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From ProBlogger, another great post: Making money from blogging takes time.
It’s something I’ve also mentioned before: blogging for money is not a “get rich quick” scheme. It’s hard work, and takes dedication, talent, a bit of luck… and, above all, time. In this particular case, I don’t mean “time” as in a lot of hours a day, but in the sense of “been doing it regularly for years”. Because:
- it takes time to build a readership of regular readers, who either visit your blog(s) every day, or subscribe to the feed(s) – but still come to your blog when they want to comment, and they will do it often, because they’re used to your blog, they feel comfortable there, and know (even if never face to face) both you and most of the other regulars there.
- it’s also a matter of numbers – number of posts, that is. If you’ve started your blog a week ago, it has probaly 5-20 posts, but if you’ve been blogging for 2 years, 1500 to 2000 posts are a more likely number. That gives much larger odds of someone googling for something and arriving at your blog – even at an old post. Which impresses the visitor, of course.
And, being impressed, he or she then looks around, reads your more recent stuff… and you have a new reader!
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It absolutely takes time to do any kind of writing, and blogging is no exception. And it’s not quantity that matters, it’s quality. Bloggers sometimes do it wrong, they just repeat someone else’s comments without adding anything. You’re doing it right by adding your own thoughts and observations. That’s what you need to do if you’re a blogger, otherwise people will just go straight to the sources you’re quoting. Give them something to come back for! Remember that your most precious resource is time.
Hi again, Eric. Thanks for the comment.
Unlike most people, I don’t think you have to choose between quantity and quality. Or, to put it in another way: I didn’t mention quality here (I do so in the series, though) because it’s implied.
Quantity, here, doesn’t mean posting 10 times a day even when you don’t feel like writing and have nothing to say – so you simply link to other articles (as you say, becoming a repeater). That is, of course, a bad idea (though I’ve seen a lot of people doing it.) It means, simply, that you’ve been blogging for years, instead of weeks.
Also, I didn’t mention it in this post, as it’s stated clear in Darren’s article, but another consequence of this is that one shouldn’t give up because he or she is only making $1 a day after 3 months, even though the posts are of good quality. As we said… it takes time.
Unfortunately, if quality was implied we wouldn’t have splogs, would we? (splog = short for spam log)
I did imply it… in what I wrote. I don’t control the rest of the world.
Also, splogs aren’t just “a lot of bad quality posts” (like, for instance, a repeater would do). They’re conscious, active attempts to “fool” search engines, get hits and/or increase some other site’s PageRank. In other words, they’re dishonest, not merely low quality.
The more we talk about longevity, sticktoitiveness, and persistence, the more honest we’ll be as internet marketers.
Sometimes a person can get discouraged when “it takes time” because there’s so much garbage out there that distracts people from just buckling down and doing what they need to do. When there is a high percentage of get rich quick sites, it adds credibility to the perception that it is possible. So good people get misled, discouraged and then disillusioned with all of it.
Instead we need to nurture the vision of online business as being just that, business. More accessible to the average Joe or Joanne, but still business.
There is one ad out there on the traffic exchanges these days that just irks me. You may know the one I mean, it’s written all in caps, red of course, and says something like THIS BUSINESS IS DOUBLING EVERY DAY, THIS IS NO HYPE!!!
Right. He or she must be related to Dubbya, thinking he can reinvent the language to suit his own definitions.