Profit from your blog
Answers to the questions people ask about 'new' media. By Frances Laing, writer, blogger and journalistArchive for Making money from your blog
What is a blog aggregator?
I’m back. Still alive. Still kicking. Writing a whole series of articles about blogs and blog aggregators. What are they? Read the first article in the series called ‘What is a blog aggregator?’ More to follow.
Loyal readers for your blog – ten tips
The phrase: ‘Practice what your preach’ springs to mind here. Sometimes we know what we should be doing, but haven’t got around to implementing it yet! No matter. Here are ten recommendations:
1. Value your readers. There are lots of different ways of doing this. When someone becomes a follower(on Blogger blogs) - greet them and welcome them aboard.
2. If someone comments on your blog, read the comments – go to their site and see if you have something to say about theirs. Try to stay upbeat and positive.
3. They say a loyal reader is worth hundreds of people who occasionally stop by and don’t spend much time with your site. So make sure you look at reader profiles and write your blog posts with these in mind.
4. If you’re using Feedburner – double check that your settings are enabling this system to do what you want them to do. Do you want to customise your feeds to feature your own logo? Do you want to include advertising in your feeds? Do you want Feedburner to notify you if someone cancels a subscription?
5. Analyse your stats. You might already have a stats analysis tool built into the software you are using.(Word Press has one of these). If you don’t have the right tool, set about installing it. Sitemeter is useful and enables you to analyse where your readers are coming from, how long they are staying and which pages they view. You can also tell which countries your readers are coming from – which is interesting too.
6. Don’t get obsessed by your stats. You need to focus on constantly improving the content and appearance of your blog. If these things are good enough, you’ll get the readers.
7. Don’t forget that carefully chosen adverts can enhance your reader experience. (Even Google Adsense). You may be able to feature adverts for products the reader doesn’t know about yet.
8. Write well and use your spellcheck facility. You don’t want to irritate people.
9. Strive to improve the layout and design of your blog. Get familiar with the basics of web design. Web ‘conventions’ have become ‘conventions’ for a reason. They’re tried and tested techniques to help you help your readers to understand and enjoy what you are writing about. Surprise your readers occasionally. Try to vary your writing style and the ways you post. Learn to use audio and video content.
10. Ask your readers directly to support you and subscribe to your blog. Make it clear to them what this means to you. You don’t ask, you don’t get!
Making money from your blog – I
The question I’m often asked about blogging is: ‘But yes, do you actually make money from it?’ There’s no easy answer to this one. So I’ll ask readers a few questions instead.
What do mean by money? (There’s no such thing as a stupid question!) Is publicity worth anything to you or your organisation? How much is it worth to you? How successful are you at getting your message out to the mainstream media? Do you know anything about the power of what they call viral marketing? Do you want commissions? Do you want to put across some sort of educational message? Do you want to offer advice? Do you want to sell your products? Blogs can help you with all of these issues. If they are done properly. And this, I believe requires quite a high level of skill.
It’s relatively easy to set up a blog. Or to get someone to set one up for you. Off-the-shelf websites such as Blogger and WordPress allow you to do it for free, relatively quickly.
But to keep a blog going over a period of time – to build up a loyal readership or fan base – and to keep producing varied and interesting content is actually REALLY hard work. That’s the reason why most blogs die out within the first month. The blogger hasn’t got the stamina. Or they’ve suddenly realised that creating a basic blog is easy enough. But to create a blog that LOOKS good – stands out from the crowd and perhaps includes VIDEO content as well – you usually need to acquire a whole new set of skills and be in a position to use them at speed.
Failing that, you employ a blogger who can do it for you. And even then, that’s no guarantee of success. I’ve seen some blogs by the Chief Executives of large organisations which are, quite frankly so BORING and uncreative no-one in their right mind would want to read them.
And I haven’t even mentioned the process of building traffic yet – which I will come back to in a later post.
So. That’s the reason why there are so many training programmes in social media and coaching for bloggers right now. You can even study these things in a degree level course at university.
They say that the U.K. is a year ‘behind’ the States in terms of blogging culture. I’ll come back to these issues and look at them in more depth in future posts.
