Opportunities in Blogging
Publishing is changing quickly as more and more readers migrate from
paper-based products to electronic media, whether it’s a computer, a
tablet, a mobile device, or an e-reader. Change of this sort always creates
opportunities, and in the last few years it’s become clear that professional
blogging is one of them.
The last decade saw a generation of blogs grow from being side projects
and hobbies, into sites with enormous readerships and real revenues.
Very quickly blogging has become a legitimate publishing business, and
today a survey of the top 100 blogs shows that with a few notable celebrity
exceptions, almost all of them are backed by real publishing businesses.
While today the blogging industry has some very professional outfits
operating, there is still lots and lots of room for the newcomer. To start with,
there are very few household names in blogging. While most people might
recognize and know names like Time, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, there
are significantly less who know Gawker (http://gawker.com), TechCrunch
(http://techcrunch.com), Huffington Post (http://huffingtonpost.com), and
PopSugar (http://popsugar.com), which are just three of the more high
profile sites. There are still many, many people who don’t read online but
who will eventually. These folk mean that blogging is an industry with a
lot of growth ahead of it, and growth is good for business and good
for newcomers.
Opportunities in blogging also arise from the many niches and topics
that are still wide open. If you walk into any bookstore and look through
the myriad magazines that line the racks, you’ll find there are audiences
interested in reading about everything from sewing to tattoos, boating to
cooking, movies to shopping. Can you name the blog to read on tattoos?
How about a great blog about boating? Think you can find one?
Moreover, for every niche that is big enough to sustain a real paper
publication, there are dozens more that are too small for print but big
enough online. Where the distribution costs are small and even nil,
distributed groups can be clumped together to form real audiences, and
bloggers have access to audiences that have never really counted before:
the so-called “long tail.”
As was often touted during the dotcom boom, the internet is a great
equalizer. The difference between one domain name and another is just
a few keystrokes. And while you shouldn’t read too much into this (after
all, people have to know your domain name to type it in), it is worth
remembering that a new voice in blogging can quickly catch on.
Of course because blogging is so accessible, it’s a tempting first business to
get into. There is a perception that it’s a zero-cost set-up, and in some ways
that’s true. You can start a new blog with not much more than a domain
name and a cheap-as-chips hosting account. This is certainly a claim that
you could never make about, say, starting a magazine or newspaper, where
the physical costs of making and distributing the product can be prohibitive.
What isn’t so obvious, is that to build a blog that is self-sustaining and
eventually profitable, does require cash, and it can be a significant amount
at that. For as easy as it is to start a blog, it is still hard to produce
consistent levels of content, to acquire traffic and readership, and to
ultimately generate revenue. While thousands of blogs may open their
proverbial doors every day, the funnel of survival can be harsh and many fall
into disrepair very quickly.
For hobby bloggers, the costs of operating a blog are hidden in the
blogger’s own time. They do the posting, the marketing, and all the other
chores of running a blog themselves, effectively eating the costs by doing
it in their spare time. But make no mistake, those costs are there and if you
want to approach blogging with a business mindset, you need to account
for them all.
On the flip side, by looking at blogging as a business, you also bring
the longevity that blogging needs to succeed. While hobbyists and less
organized competitors fall by the wayside, your operation will keep chipping
away, building audiences, growing search traffic, creating a bigger and
bigger content archive. In many ways, blogging is an endurance race,
requiring a lot of momentum to build up to become a true success story.
So building a business out of blogging, like any business, involves
investment both in time and money. The questions you want to ask are:
What costs need to be accounted for? Where will the revenue come from?
How long will it take? Along with these high-level business questions, you’ll
also be wondering about the practicalities of running a blog as a business,
planning direction, finding and hiring staff, creating content, and marketing.
In this book I aim to answer all these questions as well as to give you a
practical, hands-on guide to building a business out of blogging. Like
any business, it will take hard work, dedication, savvy, and a bit of luck.
As someone who has built a number of blogs, I hope reading through my
experience and methods will help you find your path to success.
Risk and Reward
Every business investment comes with risk and certainly blogging is no sure
thing. The risks in creating a business out of blogging include:
1. Choosing a Low Potential Niche
Perhaps the biggest risk you run is creating the wrong blog. If you start a
blog in a niche that has limited potential either because of the audience,
the competition, or the revenue potential, then you create a significant
impediment to success. You can shift the blog, reinvent it, invent a new
way of finding revenue, trounce the competition somehow, or grow the
topic’s audience ... or you can choose a niche with strong potential to
begin with! We’ll deal with selecting a niche in the next chapter.
2. Not Producing a Popular Product
Assuming you’ve picked a good niche to blog in, you still run the risk of
producing a bad product. Maybe you hire the wrong staff, maybe you
don’t figure out what sort of content people want, or maybe you get the
frequency of publishing wrong. There are plenty of factors that go into a
good blog. The best way to learn about them on an instinctive level, is to
read and think about other blogs in your spare hours over a reasonably
long period of time. You’ll also get to read about what goes into hiring
and content in later chapters.
3. Competition
Every business has competition of one sort or another. It might be other
blogs or it might be traditional media. If your business grows beyond
blogging, then it might simply be other service providers. Competition
vies for audience, for revenue, and ultimately for dominance. Even if
you scope out a niche very thoroughly and deduce that there is little
competition, you can never account for the competition that is sitting in
a garage somewhere plotting and planning their strategy for domination.
Aside from thorough research, the best defense is to be on guard all the
time, to always be looking for ways to be the best, and to think about
ways to differentiate your product from your competitors.
4. Running Out of Capital
The simple reality of business is that in the beginning you will burn
through your cash with little or no return. Later in this book, you can
read about three case studies from my own experience where you will
see that each blog took many months of losses before hitting break
even, and that one set is in fact still burning through cash!
To combat this you’ll need to make sure you have a reasonable amount
of capital to begin with. You’ll also need to look for ways to get some
revenue as fast as possible to help slow the losses. You’ll need to
constantly evaluate whether you are on the right track, whether you can
save money somehow, and how much longer you can last.
5. Market Conditions
No one can control the broader market conditions. At this point in time,
blogging looks to be a good bet with lots of growth potential and more
and more advertising moving online. Whether this is true, whether it
lasts, who knows? The most important thing is to keep your finger on
the pulse. Stay up to date with tech blogs, advertising blogs, blogs
for bloggers and publishers, and stay informed. If you feel a change in
market conditions coming, adjust your business plan to compensate.
If you think there are lean times ahead and you are low on capital, pull
back on your plans. Conversely, if you think there’s a boom coming in a
particular niche, then you might ramp up to take advantage of it.
While blogging is not without its fair share of risks, there are also
plenty of rewards. First and foremost is the satisfaction of running a
successful publication. Watching your readership grow, seeing
comments and discussion happening on your site, hearing from readers
who enjoy the site, and seeing link-backs from sites you respect are all
incredibly rewarding.
On a monetary level, a blog business can grow very large. One of the earliest
blogging companies, Weblogs Inc, which included powerhouse blogs like
Engadget (http://engadget.com) and TUAW (http://tuaw.com), sold for a
reported $25m to AOL in 2005. Another high-profile sale occurred in 2007
when environmental blog Treehugger (http://treehugger.com) sold for $10m
to the Discovery Network.
While a big sale to a listed company isn’t on the books for every blog, it’s
certainly possible to do well purely on operating profits and revenue. In
the case studies in this book, you’ll read about two blogs that I’ve worked
on which have been fortunate enough to hit profitability and turn over
enough cash to grow other businesses and to expand themselves to bigger
revenues and larger audiences.
In fact, later in this book we’ll look at how a blog can not only become very
successful in its own right, but can also become the engine that drives new
businesses such as blog networks, apps, services, or products like books
and job boards.
Planning
Content
While a solid brand and great staff are essential to the success of
your blogging business, it’s the content you publish that brings
visitors back for more, and determines whether or not people
recommend you to their friends and colleagues.
There’s a fine line between content that works and content
that flops, and that means there’s a fine line between success
and failure at any given time in the business of publishing and
blogging. In this chapter, we’ll look at the factors that make web
content succeed.
Writing for the web
People don’t always consciously realize it, but they read on screens
differently from the way they read on paper. When you pick up a printed
book, you read linearly from start to end, word-by-word. On the other hand,
content on the screen is read in bits and pieces and almost never in order.
The typical reader starts by scanning the page to find the content that’s
relevant to their needs. Large paragraphs aren’t easily scanned, so the
focus is on elements that stick out from the rest of the text. These things will
become a big part of your blogging toolkit:
• Headlines
• Subheadings
• Images
• Block quotes
• Pull quotes
• Lists
• Links in the text
Once they’ve determined whether the content is interesting enough to
warrant spending their time on, they might start from the top and read
straight through, but often they’ll find the section that answers their
immediate questions and only hang around as long as it takes to get what
they came for.
Your aim is to get the reader to stick around longer, come back more often,
and become a loyal reader of your blog. To help the reader enjoy your site
and give them more of a reason to keep coming back, you need to change
the way you write and format content.
When a reader scans the page, they are trying to obtain context and locate
information. However, elements that are easily scanned aren’t always
elements that give plenty of context!
For instance, thanks to the bad practices employed by traditional press
such as tabloids, there’s often a focus on making headlines clever or
scandalizing, as opposed to descriptive. This sort of practice seems intuitive
to many beginning bloggers, but it won’t help your readers at all.
• Use headlines that describe the content for the reader and for
search engines. If you can make it clever at the same time, by all
means go ahead!
• Images should represent the content as accurately as possible,
especially if you’re using several images in a piece; as great as images
are for creating visual interest, they should also indicate a change of
focus in the content.
• Pull quotes done properly are very useful. Find the strongest tip or piece
of information in a section and turn it into a large, feature quote so that
it draws the reader in to read the rest of it. Boring or meaningless pull
quotes will lead the reader to the conclusion that there’s nothing useful
in the article as a whole.
• Link sparingly. I recommend no more than three links in a paragraph. It’s
hard to get readers to scan a paragraph, and the more links you include,
the less they’ll draw the reader’s eye to a particular sentence.
Italics and bolding can draw attention to key points. Only use them when
there’s a really important principle to be conveyed, as they can make a
paragraph look quite messy when overused.
We’ll come back to headlines themselves later in this chapter, as they’re
almost as important as the article they represent. In the meantime, keep
scannable content in mind and apply these principles to new content. Also
bear in mind that there’s nothing stopping you from going through older
posts and making them easier to read!
Making Content Valuable
It may seem obvious to you that content needs to be useful and
deliver value in order to become popular, but if you take a look at many
less successful blogs on the Internet, you’ll find they don’t focus on
providing value.
Obscure sites that are useful are usually up-and-comers, while the majority
of less well known blogs simply ignore the fact that the reader needs to gain
some benefit from reading a blog. As a reader, this gives the impression that
the blog doesn’t have a lot to offer and isn’t worth revisiting.
If your blog publishes news-style posts, then the value in content will come
from timeliness and exclusivity. A scoop is an exclusive story delivered at
the right time and is the ultimate in value for this style of blog.
For entertainment sites, the value you deliver must be in the form of
entertainment value whether that is humor, interest, or captivation. Delivering
this type of value can be difficult, but extremely prized when done well.
For educational style blogs, you need to deliver knowledge in a specific
area. You should be drawing on that knowledge to create good, informative
posts to deliver value to your readership.
For opinion-based posts, the value is in the opinions themselves. If you have
an editorial voice that holds interest, a novel angle, a well-articulated view
point or an entertaining voice, then you’re likely to deliver the value that has
readers returning to hear what your take is on a given subject.
Delivering value is possible in all varieties of blogs. It does however take
some practice and structure. A trap that new writers sometimes fall into,
is to end up waffling because they have no plan of attack, but this can be
avoided with the simple use of an outline.
Outlining
Start by writing your introduction and coming up with a headline. This is a
very useful technique used by professional writers and journalists all over
the world. You’d only need to leave the start to last if you don’t know where
you’re going in the first place, and that approach doesn’t work well in the
blogging world. Having a headline and introduction means you have a clear
purpose for the post and are less likely to fall into the trap of waffling.
Continue by outlining the major points you’d like to cover as sections, and
even paragraphs, if you want to break it right down. If it’s an opinion-based
piece, you might outline your thought process to lead the reader down a
particular train of thinking. If it’s a news piece, you’ll want to focus on lead
facts followed by supporting information.
For educational or opinion-based content, each point you’re making (or each
step, in the case of tutorials) will usually have two components. You make
your point in clear language, and then you demonstrate it. Use anecdotal
examples, case studies, links to someone else’s work, or images and
diagrams to show how the concepts you’re discussing are used in real life.
Publishing articles and tutorials is mostly one-way communication, so the
reader can’t ask questions and get clarification from you the way they would
in a conversation or class. The examples should demonstrate the point with
the goal of making it totally clear.
Outlines can help you determine the overall structure of a post before
committing to the more time consuming task of fleshing it all out.
Editing
As a blogging business entrepreneur, there’s a good chance you’ll be editing
the work of other writers, at least until you have the capital to hire an editor
to take care of the writers and their output. Hopefully you’ve been careful
about who you hire and your writers are top-notch, but some degree of
editing is always necessary, even if the content is great and you just need
to make some changes so it works with the goals of your site or is more
web-friendly.
Editing is a complicated profession, but there are two principles of editing
that I find help professionals and beginners alike.
1. Writers may be precious about their
words, but you shouldn’t be.
Don’t be afraid to make changes, cut chunks of text, or add content you
feel is missing (or better still, have the writer go back and add it for you).
Content, generally speaking, should be as sharp as possible and make for
easy, non-repetitive reading. On the web, there’s not a whole lot of room
for waffle.
But let’s be clear: anecdotes, interesting points, and anything that augments
the main point the author is trying to make is not necessarily waffle that
needs to be cut. It adds depth and dimension to the piece, and makes for
more interesting reading than totally spartan content. Try to make what’s
already there as readable as possible, and don’t cut things out until you can
identify why it should go.
2. Read the article before you edit it.
If you don’t, you could end up changing a sentence or cutting a piece of
content that really should be there, but which you won’t realize until you’ve
finished reading the piece and have that “big picture” perspective. Leave a
mark where you wanted to make an edit so you can re-assess it after your
read-through. Leaving a mark and coming back to something you might
want to edit after the first reading is a simple thing to do, but it makes a
difference in the quality of the final product.
As an editor you need to listen to your mind and the subtle feelings that
occur to you as you read (sounds a bit New-Agey, I know). Some editors
spend their time looking for technical flaws that need to be fixed, which is
important, but a good editor approaches the content as a reader as well,
which helps you find places where the flow is broken, even if the language
may be technically correct. If you find a sentence that is jarring or at any
point you need to double back and re-read a sentence, then this could mean
that the content isn’t flowing properly, and you need to edit the phrasing,
tone, and pace of the sentence until it does.
Short of learning all the rules and minutiae of correct language, the thing
that’ll make you a great editor is the ability to identify and rectify even the
most subtly awkward phrasing. Flow is king in retaining reader attention.
Think of content flow like music: listeners get physically and mentally
caught up in a good rhythm, but just one out-of-time beat can lose their
attention altogether.
Style and Tone
Style and tone are hard to measure, but they are factors that will be
important to the success of your blog.
Your content needs to be informative and your headlines need to be
compelling, but it’s still all for nothing if readers feel like the content is
boring, dull, passive, negative, condescending, or any other number of
rather negative adjectives.
Most publications have a fairly unique style and tone. It feels strange when
one of their articles, every so often, fails to capture it. Even when that
publication is staffed by many writers, it still needs to be cohesive.
This is achieved in a few ways:
• Most publications create a style guide or employ an existing one.
• They educate writers on the tone and attitude that the content
should convey.
• They educate writers on the angles and positions that should be
taken on any particular issues important to the publication and its
target audience.
• They ensure that editors do whatever it takes to bring content in line
with the publication’s style and tone.
• They ensure that editors provide writers with feedback on all aspects of
their work, including issues of style and tone.
