it can be really easy if you know how to do it!!

2010-12-29T07:54:00.000-08:00

Opportunities in Blogging

Publishing is changing quickly as more and more readers migrate from

paper-based products to electronic media, whether it’s a computer, a

tablet, a mobile device, or an e-reader. Change of this sort always creates

opportunities, and in the last few years it’s become clear that professional

blogging is one of them.

The last decade saw a generation of blogs grow from being side projects

and hobbies, into sites with enormous readerships and real revenues.

Very quickly blogging has become a legitimate publishing business, and

today a survey of the top 100 blogs shows that with a few notable celebrity

exceptions, almost all of them are backed by real publishing businesses.

While today the blogging industry has some very professional outfits

operating, there is still lots and lots of room for the newcomer. To start with,

there are very few household names in blogging. While most people might

recognize and know names like Time, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, there

are significantly less who know Gawker (http://gawker.com), TechCrunch

(http://techcrunch.com), Huffington Post (http://huffingtonpost.com), and

PopSugar (http://popsugar.com), which are just three of the more high

profile sites. There are still many, many people who don’t read online but

who will eventually. These folk mean that blogging is an industry with a

lot of growth ahead of it, and growth is good for business and good

for newcomers.

Opportunities in blogging also arise from the many niches and topics

that are still wide open. If you walk into any bookstore and look through

the myriad magazines that line the racks, you’ll find there are audiences

interested in reading about everything from sewing to tattoos, boating to

cooking, movies to shopping. Can you name the blog to read on tattoos?

How about a great blog about boating? Think you can find one?

Moreover, for every niche that is big enough to sustain a real paper

publication, there are dozens more that are too small for print but big

enough online. Where the distribution costs are small and even nil,

distributed groups can be clumped together to form real audiences, and

bloggers have access to audiences that have never really counted before:

the so-called “long tail.”

As was often touted during the dotcom boom, the internet is a great

equalizer. The difference between one domain name and another is just

a few keystrokes. And while you shouldn’t read too much into this (after

all, people have to know your domain name to type it in), it is worth

remembering that a new voice in blogging can quickly catch on.

Of course because blogging is so accessible, it’s a tempting first business to

get into. There is a perception that it’s a zero-cost set-up, and in some ways

that’s true. You can start a new blog with not much more than a domain

name and a cheap-as-chips hosting account. This is certainly a claim that

you could never make about, say, starting a magazine or newspaper, where

the physical costs of making and distributing the product can be prohibitive.

What isn’t so obvious, is that to build a blog that is self-sustaining and

eventually profitable, does require cash, and it can be a significant amount

at that. For as easy as it is to start a blog, it is still hard to produce

consistent levels of content, to acquire traffic and readership, and to

ultimately generate revenue. While thousands of blogs may open their

proverbial doors every day, the funnel of survival can be harsh and many fall

into disrepair very quickly.

For hobby bloggers, the costs of operating a blog are hidden in the

blogger’s own time. They do the posting, the marketing, and all the other

chores of running a blog themselves, effectively eating the costs by doing

it in their spare time. But make no mistake, those costs are there and if you

want to approach blogging with a business mindset, you need to account

for them all.

On the flip side, by looking at blogging as a business, you also bring

the longevity that blogging needs to succeed. While hobbyists and less

organized competitors fall by the wayside, your operation will keep chipping

away, building audiences, growing search traffic, creating a bigger and

bigger content archive. In many ways, blogging is an endurance race,

requiring a lot of momentum to build up to become a true success story.

So building a business out of blogging, like any business, involves

investment both in time and money. The questions you want to ask are:

What costs need to be accounted for? Where will the revenue come from?

How long will it take? Along with these high-level business questions, you’ll

also be wondering about the practicalities of running a blog as a business,

planning direction, finding and hiring staff, creating content, and marketing.

In this book I aim to answer all these questions as well as to give you a

practical, hands-on guide to building a business out of blogging. Like

any business, it will take hard work, dedication, savvy, and a bit of luck.

As someone who has built a number of blogs, I hope reading through my

experience and methods will help you find your path to success.

Risk and Reward

Every business investment comes with risk and certainly blogging is no sure

thing. The risks in creating a business out of blogging include:

1. Choosing a Low Potential Niche

Perhaps the biggest risk you run is creating the wrong blog. If you start a

blog in a niche that has limited potential either because of the audience,

the competition, or the revenue potential, then you create a significant

impediment to success. You can shift the blog, reinvent it, invent a new

way of finding revenue, trounce the competition somehow, or grow the

topic’s audience ... or you can choose a niche with strong potential to

begin with! We’ll deal with selecting a niche in the next chapter.

2. Not Producing a Popular Product

Assuming you’ve picked a good niche to blog in, you still run the risk of

producing a bad product. Maybe you hire the wrong staff, maybe you

don’t figure out what sort of content people want, or maybe you get the

frequency of publishing wrong. There are plenty of factors that go into a

good blog. The best way to learn about them on an instinctive level, is to

read and think about other blogs in your spare hours over a reasonably

long period of time. You’ll also get to read about what goes into hiring

and content in later chapters.

3. Competition

Every business has competition of one sort or another. It might be other

blogs or it might be traditional media. If your business grows beyond

blogging, then it might simply be other service providers. Competition

vies for audience, for revenue, and ultimately for dominance. Even if

you scope out a niche very thoroughly and deduce that there is little

competition, you can never account for the competition that is sitting in

a garage somewhere plotting and planning their strategy for domination.

Aside from thorough research, the best defense is to be on guard all the

time, to always be looking for ways to be the best, and to think about

ways to differentiate your product from your competitors.

4. Running Out of Capital

The simple reality of business is that in the beginning you will burn

through your cash with little or no return. Later in this book, you can

read about three case studies from my own experience where you will

see that each blog took many months of losses before hitting break

even, and that one set is in fact still burning through cash!

To combat this you’ll need to make sure you have a reasonable amount

of capital to begin with. You’ll also need to look for ways to get some

revenue as fast as possible to help slow the losses. You’ll need to

constantly evaluate whether you are on the right track, whether you can

save money somehow, and how much longer you can last.

5. Market Conditions

No one can control the broader market conditions. At this point in time,

blogging looks to be a good bet with lots of growth potential and more

and more advertising moving online. Whether this is true, whether it

lasts, who knows? The most important thing is to keep your finger on

the pulse. Stay up to date with tech blogs, advertising blogs, blogs

for bloggers and publishers, and stay informed. If you feel a change in

market conditions coming, adjust your business plan to compensate.

If you think there are lean times ahead and you are low on capital, pull

back on your plans. Conversely, if you think there’s a boom coming in a

particular niche, then you might ramp up to take advantage of it.

While blogging is not without its fair share of risks, there are also

plenty of rewards. First and foremost is the satisfaction of running a

successful publication. Watching your readership grow, seeing

comments and discussion happening on your site, hearing from readers

who enjoy the site, and seeing link-backs from sites you respect are all

incredibly rewarding.

On a monetary level, a blog business can grow very large. One of the earliest

blogging companies, Weblogs Inc, which included powerhouse blogs like

Engadget (http://engadget.com) and TUAW (http://tuaw.com), sold for a

reported $25m to AOL in 2005. Another high-profile sale occurred in 2007

when environmental blog Treehugger (http://treehugger.com) sold for $10m

to the Discovery Network.

While a big sale to a listed company isn’t on the books for every blog, it’s

certainly possible to do well purely on operating profits and revenue. In

the case studies in this book, you’ll read about two blogs that I’ve worked

on which have been fortunate enough to hit profitability and turn over

enough cash to grow other businesses and to expand themselves to bigger

revenues and larger audiences.

In fact, later in this book we’ll look at how a blog can not only become very

successful in its own right, but can also become the engine that drives new

businesses such as blog networks, apps, services, or products like books

and job boards.

Planning

Content

While a solid brand and great staff are essential to the success of

your blogging business, it’s the content you publish that brings

visitors back for more, and determines whether or not people

recommend you to their friends and colleagues.

There’s a fine line between content that works and content

that flops, and that means there’s a fine line between success

and failure at any given time in the business of publishing and

blogging. In this chapter, we’ll look at the factors that make web

content succeed.

Writing for the web

People don’t always consciously realize it, but they read on screens

differently from the way they read on paper. When you pick up a printed

book, you read linearly from start to end, word-by-word. On the other hand,

content on the screen is read in bits and pieces and almost never in order.

The typical reader starts by scanning the page to find the content that’s

relevant to their needs. Large paragraphs aren’t easily scanned, so the

focus is on elements that stick out from the rest of the text. These things will

become a big part of your blogging toolkit:

• Headlines

• Subheadings

• Images

• Block quotes

• Pull quotes

• Lists

• Links in the text

Once they’ve determined whether the content is interesting enough to

warrant spending their time on, they might start from the top and read

straight through, but often they’ll find the section that answers their

immediate questions and only hang around as long as it takes to get what

they came for.

Your aim is to get the reader to stick around longer, come back more often,

and become a loyal reader of your blog. To help the reader enjoy your site

and give them more of a reason to keep coming back, you need to change

the way you write and format content.

When a reader scans the page, they are trying to obtain context and locate

information. However, elements that are easily scanned aren’t always

elements that give plenty of context!

For instance, thanks to the bad practices employed by traditional press

such as tabloids, there’s often a focus on making headlines clever or

scandalizing, as opposed to descriptive. This sort of practice seems intuitive

to many beginning bloggers, but it won’t help your readers at all.

• Use headlines that describe the content for the reader and for

search engines. If you can make it clever at the same time, by all

means go ahead!

• Images should represent the content as accurately as possible,

especially if you’re using several images in a piece; as great as images

are for creating visual interest, they should also indicate a change of

focus in the content.

• Pull quotes done properly are very useful. Find the strongest tip or piece

of information in a section and turn it into a large, feature quote so that

it draws the reader in to read the rest of it. Boring or meaningless pull

quotes will lead the reader to the conclusion that there’s nothing useful

in the article as a whole.

• Link sparingly. I recommend no more than three links in a paragraph. It’s

hard to get readers to scan a paragraph, and the more links you include,

the less they’ll draw the reader’s eye to a particular sentence.

Italics and bolding can draw attention to key points. Only use them when

there’s a really important principle to be conveyed, as they can make a

paragraph look quite messy when overused.

We’ll come back to headlines themselves later in this chapter, as they’re

almost as important as the article they represent. In the meantime, keep

scannable content in mind and apply these principles to new content. Also

bear in mind that there’s nothing stopping you from going through older

posts and making them easier to read!

Making Content Valuable

It may seem obvious to you that content needs to be useful and

deliver value in order to become popular, but if you take a look at many

less successful blogs on the Internet, you’ll find they don’t focus on

providing value.

Obscure sites that are useful are usually up-and-comers, while the majority

of less well known blogs simply ignore the fact that the reader needs to gain

some benefit from reading a blog. As a reader, this gives the impression that

the blog doesn’t have a lot to offer and isn’t worth revisiting.

If your blog publishes news-style posts, then the value in content will come

from timeliness and exclusivity. A scoop is an exclusive story delivered at

the right time and is the ultimate in value for this style of blog.

For entertainment sites, the value you deliver must be in the form of

entertainment value whether that is humor, interest, or captivation. Delivering

this type of value can be difficult, but extremely prized when done well.

For educational style blogs, you need to deliver knowledge in a specific

area. You should be drawing on that knowledge to create good, informative

posts to deliver value to your readership.

For opinion-based posts, the value is in the opinions themselves. If you have

an editorial voice that holds interest, a novel angle, a well-articulated view

point or an entertaining voice, then you’re likely to deliver the value that has

readers returning to hear what your take is on a given subject.

Delivering value is possible in all varieties of blogs. It does however take

some practice and structure. A trap that new writers sometimes fall into,

is to end up waffling because they have no plan of attack, but this can be

avoided with the simple use of an outline.

Outlining

Start by writing your introduction and coming up with a headline. This is a

very useful technique used by professional writers and journalists all over

the world. You’d only need to leave the start to last if you don’t know where

you’re going in the first place, and that approach doesn’t work well in the

blogging world. Having a headline and introduction means you have a clear

purpose for the post and are less likely to fall into the trap of waffling.

Continue by outlining the major points you’d like to cover as sections, and

even paragraphs, if you want to break it right down. If it’s an opinion-based

piece, you might outline your thought process to lead the reader down a

particular train of thinking. If it’s a news piece, you’ll want to focus on lead

facts followed by supporting information.

For educational or opinion-based content, each point you’re making (or each

step, in the case of tutorials) will usually have two components. You make

your point in clear language, and then you demonstrate it. Use anecdotal

examples, case studies, links to someone else’s work, or images and

diagrams to show how the concepts you’re discussing are used in real life.

Publishing articles and tutorials is mostly one-way communication, so the

reader can’t ask questions and get clarification from you the way they would

in a conversation or class. The examples should demonstrate the point with

the goal of making it totally clear.

Outlines can help you determine the overall structure of a post before

committing to the more time consuming task of fleshing it all out.

Editing

As a blogging business entrepreneur, there’s a good chance you’ll be editing

the work of other writers, at least until you have the capital to hire an editor

to take care of the writers and their output. Hopefully you’ve been careful

about who you hire and your writers are top-notch, but some degree of

editing is always necessary, even if the content is great and you just need

to make some changes so it works with the goals of your site or is more

web-friendly.

Editing is a complicated profession, but there are two principles of editing

that I find help professionals and beginners alike.

1. Writers may be precious about their

words, but you shouldn’t be.

Don’t be afraid to make changes, cut chunks of text, or add content you

feel is missing (or better still, have the writer go back and add it for you).

Content, generally speaking, should be as sharp as possible and make for

easy, non-repetitive reading. On the web, there’s not a whole lot of room

for waffle.

But let’s be clear: anecdotes, interesting points, and anything that augments

the main point the author is trying to make is not necessarily waffle that

needs to be cut. It adds depth and dimension to the piece, and makes for

more interesting reading than totally spartan content. Try to make what’s

already there as readable as possible, and don’t cut things out until you can

identify why it should go.

2. Read the article before you edit it.

If you don’t, you could end up changing a sentence or cutting a piece of

content that really should be there, but which you won’t realize until you’ve

finished reading the piece and have that “big picture” perspective. Leave a

mark where you wanted to make an edit so you can re-assess it after your

read-through. Leaving a mark and coming back to something you might

want to edit after the first reading is a simple thing to do, but it makes a

difference in the quality of the final product.

As an editor you need to listen to your mind and the subtle feelings that

occur to you as you read (sounds a bit New-Agey, I know). Some editors

spend their time looking for technical flaws that need to be fixed, which is

important, but a good editor approaches the content as a reader as well,

which helps you find places where the flow is broken, even if the language

may be technically correct. If you find a sentence that is jarring or at any

point you need to double back and re-read a sentence, then this could mean

that the content isn’t flowing properly, and you need to edit the phrasing,

tone, and pace of the sentence until it does.

Short of learning all the rules and minutiae of correct language, the thing

that’ll make you a great editor is the ability to identify and rectify even the

most subtly awkward phrasing. Flow is king in retaining reader attention.

Think of content flow like music: listeners get physically and mentally

caught up in a good rhythm, but just one out-of-time beat can lose their

attention altogether.

Style and Tone

Style and tone are hard to measure, but they are factors that will be

important to the success of your blog.

Your content needs to be informative and your headlines need to be

compelling, but it’s still all for nothing if readers feel like the content is

boring, dull, passive, negative, condescending, or any other number of

rather negative adjectives.

Most publications have a fairly unique style and tone. It feels strange when

one of their articles, every so often, fails to capture it. Even when that

publication is staffed by many writers, it still needs to be cohesive.

This is achieved in a few ways:

• Most publications create a style guide or employ an existing one.

• They educate writers on the tone and attitude that the content

should convey.

• They educate writers on the angles and positions that should be

taken on any particular issues important to the publication and its

target audience.

• They ensure that editors do whatever it takes to bring content in line

with the publication’s style and tone.

• They ensure that editors provide writers with feedback on all aspects of

their work, including issues of style and tone.

How to Create a Working Blog

it can be really easy if you know how to do it!!