Booksquare

Last week, we link to an article with the grand plan of returning to the topic later that day. Days have a way of getting away from us. As do weeks. But we have been dwelling mentally on the subject, and woke up this morning ready to write about the all-important topic of making money from blogs.

Lynne Scanlon notes that making money the traditional way (selling a book to a publishers, receiving an advance, earning out an advance, waiting months and sometimes years for royalties to be paid) doesn’t really work for her. Let’s all face facts: if you’re writing to get rich, you might also want to consider winning the lottery as a back-up plan (also, note our advice below). Scanlon has decided to (catch phrase alert!) monetize her blog.

It is a natural urge to try to make money doing what you love or do best. Especially if you have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people reading you ever month. If you compare the daily readership of some blogs to the sales of most authors, the differences would make most publishers cry. However, the financial models are very different.

Scanlon discusses potential avenues for earning revenues (ads, ads, and sponsorships). These are, indeed, viable sources of money. We have had some modest success along these lines with other sites in the BS family. However, that success came not because we slapped up ads and counted the money as it rolled in. There are three basic elements that are essential if you’re serious about making your online ventures pay. These are not big secrets, by the way.

• Niche – You need to figure out where your blog fits into the grand scheme of life. If you regularly visit grocery stores, you’ll notice that there are very few general interest magazines on the racks. Each and every publication differentiates itself (not all successfully) by targeting a specific niche. The Real Simple niche — people looking to streamline their lives in an upscale-ish sort of way — is very different than the Budget Living niche.

  To be a successful paid blogger, you need to know your niche and write about it. Sites such as Boing Boing get a pass on this rule because they have built a massive audience by targeting a wide range of interests with a geek perspective. Boing Boing is an exception, and if you read it regularly, you’ll understand why. In the world of blogs, specific trumps general.

• Content – People do not generally come to your blog (or website) to admire your brilliant design. Okay, if it’s a brand-spanking new look, maybe you’ll get a rush of traffic admiring your lovely colors and hot boxes, but generally design doesn’t a destination make. People visit blogs and websites for content.

  Content comes in many forms: text, sounds, and images. We’re going to focus on text, because, well, our particular niche is very much into the written word. You’ll notice that A-List blogs have certain things in common, mainly good, strong writing with distinctive voices. Original content matters; repurposed, cookie-cutter content doesn’t work. Hmm, sounds like the publishing industry is dictating the rules of the Internet, no?

  Your content must be engaging and interesting. It must inform people about the topic at hand. It must be evergreen. Okay, it should be evergreen — content that gets digested by search engines and ranks high in Google (or other search engines) when people type in key phrases. Content that drives traffic to your site long after the post is off the home page. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule. There are always exceptions.

  You would think that writers would be particularly inclined toward creating good content. Let us add one more rule: frequent content. You don’t have to post twelve times a day, but you do need to post often. Daily, weekly, whatever your schedule, but the more you write, the more content. If it’s good content, then that leads to more traffic. Vicious circle, yes.

  In other words, bloggers who make serious money off their sites often treat their blogs like full-time jobs. Or part-time jobs if they’re thinking the money will be less serious. Successful bloggers are constantly writing and networking and doing all the things that writers do to sell their words. Because there’s one more key element of paid blogging:

• Traffic – We’re not going to pretend we understand CPMs and all that advertising lingo. There are books, we’re sure, that explain it all. But we do understand the basic laws of traffic: you don’t make money off your blog if you don’t have decent traffic. Ten, twenty, one hundred visitors a day is simply not going to cut it (unless you have a high-paying niche and click-happy readers).

  Building website traffic is an art form, meaning it’s far more complex than we can get into here and now. You need a target audience, you need content — fresh and evergreen, and you need to employ traffic-building strategy. Very rarely do you build it and they come. As we’ve discussed in the past, this involves linking to others and community and writing articles that people want to link to, posts that people want to pass among their friends. Work, you know.

  You can, possibly, buy traffic, but that capital outlay won’t do you much good if there’s nothing behind it. People who come once won’t come twice if there’s no reason to make the effort. Have we mentioned the part about good writing and distinctive voice?

Bloggers do get paid for their work, and writers, especially, are well-positioned to take advantage of the medium. In order to make money off your site, you need to make your site a destination. Throwing up a bunch of links or grabbing canned content won’t do the job. And thus ends today’s rant.

Technorati Tags: writing, publishing, blogging, paid blogging, content