Some tips for starting your own blog.
I received an email from an Austin resident who came across my blog the other day. He said “I’m looking for a way to make a modest, full-time living as a blogger” and he wanted to know if I’d ever written any advice on doing this.
I don’t think I have. I don’t pretend to be TechCrunch, HuffPo, or anything like that. But this blog does generate six figures in ad revenue a year, which is a nice goal.
I’ll also preface my advice by saying this blog generates income primarily from advertising. If you have another service or product to sell then some of this might not apply.
Here’s my advice:
Technical
– Use WordPress. Using any other blog tool is suicide.
– Host your own copy of WordPress and do it on your own domain name. I have a friend who started with the hosted WordPress.com. His blog became quite successful and then he started to understand the limitations of the hosted platform. He transitioned to his own WordPress installation and domain name, but it took six months for SEO and RSS traffic to recover.
– Use a scalable web host. The first time you get a big link or social media mention you’re server will get clobbered. After losing out on lots of traffic I finally moved this blog to a dedicated server. Overkill? Sure. But you should consider a host such as WPEngine. All they do is host WordPress blogs, and they can scale to handle your traffic spikes. (I don’t use WPEngine so I can’t vouch for it, but they’re located just down the road and are meeting an important need for bloggers).
Topics
– If you’re in it for the money, pick a topic that will allow you to get direct advertisers. I’m assuming you don’t aspire to be TechCrunch or Huffington Post. That means you’ll have to join ad networks and they’ll pay you like crap. So pick a topic where a) there’s not much ad inventory for the big players in the industry and b) potential advertisers aren’t that big. For example, if your blog covers soda it will be very hard to reach out to Coca-Cola to get them to advertise. If advertisers are smaller and have few options then selling direct will be easy.
– Pick a topic you care about. This may be the most important part. If you aren’t truly passionate about what you’re writing about then blogging will be like work. And that means you’re destined to fail.
Frequency
– If you start blogging a couple times a day you might burn out. You might start with a few entries a week and scale it up from there.
– Most bloggers burn out after a couple months and stop all together. That’s fine; it just means you aren’t as enthusiastic about the topic as you thought. The good news is it costs basically nothing to start a blog.
Getting Traffic
– Write good content and the traffic will come. When I first started blogging I had to beg and plead for links and visits. That’s OK. But the truth is if you write good content people will discover your site and traffic will flow. I know that when people like Matt Cutts say that it sounds like a load of B.S. But it’s true. Write good stuff and people will link to you, sending traffic your way.
– Social media traffic sucks. Remember how I mentioned your first big social media hit will melt your server? It will also send crappy traffic. The average visit to DNW lasts about 2 minutes. The typical Reddit visitor spends 5 seconds and YCombinator spends 10 seconds. It’s nice to get the traffic, but realize the quality sucks.
– Don’t jump over a quarter to pick up a dime. There are things you can do early on to get quick traffic at the expense of more traffic down the road. For example, syndicating only snippets through RSS might give you a few more clicks, but you’ll earn more readers in the long run if you syndicate full posts. Another mistake: writing misleading headlines. After people get duped a few times they’ll never come back.
– Use Twitter. Syndicate your headlines through Twitter, but also make other relevant tweets and retweets.
– It might take you a couple years to build up the audience you want.
Making Money
– Ads may not be the way. See my caveat at the beginning of this post. If you’re a real estate agent your goal might be leads, consultants might want more gigs, etc.
– You have to sell direct if you want to make money with ads. Ad networks won’t pay you enough unless you have an audience the size of TechCrunch.
– Start small then increase your ad prices. I started with fairly inexpensive prices and raised them as my traffic increased.
So there you have it…my advice. Take it for what it’s worth 🙂
Tim Davids says
Good stuff Andrew. Appreciate you being candid with this. Big agree on liking the subject yourself. I’d add try to pick a subject that is a big enough industry to have trade-shows etc. You’ll need a place to get material.
Keith Carasco says
The phrase gets worn out daily but hey, I do mean it, thanks for sharing great read.
Jamie says
All great advise Andrew but I don’t think you stated anything about using a good domain name from the start?
Andrew Allemann says
@ Jamie – good point. I’d say an easy to remember and hard to confuse domain is important. It doesn’t have to be a category killer for a blog. Domain Name Wire works just fine. TechCrunch worked just fine.
Boyy says
Is it possible to use Dreamweaver program instead of WordPress? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Dreamweaver?
Andrew Allemann says
@ Boyy – for a blog? Go with WordPress.
Jamie says
@Boyy,
The biggest thing is the amount of plugins the Wordpress CMS has available. It’s like the apple app store!
teendomainer says
Thanks for the great advice, your blog serves as an examples for the rest of us to follow.
Boyy says
@ Andrew,
Thanks for the advice.
Boyy says
@ Jamie,
“The biggest thing is the amount of plugins the WordPress CMS has available. It’s like the apple app store!”
Can you name some good examples of websites that use WorePress that looks like apple app stores? I want to try and learn to use in WordPress.
I normally use Dreamweaver for non-blog sites.
SL says
Ok, this must be related to the popunder I got yesterday…
“Austin mom makes $100,000 a year reading UDRPs in her spare time…Click here!”
Joey Starkey says
Good Advice thanks