It’s easy to find blogs that are, for all intents and purposes,
“dead.” Plenty of people feel inspired to start using a blogging service
or a social networking service (especially Twitter), then blow it in
the follow-through; the blog gets a handful of posts, then the user
loses interest in their blog, quits writing new content, loses or never
establishes a reader base, and thus never gets a chance to make money.
With no readers to buy potential products and no readers who might click
on advertisements, the more likely way for bloggers to make money, the
blog does nothing but occupy space, taking up domain names and usernames
that other bloggers might have wanted for their own, more serious
projects.
As a consequence, it’s obviously quite important for
bloggers to do two things: they must both provide a substantial amount
of fresh posts and a wide variety of posts to make money. If a blog
isn’t updated on a regular basis, unless the writer is someone extremely
important (i.e. someone who probably isn’t looking to make their money
from the blog, but from something else they do, like perhaps making
music or acting or writing things that aren’t blog posts), it will very
quickly lose readers, which means less site hits, less traffic, and no
chance of profits.
Maintaining a steady supply of ideas for posts
can be difficult, but a blog that aims to make money likely has a
pre-established focus, such as cooking, music, pets, or something
similar. You thus want to diversify your portfolio within the world of your umbrella topic as much as possible.
Cover aspects of your topic of focus that put you one foot within the
familiar and one foot outside your comfort zone; if you write about
cooking, for example, find a trend or a culinary technique that you and
your readers might not be intimately knowledgeable about and familiarize
yourself – and your audience – in the process. If you have a
pre-established audience, you might be able to get sponsor assistance
through this coverage, helping both you and your advertiser further each
other’s goals.
Your comments section might also help you find inspiration for new posts.
If your blog is assaulted with ad hominem attacks, you’re probably not
going to get much long-term success out of having a meltdown on your
blog, but if you have insightful, engaging regular commenters who ask
questions of you – or make you curious about something – address the
commenter’s question or comment in its own post and elaborate upon it.
It’ll expand your own field of knowledge and expertise, but it does
something else: it will quite possibly make that commenter share the
piece written at least partially about them with friends and family,
which will in turn potentially lead to an even bigger reader base.
However,
there’s another approach you can take to the world of professional
blogging, especially if you’re pursuing a book deal; many users
of the microblogging service Tumblr, among other networks, have made
money with one-note-jokes turned into coffee table books, such as Hipster Puppies, This Is Why You’re Fat, and Stuff Hipsters Hate.
These blogs essentially post the same kind of content on a semi-regular
basis – extensions of the one joke almost always explained in the
blog’s title or URL. For these, all you need is a jokey premise that
catches on and enough content to sustain it until it produces enough
content to merit publishing a book, though obviously book deals don’t
magically come to bloggers who decide to use the medium for this.
Both
types of blog writing, however, essentially do the same thing to make
money; they establish an audience, then use that audience to collect
revenue. Audiences are far more prone to read something that continues
to appeal to them and gets updated regularly, and thus a happy medium
between consistency and diversity without compromising quality or
credibility is what’s going to give you results.
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