Ideate

So you want to be a money-making blogger?

by Andrew on 26/11/09 at 4:35 pm
2 comments

On many levels it seems like the ideal job – write a few articles in your pyjamas at home and only leave the house to bank the advertising cheques. But of the literally millions of blogs started every year, almost all of them end in a pitiful death of outdated posts and no visitors.

We started this blog 4 years ago after launching Bug Zapper in a weekend and wanting a place to write about it. We now run 4 blogs (Business Funnies, Heavy Chef, Yuppiechef Blog and Ideate), and amazingly they have reached profitability, and we even employ an editor. That only really happened this year, and here are some of the puzzle pieces that we finally put together to get it working:

1) Balance strategy and writing

For a long time we believed that spending an hour “blogging” meant spending an hour “writing”. We wrote until our fingers bled, lost motivation for a while, felt guilty, renewed efforts for a few more weeks. Rinse. Repeat. The fact that this was a blog about business and it wasn’t making any money made us feel even worse!

Earlier this year we got together with another blogger and chatted about our trade, and he said that the key was spending an hour or two on your blog every single day. “Aha,” we sighed, “I knew we weren’t spending enough time writing.” There came a surprised look on his face, “What do you mean writing? I’m saying you’ve got to spend an hour or two every day on the business of your blog.” We learnt then that if your life dream is to be paid just to write, get a job as a journalist at a magazine. If you want to get paid to blog you’ve got to see it as a business, which means you are more than just a journalist. We now try and spend an hour a day “blogging”, but that is mostly made up of:

-    Researching relevant, strategic articles to write about, instead of just jumping in
-    Making advertising sales
-    Analysing statistics to see what we’re doing right and wrong
-    Participating in the community (reading other blogs, commenting, linking, Tweeting)
-    Maintaining a posting calendar (see the next point)

Almost immediately after spending time on activities like this our traffic increased, advertising revenue increased, and “blogging” became fun again.

2) Consistency trounces quality

Even though we shifted our focus from writing to strategy, a key strategy was making sure that posting happened consistently. A lot of readers don’t even know they’re reading a “blog”, and they’re certainly not subscribing with an RSS reader (a what?). If they fire up your website in their browser every day and there’s new content they’ll keep coming back. If they visit a few times and it’s stuck on last week’s post, they’ll stop coming. Simple.

I’m not suggesting that you can write rubbish, but if writing one 5-page monstrosity sucks the life out of you for the next week, then you need to switch strategies. Over the years we’ve proved time and again that posting daily increases readership, while less often than that decreases readers. This month we’ve upped to 2 posts a day and our traffic has risen 20%.

3) Don’t go it alone

Posting every day is not easy, and getting a little help from friends can make all the difference. The simplest way of getting help is to ask other bloggers if they would write a “guest post” on your blog. This exposes them to your audience, and it gives you a break for a day. You’ll also find good writers who don’t want to start their own blog, but will happily write regularly on your blog in return for what it does for their personal profile. When things start going really well you can consider employing a part-time writer/editor to focus on the content while you focus on the business.

4) Stick to a theme

If you think “Branding” is something that only McDonalds and Apple have to worry about, you’re wrong. With millions of other blogs out there, yours has to have a reason to exist, and if you’re writing about your cat, the latest nano-technology breakthrough, the new James Bond movie, and “7 tips for great Photoshop techniques”, it’s going to be hard to build your brand and claim a spot in your readers’ minds.

We decided that Ideate was going to focus on Business, with a slant towards smaller businesses wanting to grow, and a South African flavor. That means that every article, including when we rant about Telkom, celebrate a local startup, or dip our toes into politics, always has some sort of relevance to “Entrepreneurs Thinking BIG”.

5) Get ready for the long-haul

I loved the blogging storyline in the new movie, Julie & Julia. Julie had been writing for a couple of months, wondering if anyone was reading, when suddenly a comment was posted. She let out a whoop and bragged to her colleagues, before realising that the commenter was her mom who had written, “Why are you wasting your time with this Blogging project?”

Starting a new blog takes month after month of writing to an imaginary audience before a real audience arrives. You’ve got to keep going.

Perhaps the most complete guide to profitable blogging is ProBlogger.net. We highly recommend the many resources and articles posted there.

Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew.

Tags: blogging

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