One of the presentations that I made a point to attend while at BlogWorld Expo 2010 was “Treating Your Blog Like a Business” with David Risley, Lisa Morosky, and Nathan Hangen (and moderated by Jordan Cooper). This topic is especially important in my opinion and where a lot of bloggers seem to fall short. You can blog and blog and blog until your fingers are bloody little stubs and not see a dime from it. If your business model is “blog as much as possible,” you’re not going to be able to afford groceries. Why? Because you’re running a blog, not a business.
“You can’t feed yourself on comments and retweets.” – Nathan Hangen
As these four made abundantly clear at their panel, step one of making more money from you blog is to stop blogging.
Ok, so I’m not suggesting that you never write another post – I don’t think that’s what they meant. However, have you ever noticed that the most successful bloggers don’t post more than once or twice a week? Sure, some have built empires on frequent updating, but I think it’s been more than proven that you don’t need to blog your butt off to have an audience. It’s about quality over quantity.
You need to get away from blogging as a business model and instead think of your blog as just a part of the package. If you blog, you can build a community, but if you have no call to action, does it really matter? Not if you’re trying to pay your rent this way.
So what’s your call to action?
- Support my sponsors
- Buy my product
- Join my private membership community
- Buy stuff through my affiliate links
- Sign up for my mailing list
Or maybe a combination of the above…or something else entirely. The point is this: if your blog is just a blog, not a marketing tool, I’m not sure how you expect to make money. Great, free content is just the first step to making this a viable business. There’s nothing wrong with blogging for the love of writing, blogging to get your ideas heard, etc…but if you want to make money with your blog, realize there’s a lot you need to do beyond writing great posts to make that possible.
Thanks to Jordan, Nathan, Lisa, and David for a great BlogWorld session!
I totally agree. I realized that when I put up an amazon dot com affiliate link and got one hit, (which might have been from me), after several thousand page views.
The ideal method is one to two new articles per week, AND, offer a product or service. That is my goal, to hopefully drive some business to my one of a kind 1 to 3 student sized classes based on my 20 plus years involved in film and video production and editing.
http://www.alexlogic.com
I agree. I think when you’re facing the pressure to blog every single day, your post quality suffers as you strain to just have some content–any content–to put out. I envy those bloggers who can post every day and make each and every post a valuable piece of information, but that’s not the reality for most of us. Especially when blogging isn’t our sole means of income or time focus.
Have more than one blog. Niche blog.
I was just thinking about this when I woke up. Glad I read it, it solidifies my plans.
I think this is true and not true at the same time. Obviously comments and retweets won’t feed your belly (Though it does appease the self-esteem at times haha) but at the same time for a new blogger just starting out they need to blog every single day to build-up their readerships.
And the most successful blogs I have seen personally ( I am relatively new to the blogosphere) like Copyblogger, Problogger and Entrepreneurs-Journey all regularly update almost every day.
Though they now have a lot of their posts done by other people. Which is a cool leverage.
In terms of feeding your belly, I think a combo of all the things you said work well. My plan with my new blog is to have great reviews of affiliate products for one stream of income. And make money off those posts over and over again from sneeze pages, SEO and most importantly from gathering a mailing list from my blog that I can refer every new subscriber back to that post no matter how old it is.
The quantity argument (must be quality as #1) is also in favor of large sums of posts so you can interconnect them (like sneeze pages) to drag new readers or even old ones deeper into your blog and spend more time with you. Building a more and more powerful relationship with the reader (And possibilities of getting retweets constantly for possibly years ahead).
Just my two cents, but thank you for the blog post, I love the title. SUPER eye-catching 🙂
To life,
-Gregory