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HOW TO BECOME A SUCCESSFUL FREELANCE BLOGGER
by Brian Konradt
Blogging (short
for "web logging"), born from the Internet age, is one of the newer venues for
freelance writing. The Internet has generated a lot of news about the financial
possibilities open to bloggers: an audience of potentially millions -- along
with possible corporate sponsorship, a byline, and infinite creative control --
captures the imagination of many prospective bloggers, and makes blogging seem
like an infinitely desirable, lucrative field.
The truth is it is much
more difficult to become a successful freelance blogger. A good knowledge of
marketing, web design, and being consistent are skills you need to make a
living (or a comfortable extra income) from this new form of media.
The reason for this is the low barrier of entry. Anyone with access to web
space can start a blog. Sites like Blogger, Livejournal and even MySpace offer
free web space to anyone willing to sign up. This has resulted in millions of
blogs in existence today, many of them literate, many of them wildly popular,
and nearly all of them free to read and browse.
That variety of free
content makes it difficult to charge for access to your writing, no matter how
good it is. You could be the greatest expert on foreign policy or nutrition
known to man, and few people would be willing to pay $5 -- or $1, or one cent
-- to read a blog post by you, the expert, when there are thousands of
semi-qualified (but bright and engaging) writers giving away similar material.
So your main sources of revenue are going to come from advertising and
from whatever paid content you can fit into the site. Luckily, web advertising
is becoming less dicey than it was a year ago. Google's "AdSense" program is a
good baseline for a page, providing targeted advertising based on your content
and paying you, directly, per click-through (although the pay rate per click is
low.) You can supplement that amount with other forms of web advertising, from
the comparatively unobtrusive banner to pop-up animations that "float over" the
text.
This brings us to the "double-edged sword" problem in web
advertising. The most effective advertising is obtrusive advertising; that is,
advertising that blocks valuable content until the user clicks on it either to
make it disappear or to take you to a different website. However, obtrusive
advertising also irritates your readers, which can lead to a lower reputation
for your blog overall. On the Internet, reputation is the single best
determinant of your web traffic. Using obtrusive advertising can significantly
lower your traffic and make your blog that much less attractive to potential
advertisers.
So you'll need to find a happy medium between heavy
advertising (and light traffic) and little to no advertising (and high traffic,
but little revenue.) Luckily, the instant responsiveness of the Internet, along
with the commenting features available on nearly all blogging software, make it
easy to ask your readers about exactly what level of advertising they'd be
willing to accept. Reader connectivity is one of the most important features of
any good blog: not only does it allow you to fine-tune your blog over time,
eliminating features that readers find irritating or off-putting, but it also
allows you to develop personal connections with your readers, the kind of
connections that build loyal audiences.
There are other ways to make
money by blogging, such as the following:
1) It's possible to
sidestep advertising altogether by making some of your content unavailable,
except to subscribers. For example, you might only keep your most recent five
or six blog entries unlocked, and require a monthly subscription fee to read
the rest of the archives;
2) Or you might keep your current
posts and your entire regular archives active, but produce some longer or
specialized entries or other content and charge a set fee for these;
3) You could even compile some of your best entries into a physical
book, along with some new content, and offer it for sale. Even if all the
entries are available online, you'd be surprised how many people are willing to
pay to have something they can hold in their hands;
4)
Additionally, you could go the Salon.com route -- make all of your archives
available to anyone willing to watch a short full-screen advertisement -- or
you could rely on readers' willingness to support content that they find
worthwhile by asking for donations outright.
Many prominent blogs and
online content providers have done this and found themselves able to make rent
and pay all of their bills every month on donations alone.
No matter
how much advertising or subscription services your blog has, it's all worthless
if people don't want to read you in the first place. And there are three simple
rules to make your blog popular:
1) Write on something you care
about
2) Write consistently and thoughtfully on a regular schedule
(daily is best)
3) Read and comment on other blogs
People
read blogs because they provide a source of information and analysis on topics
that traditional media sources only cover sketchily and hastily, or don't cover
at all. Don't try to figure out an ideal money-making blog topic and proceed
from there. People care about blogs because blogs are about personal, in-depth
viewpoints and thoughts.
If you can provide those to your audience
regularly, and you can set up a minimally-intrusive but still worthwhile
revenue system through advertising or subscriptions, there's no reason you
can't become a successful blogger.
© B.
Konradt
Brian Konradt has been a professional freelance
writer for over a decade. Visit his website at
BusyEntrepreneur.com (
http://www.busyentrepreneur.com ). Read more of Mr.
Konradt's articles at FreelanceWriting.com (http://www.freelancewriting.com) and
WritingCareer.com (
http://www.WritingCareer.com ).
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