Entries Tagged 'Blogs and Blogging' ↓

I don’t make a bunch of money from my blog. In fact, if I have $50 a month from affiliate sales in a month, I throw a party.

A very tiny party. Hey, it’s only $50.

Still, my blog is one of the most profitable pieces in my business model. How is that possible?

In short, I get a ton of freelance writing work from my blog. Here’s how:

I get clients through blog-based social networking

One of my biggest clients is one of my blog readers. She followed the blog for a long time, and we eventually struck up some conversations on Twitter. After a while, she trusted me well enough to offer me some writing assignments. For the past several months, I’ve brought in anywhere from one third to one half of my income from this single client.

I use my blog to showcase my best material

When I using a bidding site to compete for freelance writing gigs, the competition can be pretty fierce. After an initially strong run on one particular site, we saw our bid acceptance rates drop dramatically. We couldn’t figure out why it happened that way. Eventually, though, we discovered that bids we put in that included a link to The Writing Journey sold better – by a factor of about 5 – than bids that didn’t link to The Writing Journey. This was the case across the board, whether it was for an ebook, blogging, website copy, or even technical writing gigs.

I earn credibility and prestige through my blog

Without The Writing Journey, I probably wouldn’t have a post at Freelance Switch, and almost certainly wouldn’t be a regular at Freelance Folder. I’m not a superstar, by any means. But my blog is strong enough so as to support a reputable presence around the blogosphere. This, in turn, leads to credibility in my writing business.

So, what about you? How do you use your blog to support your freelance writing business?

There are plenty of tips and tricks I could give you about how to get more traffic to your blog.

And there are a lot of folks who can do that a heck of a lot better than I can.

The fact is, however, that getting traffic to your blog is only half of the challenge. Once a reader is on your blog, you’ve got to give them a reason to stay.

There are plenty of things you can do to increase your readership. You can hold a contest, for example, that asks readers to subscribe in order to enter. You can publish an Ebook and offer free to subscribers. These techniques are certainly valid ways to increase your blog readers, and they’ll almost certainly give your blog an immediate subscriber boost.

However, there’s only one thing you can do to guarantee people will come back to your blog again and again:

Write well.

Good writing is the key to successful blogging. Yes, all of those promotional techniques, from social media to article marketing, are important. They get folks to your blog in the first place. But good writing is infinitely more important in the long run. Why?

Good writing is pleasing to read.

According to studies, Internet surfers have horribly short attention spans. If you write poorly, your reader won’t understand what you write and they won’t enjoy it, either. Good blog writing means putting a smile on your reader’s face and getting your message across clearly.

That’s not all, though. There’s more to it. A readable style is only one part of good blog writing.

Good writing connects with the reader.

This concept applies to both the style of your writing and the content of your writing. To keep readers coming back, you have to write in such a way that they feel connected with you. You can’t write above their level, and you can’t write in the third person. In addition, you have to write about something they’re interested in.

Making those sorts of connections with your readers helps to establish a real relationship, one that involves trust. In fact, that brings us to the next point about good writing:

Good writing engenders trust.

There’s quite a bit of talk about “authority” in the blogosphere. Ultimately, authority is really about a trust relationship between you and your reader. You have something to say, and your reader trusts that it is both true and reliable. It really isn’t any more complex than that.

There are many paths to authority, too, regardless of what some of the experts might tell you. Getting readers to trust you starts, however, with your writing. You demonstrate your authority on a topic with good writing.

So, what do you think? Does good writing still matter online?

As you all are well aware, I’m not in the “Make Money Online” blog crowd. Like I said the other day, I blog when I’ve got something I think will be useful to other writers. I write about common mistakes, ways to improve your writing, and even about some of the online writing tools that I use.

I tend to focus on the “how to be a better writer” and “how to be a better freelancer” side of things, rather than “how to make money online.” There are plenty of folks out there who are willing to tell you how to make money online, I don’t need to do it.

Unfortunately, a lot of those folks are little more than charlatans and thieves. There are lots of bad guys, and just a handful of good guys. One of the good guys is Yaro Starak. Yaro’s free Blog Profits Blueprint was in many ways the inspiration for this blog, and is a good part of the reason that this blog is so successful today.

Yaro’s got a new free 30-minute video, just released today, called “Conversion Blogging.” The video focuses on leveraging your blogging efforts into a full-time income. In the video, he talks about how to get away from becoming a “page view slave” who makes pennies a day on their blog, and making a real income.

Obviously, the video is a way for Yaro to introduce you to his blog mentoring program, in the same way that the Blog Profits Blueprint does. But even if you just watch the video and read the blueprint, I promise you’ll find something that’s worthwhile, that you can apply to your blogging efforts. Even if you’re like me and use your blog more to get clients than you do to make money, Yaro’s got plenty of sound ideas about generating blog traffic that you should listen to. On top of that, his ideas about “pillar content” are especially insightful and tremendously useful, particularly if you’re just starting out blogging.

Give it a whirl, and then feel free to come back and let me know what you think about it.

It’s been quiet around here lately. Why is that?

Blogging, for me, isn’t as much about getting thousands of subscribers (although I’m well on my way to four digits as of this morning) and it isn’t even about making a bunch of money (though I do get some affiliate sales through products I recommend and some clients through my services page).

For me, this blog is about helping you achieve your dreams.

When I first started blogging, I was of the mind that I needed to post every day. In fact, on my gaming blog, I was posting two or three times a day.

That turned out to be a bit pointless. It didn’t help me get subscribers, and it didn’t make me any money.

So, with The Writing Journey, I’ve tried all along to only post when I’m inspired. That means, sometimes, creating a series that inspires me to keep going, like the gong series or the food series.

At other times, it means the blog sits silent, like it has for the past week.

Life gets in the way of blogging, and sometimes you send all your inspiration elsewhere for a few days.

What’s my point here?

Simply this: while I have some feelings of regret for not having posted in a week, they are more to do with the interaction I get with my readers in the comments section than anything else.

I don’t do the “sorry I haven’t posted in a week” bit. While I understand what prompts folks to make those posts, it also comes off as egotistical. While I believe you will benefit every time I post, fact is that your writing career isn’t going to go down the tubes because I don’t blog for 7 days.

I’m not particularly worried about not having posted for a week.I’ve never unsubscribed from a blog because they didn’t post enough (unless it was a month between posts). I have unsubscribed when they continually post filler material, however.

There are varying schools of thought on posting frequency. For myself, I tend not to worry much about it. You all keep coming back, even when I’m gone for a few days. For that, I’ll say “thank you,” and try to return the favor by posting more frequently the next week. Not out of obligation or fear, but because I want to interact with you and because I genuinely want to help you achieve your dreams.

photo credit: tomsaint11

I’m in my fifth month here at The Writing Journey, so I suppose it’s time to reflect a bit. Five months isn’t that long, unless you consider the fact that the vast majority of blogs fold by the end of their third month. So, I’m tickled to still be here in month five, and I both excited and humbled by the success I experience here.

I get asked, on a fairly regular basis, questions about blogging, about starting a blog, and about how to run a blog. I take this as a compliment.

One of the most common sorts of questions has to do with starting other blogs. Should the blogger, for example, start a separate blog for each of his interest areas, or should he write about all of those areas in one blog?

I’m not Darren Rowse, so I can’t give you the professional blogger’s opinion on the matter. I can tell you about the journey I’ve taken in blogging, though, and how I got to where I’m at today.

The beginning blogs

I blogged on and off in a casual way for a couple of years before I got serious about blogging. I started a couple of blogs in mid-2003. I updated them sporadically, blogging daily for a week or two and then not posting again for a couple of months. These blogs were mostly personal, and aimed more at communicating with my friends and family more than anything else. There’s nothing wrong with those blogs, if that’s what you want. But that sort of blog isn’t going to build a large base of readers.

Getting serious about blogging

You would think that, as a professional Internet writer, I’d have started blogging sooner. Truth is, I was perfectly happy writing my web content. My clients weren’t looking for bloggers, so I didn’t feel the need to blog.

When I first got serious about blogging, I ran five different blogs – all in different interest areas. It was too much to keep on top of, even devoting a portion of my workday. Unfortunately, none of them were really growing.

The Writing Journey

Somewhere along the way I discovered the Blog Profits Blueprint. I’ve raved about this document elsewhere, so I won’t bother doing it again here. Suffice it to say that Yaro’s words inspired and motivated me in a big way.

Among other things, Yaro helped me to figure out that I was spreading myself way too thin. I needed to focus my energies in on making just one great blog.

That’s when I started The Writing Journey. I found myself spending more and more time on WJ, and less time on my other blogs. Within a month or so, I’d stopped updating my other blogs.

That’s when WJ really started to grow. And it’s grown exponentially since then. Every day I have a new record number of RSS subscribers. I firmly believe that wouldn’t be the case if I’d tried to keep all 5 blogs going. I also don’t think it would be the case if I’d tried to combine all of the different interest areas into one. The more focused I become on my topic, the better the blog does.

I picked back up my gaming blog around a month ago. I’ve been updating it regularly and applying what I’ve learned about promoting blogs at The Writing Journey to that blog. It’s growing faster now than it ever has, too. But The Writing Journey is still my flagship, and it’s where I devote the lion’s share of my blogging time.

The short answer

So, the short answer to the question is this: in my experience, focusing on a single blog with a single niche creates the best scenario for success. Once that blog is humming along, add another if you have the time. Don’t neglect the first one, though, and if you have to choose between them, stay with the first.

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Many of you readers have been at the blogging game much longer than I have. What would you add to the discussion of running multiple blogs?