Personal Blogging

Many of us keep personal diaries of events that have occured over the last few weeks, months, years, even a lifetime. With the emergence of the Internet and the great opportunities for reaching a wide and interested audience, many are now keeping these records online. There are 1,668,870,408 Internet users in the World; your audience. To have but one subscriber wanting to read your online diary on a regular basis gives one great satisfaction and a feeling of purpose. I believe that this is the attraction of personal blogging.



The online diary, which we call weblog, often goes well beyond the boundaries of simple communication. There are gripping articles and lots of interactive features that create an entertaining environment for any Internet user. Many brilliant writers began by keeping weblogs, records of personal thought, comments and ideas. Personal blogs allow a limitless space for expression of opinion and a clear record of ones development.

Personal blogging comes with caution as certain aspects of ones personal life can be detremental to other goals you may have set yourself, such as business success. Much caution now goes with MySpace pages and Facebook pages; what better way for a company to see the 'true' individual they may be hiring? It is sensible from the outset to keep personal and business blogging separate and to follow a few simple rules to ensure your personal blog is successful.

The first thing you need to put effort into is the topic of the articles you post; they are responsible for the overall image of the blog. There are many poor personal blogs, with uninteresting work and poor grammar and spelling. Please bear in mind that anybody with Internet access can view your blog and so you have a responsibility to self-censoring. This is for your benefit as well as others and unfortunately there have been cases of stalking and even stolen identity. Also remember that blogs are interactive; do not write about aspects of your life to which other peoples comments could hurt your feelings.

As long as you monitor your writing and others comments and adhere to your own self-censoring policy the outlook for your blog should be bright. When you write a personal blog you must consider its affect on your family and your friends. Do not fall into the trap of believing a weblog is a private, secretive place where you can store your opinions and thoughts. Your thoughts can have great power when you publish them to the World, but with great power comes great responsibility.

Next Time: Business Blogging

Is Blogging Profitable?

I think we are all in agreement that the Internet contains a wealth of opportunities for making some extra money and supplementing an income. Blogging harnesses these revenue prospects but in a low cost way with little effort actually coming from the blogger. Is it really possible to earn money in such a simplistic fashion? If so, then why isn't everybody doing it? I have described blogging initially as an online diary but over time through confidence in personal expression and advancing monetization methods, blogging has evolved. Most desirable by bloggers is to now turn their work into a home-business. Who wouldn't want to earn money for doing something which they enjoy? This is a goal for all of us.

We will start with the established blog. Great quality content, a witty and interesting author and the subject base 'Making Money Online'. This blog has a large number of subscribers and consistantly has 1000 hits from visitors per month. Now anyone running a business that specialises in delivering advice for making money online, runs an online marketplace or produces a product that delivers more traffic to a website etc would see advertising on this blog as a great money spinner. Heres why:

The visitors to the blog are clearly interested in making money online, perhaps they have their own businesses and want to make more money through increased sales or they just want to supplement their income using the Internet for this means. A well established businessman would see the marketing potential here and ask to advertise on the homepage of the blog, somewhere near the top of the page with a catchy slogan:

Fat Loss For Idiots

Now my friends this is bound to draw the eyes of the 1000 visitors away from whatever article they are reading on the blog for at least 1 second, yes? Well so far so good, 1000 glances at this advertisement per month. Now lets be really conservative here, say 10% of the visitors actually click the link attached to the slogan:

Fat Loss For Idiots

Thats 100 people per month following through to the business' homepage to read about the product, great! Now we are going to be even more conservative and say that just 10% of these people go and actually buy the advertised product. Thats 10 sales extra per month the business has gained. If the product is priced at say $20 then thats $2400 in extra sales per year. Most bloggers will advertise for a small commission, for continuity we will again say 10% (although much higher commissions can be made!). Now the blogger is earning $240 per year, and the business is earning and $2160 per year! Very lucrative!

So you can see that through little effort on either part, both are earning money. You can scale this up for yourself for popular webblogs recieving 100,000 visits per month etc.

A key factor mentioned here is visitor numbers, you must be recieving plenty of hits for this process to work.Luckily this is attainable for most by following a few simple procedures that I will discuss in the following weeks. To summarise though you must make web search possible directly from your blog using perhaps one of the Google programs available. Then your blog visitors should be able to interact with your blog; make comments, download images, subscribe etc. You must regularily update your blog to make it 'sticky' for the reader and then monitor your site statistics regularily; visitor number, time on site etc.

It is not just companies promoting single products that want to advertise on your site, there are also great advertising companies like Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Clickbank and Amazon Associates that allow you to advertise lots of different products for lots of companies using banners, link groups etc that are created by the marketing company for you.

If you have great content, great functionality and good adverts then word will get around and traffic will come to your site and you will make money. However there are a few tips and tricks that will make this a much quicker process, some of which will be discussed next time.

Next Time: How Do I Start Blogging?

Who Blogs Anyway?

You may have a certain stereotype in your mind as to who actually 'blogs' and who reads a blogs content. Surprisingly everybody who has ever surfed the Internet has probably contributed to a blog in some way or form. As stated in my previous post, blogs cover a wide range of topics; even Google has blogsearch. By browsing a few blogs (which I highly recommend, if only to gain an understanding of how blogging works) you will see that everybody blogs; secondary school children, 22 year olds such as myself and even the older generation are now blogging as a way of supplementing their pension. Yes blogging is no longer unique to the hardened Internet-ers but is accessible and attainable by both you and me.

Individuals tend to blog as a way of expressing their opinion or giving something back to hobbies or past-times they have enjoyed for many years. These blogs often feature tips and tricks and reviews from their chosen area and the bloggers make money through advertising on their sites. An example is Gone Camping UK ; the owner enjoys camping and has chosen to blog about his hobby, generating revenue through advertisements. Larger groups/well known individuals and businesses tend to produce blogs to advertise a product and generate revenue directly through increased web traffic to their website resulting in an increase in sales. Examples here are Blogging to the Bank and MagniWork .



However not everyone aims to directly make money from blogging. The popular TV show Top Gear has a blog which can be found here and acts as an extension to the TV show, of course raising awareness of the show along the way!

Next Time: Is Blogging Profitable?