on, you write about yourself or your dog or whatever your topic is, you log off.  I realized there were sites that could be put under the "blog" category and still be lucrative, but I thought of them as sites rather than blogs.  Maybe it's utilizing that kind of response in the viewer that makes a blog successful?  The more I learn, the more involved blogging seems to be.  Hopefully when I've learned more I can revisit this topic with better strategic information.


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