Wednesday, January 9, 2008

The Bad Side of Blogging

How many blogs do you suppose there are on the Internet? Whoops another one was just started, and another, and another and..

There are millions of blogs online today and everyone is practically tripping over each other to start their own. My question is why?

You can answer that in word. Money! People think blogging is the magic bullet they have been missing to make money for the first time in their life. The other thing is blogs are so simple to start that a child of 10 could do it.

Of course after a few days the new blogger begins to realize that the money is not flowing in and this is going to become work. They sure are spending a lot of time working on their new blog and they have not made one penny off of it yet.

This is the bad side of blogging. It takes a lot of work to get traffic to your blog and it takes even more work to convert some of that into a paying customer.

If you value your time you lose money every time you set down and post in your blog. Let's say you spend 30 minutes writing a 400-word blog post and you do that everyday for 1 month. You have just spent 15 hours and you may not have even made any money yet.

That's the rub right there. First of all most people will never write 30 posts in the first month or maybe ever. The Internet is cluttered with blogs that were started with good intentions and abandoned like an orphan.

Someone should start a blog orphanage for abandoned blogs that we could adopt and offer tender loving care to. The bad side of blogging is you may be the next victim of “blogging is work” syndrome. Another blog started and abandoned because blogging is work and is not the easy road to riches you hoped it was.

A really good blog is one that is started by someone who would keep it up if they never made any money at it. The reasons for this are that the topic of the blog is a passion for the blogger. They have an interest in the subject matter. They may even be an expert in what they write about and their expertise shows.

The reader comes back over and over to see what the blogger will say next. They pull out their credit card to buy a product the blogger recommends. They click on a Google ad or subscribe to a newsletter. It is all so easy when the blog is kept up to date with useful information. The blogger has avoided the bad side of blogging.

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