Advice for Fresh Bloggers
Some tips for starting your own blog.
I received an email from an Austin resident who came across my blog the other day. He stated “I’m looking for a way to make a modest, full-time living as a blogger” and he wanted to know if I’d ever written any advice on doing this.
I don’t think I have. I don’t pretend to be TechCrunch, HuffPo, or anything like that. But this blog does generate six figures in ad revenue a year, which is a nice goal.
I’ll also preface my advice by saying this blog generates income primarily from advertising. If you have another service or product to sell then some of this might not apply.
Here’s my advice:
Technical
– Use WordPress. Using any other blog tool is suicide.
– Host your own copy of WordPress and do it on your own domain name. I have a friend who started with the hosted WordPress.com. His blog became quite successful and then he started to understand the limitations of the hosted platform. He transitioned to his own WordPress installation and domain name, but it took six months for SEO and RSS traffic to recover.
– Use a scalable web host. The first time you get a big link or social media mention you’re server will get clobbered. Following losing out on lots of traffic I finally moved this blog to a dedicated server. Overkill? Sure. But you ought to consider a host such as WPEngine. All they do is host WordPress blogs, and they can scale to handle your traffic spikes. (I don’t use WPEngine so I can’t vouch for it, but they’re located just down the road and are meeting an notable need for bloggers).
Topics
– If you’re in it for the money, pick a topic that will allow you to get direct advertisers. I’m assuming you don’t aspire to be TechCrunch or Huffington Post. That means you’ll have to join ad networks and they’ll pay you like crap. So pick a topic where a) there’s not much ad inventory for the big players in the industry and b) potential advertisers aren’t that big. For example, if your blog covers soda it will be very hard to reach out to Coca-Cola to get them to advertise. If advertisers are smaller and have few options then selling direct will be easy.
– Pick a topic you care regarding. This may be the most notable part. If you aren’t truly passionate regarding what you’re writing regarding then blogging will be like work. And that means you’re destined to fail.
Frequency
– If you start blogging a couple times a day you might burn out. You might start with a few entries a week and scale it up from there.
– Most bloggers burn out following a couple months and stop all together. That’s fine; it just means you aren’t as enthusiastic regarding the topic as you thought. The good news is it costs basically nothing to start a blog.
Getting Traffic
– Write good content and the traffic will come. When I first started blogging I had to beg and plead for links and visits. That’s OK. But the truth is if you write good content people will discover your site and traffic will flow. I know that when people like Matt Cutts say that it sounds like a load of B.S. But it’s true. Write good stuff and people will link to you, sending traffic your way.
– Social media traffic sucks. Remember how I mentioned your first big social media hit will melt your server? It will also send crappy traffic. The average visit to DNW lasts regarding 2 minutes. The typical Reddit visitor spends 5 seconds and YCombinator spends 10 seconds. It’s nice to get the traffic, but realize the quality sucks.
– Don’t jump over a quarter to pick up a dime. There are things you can do early on to get quick traffic at the expense of more traffic down the road. For example, syndicating only snippets through RSS might give you a few more clicks, but you’ll earn more readers in the long run if you syndicate full posts. Another mistake: writing misleading headlines. Following people get duped a few times they’ll never come back.
– Use Twitter. Syndicate your headlines through Twitter, but also make other relevant tweets and retweets.
– It might take you a couple years to build up the audience you want.
Making Money
– Ads may not be the way. See my caveat at the beginning of this post. If you’re a real estate agent your goal might be leads, consultants might want more gigs, etc.
– You have to sell direct if you want to make money with ads. Ad networks won’t pay you enough unless you have an audience the size of TechCrunch.
– Start modest then increase your ad prices. I started with fairly inexpensive prices and raised them as my traffic increased.
So there you have it…my advice. Take it for what it’s worth 🙂
