Blogging for apples

There are a couple of reasons that people blog.  One is that they feel they have something of value to say and simply want a platform for doing so, another is that they see it as a means to a professional career in writing.

Let's be honest with ourselves shall we? If you're in the first group, good for you.  Our narcissistic need to be heard and to believe our lives and points of view are so interesting as to warrant a platform for publishing them is natural.  Is it self-involved and self-centered? Sure.  But I'm ok with that.  I'm in that group and I don't shy away from that reality, although I realize some of you might not see yourselves that way.  For those in the second group however, the signal to noise ratio out there is so incredibly high that anyone looking to make a living at blogging is playing the virtual lottery.  The same psychology that allows us to see those very few exceptions to the rule and put blinders on to the realities of the odds involved in a lottery are very much at play in those who believe blogging can be a lucrative profession.

Am I saying that those persons are allowing themselves to be conveniently deluded? Well, sure.  But we do that everyday, in all facets of our lives.  But to be deluded you needed some sense of the realities involved to begin with.  Yet when I speak with bloggers (of the professional bent) I rarely hear them speak about what it would really take to be successful.  The focus is on good writing, interesting topics, etc., etc.  Because, if you build it well enough, they will come right?  That's absolutely true to some degree, it's also just a very small component of being successful.  Unlike a lottery, there are methods of manipulating those odds in your favor, but they are skills that cross multiple business disciplines and that many would-be pro bloggers seem to lack.

What tends to be overlooked is just how many of those interested parties would need to come to your site, and with what regularity, to create a self-funded enterprise capable of sustaining a decent quality of life.  They never seem to look at their site analytics with a critical eye towards true revenue generation.  I've seen bloggers with professional aspirations go absolutely ga-ga with 5000 new visitors coming to their site in a month, yet never acknowledge the fact that they would need 10, 20, 50 times that number to begin truly making any "career" money. 

The realities of marketing, conversion rates, clickthroughs, ad placement, SEO, leveraging publishers, and so on just aren't the typical talents of a great writer.  Yet to be a truly successful blogger, those skills are absolutely necessary.  Do yourself a favor, have a business plan, set real quarterly targets based on your revenue needs not growth rates (traffic growth is not a measure of success, how you leverage that growth is), set minimum milestones in which you turn your back and walk away if you can't reach them.  If you want it to pay you like a business you have to learn how to run it like a business, and most importantly know when to fail.  There is no motivation like the specter of failure.

So where do you fit? Do you simply have something to say, or do you want to make a living at it?

- @Techguerilla
Posted on Saturday, Oct 31, 2009 by