How to be a blogging star: moneymaking bloggers say nothing earthshattering

The New York Times’ article today, called “So You Want to be a Blogging Star?” is a decent piece for people who don’t know much about blogging. There are a lot of big name bloggers I follow or at least note when I see something they’ve said on a blog I follow (I don’t follow - as in, subscribe to the RSS feed - for any of the bloggers in the story: Mark Cuban, Xeni Jardin (I love her name, always have, always makes me think of the punk rock era singer), Ted Dzuiba, Glenn Reynolds - just four, out of 110,000,000)

Tips they give (or, more likely, culled from interviews done with the NYT reporter - which should make you know that it is highly likely that each of those bloggers said a lot more about what makes a blogger succeed and that there may very well have been interview material from even more bloggers that just never made it into this article)?

Don’t expect to get rich. …

Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice. …

Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule. …

Just post it already! …

Keep a regular rhythm. …

Plug yourself. …

But for those of us who do - you know, the 110,000,000 that Technorati tracks (109,999,000 of which don’t make any money worth counting at all; as the article reports, “…only one in six blogs draws even 500 page views a day. At that pace, you would make at most $45 a month, even if the site were decked out with full-page ads. Mr. Kaplan [Phil, of AdBrite] estimates only 3 percent of active sites make more than $1,000 a month from advertising.), those hints are very, very basic. Just google “how to make money as a blogger” and you’ll find a lot more information.

Just off the top of my head:

Keep your title very focused and as full of key words as possible. The artsy cutesy turn of phrase sometimes works, but if you are looking to be the place for a topic, titles are important.

Learn a little about how to do tags - those words that you can use as categories to help other people find your posts on a particular topic.

If you are able to, find a niche topic - either of its own or within another area. For example, in education, gifted education. In politics, a particular issue like health care.

Experiment with audio and video. Even the free blogging platforms make it so easy to spruce up what you’re doing.

But…don’t go overboard. Or else your voice gets lost (unless you are specifically a vlogger).

Finally, please, please, please, please know that the assertion bolded here:

“Don’t go into blogging to make a living,” Mr. Cuban warned in an e-mail message. Still, he and other top bloggers with day jobs agree most people could attract a following on the Web. And whether a person blogs to make a little money, to influence opinion or just for sheer ego gratification, amassing a large audience is the goal.

is not not not the goal for so many bloggers. Again, Technorati is following 110,000,000 blogs. I promise you, the marjority of them probably don’t even know that they’re being tracked, and if they know, they don’t care or track that they are being tracked.

Watching my traffic grow has been like waiting for a fruit-bearing tree to mature - it can take years. Which means that unless you are that good at delayed gratification, you shouldn’t be blogging with the intention of amassing a large audience. You need to be blogging because it means something to you. It can mean anything - except amassing a large audience. Because if that’s your sole goal?

I can tell you how that’s gonna work out for ya right now.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 9:55 pm March 20th, 2008 in Marketing, Meet the Bloggers, Writing, Media, Tech, Blogging

Comments

2 Responses to “How to be a blogging star: moneymaking bloggers say nothing earthshattering”

1 LisaRenee on March 21st, 2008 7:14 pm

I agree with you, I started out with Glass City Jungle having 12 readers, and blogging about what I thought was interesting, frustrating, awesome, etc., about the Toledo area.

The cool thing about having grown a larger readership is the discussion aspect, but as you know, sometimes the posts we’ve spent the most love and research time on don’t end up being the ones other people jump on. Yet that doesn’t matter in the end because when it’s all said in done, we are blogging for ourselves first…
2 Jill Miller Zimon on March 21st, 2008 7:18 pm

Could not add to that. Thanks, twin.