You all know how it is: you hear in the blogosphere about making money from blogging. Then you find and read thoroughly the major league: the Problogger.net and JohnChow.com; and then you make up your mind: "I'm going to do that too. If they can make it, so can I".
And then, you go and read Darren's list of newbies tips, and John's ebook. But you decide that you're not ready to pay for the blog yet - after all, you're just trying out, right? So, you sign on Blogger or Wordpress, just to save a $100, but you do register domain, because everyone agrees that it is the most important thing you should start with.
And then you start posting. At the beginning, you're on fire. Finding everything you can on the net, posting like a crazy. But, for some reason, stats do not go up. Then you say to yourself, "well, maybe no one really reads what I write", and you post less and less. And then, no one really reads your blog.
Such a state of things would probably describe most of new bloggers (and that would include myself as well). The idea of making money out of blog is very attractive, but many do not succeed at making enough for cup of coffee. Why is it so?The main reason is that many newcomers start with the obsession over statistics and the idea of earning the same money that big shots do. They check visits every few hours, they check how much cents they've made out during those hours. They put many ads into the blog, and wait until money and readership would thrive. Big mistake!
So, here's the list of things required to make any blog successful:
- Create an interesting content
But there are more things that I'm doing for my blog:
- Listen more to Darren from ProBlogger and John from John Chow. These guys apparently know what they're doing.
- Less is more: that recent post on ProBlogger made by Skellie from AnyWired, is really a good one. I decided to post not more 4 technology-related posts a week, including posts regarding the process of building the blog itself. In addition, I removed some advertisers which didn't bring anything in a long while, and just made a bad impression for being there.
- Stop caring about statistics. Don't check it every few minutes. Its a stressful action: you wait, it doesn't rise up, you panic, you loose motivation. Just stop doing it. In 10 minutes you checking for statistics, you could have an outline for a new post.
I only have to remember that myself :-)
6 Comments:
I totally agree! In fact I removed all advertising from my blog - even the entrecard stuff ;-). I still check my stats once a day, but I stopped caring about it that much. In fact my recent reader count provided by feedburner dropped from 50+ to 30 since yesterday! A couple of month back I would have freaked out because of that ;-).
Chimeric - I wouldn't put that much into Feedburner.
While it a nice metric (especially for the ego) it's jumps in a numbers are quite erratic.
I had once a jump from 10 to 70 and back to 20 in 3 days.
But I don't care that much anymore, just as you...
Personally I can't stand blogs that are obviously about "blogging". I don't read any blogs like that. The best blogs are completely unpretentious and just sort of rants about some interesting subject that happens to be interesting. Nothing about "making it" in the blog world or "blogging regularly" or methodical stuff. I don't like the whole blogging subculture at all, I just like the idea of blogs as a personal outlet for whatever it is you might want to express on a given day.
I agree with you Martin. Its getting to a point where its sickening. Its like if you can't get a job then what do you do? Well, you get other people a job.
Thanks for putting it in a well written, concise post. :D Great example!
reggysy :-)
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