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[WARNING: Expect elements of tongue-in-cheek humor and a couple of lessons learned along the way...It could be a bit of a 'lessons learned' thread and 'how i screwed up and still managed to do alright' type of thread...]
...So you would think that as a technology journalist, blogging should be cake for me, right?
Just bash out a couple of posts on hot topics, then see the hordes of people stream in and click on my adsense ads like lab rats banging on the levers in the cage, expecting food pellets to stream out?
Wrong...My first attempt at blogging was over at andreww38[dot]blogspot[dot]com
I spent about an hour each day after I finished my dinner and spending time with my wife, thinking up something clever to blog about.
I'd be studying a number of mass appeal Perez Hilton-type bloggers over a couple of weeks and figured that funny + witty + informative = winning formula for blog success.
If anyone with a keyboard, who could string together Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in the same post and claim that they're generating hundreds of dollars a month in adsense income, then shouldn't I be able to easily replicate their efforts?
Unfortunately....not.
Just create my free blogger account and knocking out posts with a minimum word count of 400, with accompanying pretty pictures did not get me the hordes that I was dreaming of. Nope...not even a platoon...or a squad for that matter.
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Hot Or Not?
I think any new blogger will believe that blogging about any hot topic will make you some super hot blogger.
If you go along that school of thought, you'd probably, like me, be checking out Google News (news.google.com) or the Technorati WTF (technorati.com/wtf) - it'd probably be Lindsay Lohan or George Clooney's motorcycle accident...
And even if you have killer content that knocks the socks and boots off the top bloggers in your niche, you might discover you haven't made much traction as I did.
On hindsight, here's why:
* You've heard of on-site and off-site SEO optimization...guess what? There's on-site and off-site blog optimization too.
Everything I Need To Know I DIDN'T Learn In Kindergarten...
Here's what I DIDN'T do the first time round.
1) On-site blog optimization - conduct keyword research, construct a silo/LSI model for your blog. Make it a themed blog, the tighter and more closely related your keywords, the better. [So drop the idea of doing a "scrapbooking" blog or a "celebrity" blog... go for the jugular and create a "female movie actress celebrity blog for tweens" , or "scrapbooking site for intermediate female scrapbookers who have 1-2 year experience under their belt and with about $100-200 budget each month to spend on scrapbooking supplies"].
Once you have a target profile in mind, you can imagine yourself like a sniper, seeking out only high value targets. Your major limitation is the bullets (or time and monetary resources at your disposal), so you have to make sure every shot counts.
There's a lesson to be learned from snipers too. You'd normally aim for the head or the heart to achieve your objective, or kill. So a fact-filled, informative and insightful post will hit the reader in the head, while something funny, entertaining and emotional will hit them in the heart.
The best posts are those that aim for the head AND the heart.
These would usually be the sort posted in this thread - a combination of a personal story, some fact filled points and strategies that readers can themselves use.
Ok, that covers some of the basics for on-site blog optimization - content and siloing. There're a couple of other things to bear in mind, like site structure (permalinks, categories) along the lines of blog SEO, but I think content should always be the prime focus.
You can have an ugly blog with great content that people will keep coming back to.
Or you can have a pretty blog with mediocre content where one visit might be one visit too many...
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So the other lesson I learned was:
2) Off-site blog optimization: Just in case, some of the new bloggers, don't realize (as I hadn't realized early on), there's a multitude of blog and RSS directories out there.
If the blog isn't listed in them, it probably won't get much traffic.
Pretty much any forum with a decent buy/sell/trade section should be filled with programmers or freelancers from less developed countries who would be willing to submit your blog to the directories for less than $100. It'll be an investment well spent, and aside from the labor cost, it costs you nothing in most cases.
If you use a backling tool like the Yahoo! Site Explorer or any one of a number of domain or keyword tools, you can see blog directories sending backlinks to a domain. Some of these backlinks have PR3 and sometimes PR4 for them. So that investment of 10-20 hours (if you choose to day it yourself) will pay handsome dividends.
Links, Links and More Links...
The other thing I started to do a little of, was to submit articles to directories like ezinesarticles.com, goarticles.com, articlecity.com and others. (actually I only submitted articles to ezinearticles). This gets you highly targeted traffic.
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Playing The Social Game
Ok, so you might know about submitting to blog directories already, but are you also leveraging other high authority sites to bring you traffic and higher SERP rankings?
I have also gone to places like Yahoo! MyBlogLog, Bumpzee.com, Squidoo, MySpace to create profiles there with a backlink to my blog. This again creates 50-100 high authority backlinks with qualified traffic. I guess if I wanted to go the whole hog on this, I would also use hub pages, wikipedia and other sites like PlugIM to generate more traffic.
From what I've seen, planning represents 90% of the effort of winning the game, and if you do it right, even with little effort afterwards, you should be seeing at least 2,000-3,000 highly targeted uniques coming to your site each day.
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Money Makes The World Go Around...
So having given some thought to studying my "failure" and working out what went right and what went wrong, I developed a plan for my blog WhoIsAndrewWee.com in July 2006.
I launched it and gave careful thought to having a monetization strategy in place.
I didn't really like the idea of monetizing using adsense (which you're know if you have visited my blog) and focused instead on affiliate marketing, as it'd easily give me at least a 10x higher return.
So in the first 15 days of launching my blog, I generated about $1,500 in affiliate commissions.
Bottomline: If you're a "pure blogger" (as some who like to comment on my blog like to refer to themselves), you might find yourself just like another poor, starving writer....with a computer.
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Who Do You Know...And Who Knows You?
From there I focused on expanding my blog's sphere of influence.
The "sphere of influence" is something that most bloggers don't think about, because most of them are focused on traffic (ie. who comes to your blog), when actually your sphere of influence ("who knows you") is much more important.
Just think about this for a moment...is there a blogger who is fairly big in your niche, and whose reputation precedes him or her? You might not even read their blog, or might not even have been to their blog, but their name is one you recognize? You've just discovered the effect of having a large 'sphere of influence'.
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Banking With Blogging Tips:
If you've made it up to here, congratulations!
Here are a couple of pointers that have helped me and may help you reach the next level in your blogging efforts, or perhaps spur you on if you've been looking at blogging as a strategy to grow your business...
1) "The money is not in blogging" - ok, you might have bloggers who make $x,xxx or $xx,xxx from their blogging efforts, but they could be doing much more.
Think of blogging as a super-charged machine to drive your consulting, or your product creation, or affiliate marketing efforts into overdrive...
Let me give you some examples of how this has helped me...
-I focused on pumping out great content on my WhoIsAndrewWee.com...
As a result of this:
1) Shoemoney was looking for a moderator for his forum and invited me on board (the previous board, not the current one).
2) I got into the 9Rules Blog network after blogging for about 2 months, and this brought a flood of traffic to my blog (and bumped my affiliate and product sales up a few notches). Later on, I was invited to join Yahoo! MyBlogLog's advisory group, so the input I give them influences how Yahoo! develops the widget and how it's marketed.
3) Content syndication is great: Recently I was invited to join the ientry network, so my content gets syndicated on WebProNews, MarketingNewz and a number of their other sites... again, while the increase in revenue and profit is great, what's better is the joint venture and marketing opportunities...
So, one thing I've learned is:
1) Focusing on the traffic is a BAD goal..... Traffic is a sign or an indicator that whatever your plan is, it's going well. But traffic, or the number of RSS or feedburner subscribers is not a good metric of your blogging success. A better (and more realistic metric) in my opinion is the number of sales you've made, or number of projects or joint ventures resulting from your blogging.
2) Be a sniper, rather than an infantryman: If you've played any of the team fortress games online, you'll realize that the infantryman is very generalized, carries just about every weapon available, tries to aim at everyone and generally doesn't do a very good job at whatever role they originally had in mind.
Instead, I like to visualize myself as a sniper (armed with a AWP....), going for highly profile targets, rather than the rank and file.
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To be continued...
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Ruthless for the People....A Blog Story
