Yesterday I heard about someone (I won’t name) who tries to make money from blogging. Therefore he uses a completely different approach than just to start writing about somthing he cares much about or is very familliar with. No, its just a bunch of different blogs, specialised to certain up-to-date themes that you don’t necessary need to know much about, but that hit the vibe.
The idea in this is to place blogs on the web that satisfy a certain niche, that may get big soon, or are underrepresented in the web. Just pick a nice, suiting theme for a blogging-system of your choice and put some general pages up … get your info from WikiPedia, Google and other blogs. Get yourself some specific feeds on the topic. Keep posting news from the sector or random thoughts you come across in that topic. Crosslink the blogs and use the multitudes of web-directories for all blogs that you set up. Use a Twitter-Plugin and a follower-unfollow-script to gain followers. Watch the stats. The higher the stats, the more effort is to be put into the blog. Try to get advertisment for good blogs or use services like Trigami or AdSense to generate money.
Don’t be fooled: Using this method, you sure can make money on the web through blogging, BUT its a full time job and it will take a couple of months or maybe even years to get something out of it. If I could write good content in a well-written manner with a speed of 10 posts in two hours I’d for sure be a money-blogger … but I can’t. And I don’t think its the golden money source, as you’d need a lot of time to build up PageRank, reputation and readers using this method - especially if you’re not really apt with the topic you’re writing about.
Personally, I don’t gain much from watching such a blog and it won’t land in my feedreader. The Admarkets is flooded anyways, and I wouldn’t advise anyone to go down this route. If you really want to make a blog, then for chrissakes write about something you care about or just write about yourself and your experiences.
And one final note: Too many people on Twitter and in different blogs scream into the world how to make money with blogs and “online-marketing” - as too many computerkids out there dream about money from doing basically nothing - and I hate it. Its only blogged about to draw pageviews onto their sites, and as you’re reading this, you also might be a victim of the blogging-to-money-lie. Good content surely don’t come from nowhere. You need to be a very good writer to do this. And even if you have good content and if you can keep up the good work for a very long time that it will take for your word to spread, can you be sure that you’ll love to do it for a living? Can you be sure that its enough money compared to a random job? Do you feel challenged by this?
A second final note: Yes everyone can open blogs this way. We’ve got a lot of good CMS that make it possible. Don’t you think the commercial market will die out even more with even more people doing this sort of “work”? Did you hear about AdBlock Plus? Roughly half of your visitors won’t even see your ads.
A third, but final note: I got a lot of feeds from people who really blog good stuff. I love good blogs and good content, and I really think this is worth good money. But I also believe that this money isn’t earned because it was the purpose of this blog to make money but because the writer is just talented or has a lot to talk about. So please give up on the “get-rich-blogging-lie”. Thanks for listening.
