With blogging, as with anything in life, success is not guaranteed. This may sound like an obvious thing to say, but when you read a lot of blogs in the blogging and make money online niches, the overwhelming message is that “anyone can do this – look it’s easy!”. Well, in many ways it is easy to start a blog, but making any serious money out of it is not (or I must be doing something wrong).

Image courtesy of Tom@HK

Seth Godin makes a good case that there is still a high correlation between hard work and success. Sure, a bit of luck doesn’t hurt, but as Gary Player once said:

“The harder I practice, the luckier I get.” - Gary Player

Unfortunately working hard is not a guarantee of success – but it sure improves your chances. Conversely, I think it’s fair to say you are far more likely to not be successful if you’re not prepared to work hard.

2 hours a day?

John Chow famously claims to only work at blogging for two hours a day. Although I’m not sure what he bases that on, for a blog as popular as his, it seems somewhat too good to be true – I guess he must outsource a lot of the work (certainly I see a lot of guest posts anyway). Maybe it’s because his is a mature, well-known site which doesn’t take as much promotional effort as a new one struggling to get noticed – I don’t know. Then there’s Darren Rowse who says he works 50 hours a week, which sounds more realistic to me.

“Pro blogging is not a get-rich-quick tactic.” - Darren Rowse

Regardless of exactly how many hours you put in, I think most people who’ve been blogging for awhile would agree that it’s not easy to consistently produce quality content. And that’s not even mentioning all the other things you have to do to manage a blog – networking, advertising, tech stuff, moderation, optimisation…it’s a long list.

So why’s that a good thing?

Well, as I already mentioned, starting a blog is easy. Using WordPress.com or Blogger you can create one in a matter of minutes. Slap on a couple of AdSense ads, sit back and wait for the cheque to arrive. I think it would be fair to say that blogging has an extremely low barrier to entry. Consequently, huge numbers of new blogs are started daily – imagine what would happen if they all continued and grew to maturity! We’d have an online population explosion (well, more than we already do), and it’d become even more difficult to make any kind of impression. With so many people making masses of easy money, we’d have rampant inflation, leading to a global credit crisis (oops, we’ve got that already, haven’t we). The sky would fall on our heads, and life as we know it would cease to exist…

OK, I’m being overly dramatic, but the reality is that the majority of those new blogs never make it beyond the “Hello World” stage, and only a small percentage ever manage to attract much traffic at all. Why? Because it takes hard work! This is a good thing because while there is virtually no barrier to entry to start a blog, there most certainly is one to becoming succesful, which creates an opportunity for someone who is a bit savvy, has something to say, and is motivated to work hard.

Are you willing to pay the price?

Certainly, the myth of lounging by the pool while the cash comes flooding in without having to lift a finger is just that – a myth. Blogging is a stimulating and enjoyable pursuit. It may even bring you a measure of fame and fortune. But are you willing to pay the price to get there?

Related posts:

1. 5 Reasons for Blogging
2. Book review: Problogger – Secrets for Blogging your way to a Six-figure Income

Every day I use several tools and services for creating, maintaining and promoting my blog, tools that are absolutely fundamental to various aspects of the blogging process. Sure, I probably could get by without some of them…but I sure wouldn’t like to try! And I’m not referring to electricity or the World Wide Web – obviously blogging would be impossible without those!

The common denominator in this list is that they are all free, which probably has something to do with their market penetration. But their value is definitely far higher! Without further ado, here they are, roughly ranked according to how indispensable they are – although as I’ve already pointed out, I couldn’t really do without any of them:

1. WordPress

This is a no-brainer. I’ve been responsible for a traditional HTML site before, and take it from me – manually updating pages, navigation, etc and uploading updates via FTP is no joke. These days we take for granted how easy it is to publish a post using a content management system like WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Joomla, etc.

2. Google search

I doubt a day goes by that I don’t use Google search – as I read somewhere recently, Google has become so ingrained in our culture that the word is now used as a verb (eg why don’t you just Google it?). I use it for news, entertainment, researching articles, finding other blogs, finding sources of technical help, and much more. Sure, there are other search engines, but Google’s market dominance means I never have to use them.

3. Google Reader

For keeping up with my favourite blogs and finding out what’s happening in my niche, I use Google Reader. This application is a real time and bandwidth saver, and allows me to check my feeds at home, at work and on holiday if I want. It sure beats manually visiting each site to see if it’s been updated!

4. Feedburner

Feedburner is great not only for knowing roughly how many people are consuming my feed, but also which posts are the most popular (which usually has a lot to do with the quality of my headlines), and which result in clicks through to my site.

5. Google analytics

Speaking of feedback, Analytics provides invaluable information about a site’s visitors, traffic sources, and how those visitors interact with its content. And the thing is, I only use the basic functionality – I’m sure I could learn a lot more about my site by drilling down a bit further.

6. Akismet

Spam represents the dark side of the internet, and unless you want to become a victim, you’d better protect yourself. I find Akismet extremely accurate in identifying and quarantining comment spam before it makes it onto my site. Before I installed it I was getting increasing numbers of spam messages every day, and manually moderating them (grr) – what a chore. Akismet stopped it dead in its tracks.

7. Firefox SearchStatus addon

This great little addon to Firefox gives me a high-level picture of a site’s authority with a single glance down at my status bar, revealing PageRank, Alexa and Compete rankings. It can also automatically highlight nofollow links, and tons of other stuff which is really useful when networking with other sites.

8. AdSense

Ease of use, and the fact that it’s available to just about everyone makes this the most widely-used monetization option on the net. If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should.

9. Paypal

This is a great way to collect payments from your site visitors without the hassle and expense of needing your own merchant account to process credit card payments. Not only that, but loads of advertising networks and affiliate programs use it to pay partners. Also, the fact that it’s widely used on eBay means your average web user is familiar with it, and thus more likely to use it to submit a payment without fear of having their payment information fall into the wrong hands.

10. FileZilla

Last, but not least, FileZilla is incredibly handy for transferring files to your web host – images, plugins, etc. I probably don’t use it every day, but when I do need to, it certainly makes my life a lot easier.

I’m sure there are many other essential tools and resources out there – these are just the ones I could name off the top of my head. What about you? Care to share your favourite productivity tool?

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So you’ve started your blog for whatever reason. You may have been going for awhile, or only started recently. Either way, have you considered your exit strategy?

It may sound like a strange thing to think about if you’ve only just begun blogging; chances are you’re far more concerned about where your next hit is going to come from (for your site, I mean ). But the fact is, most of us are not going to be blogging until the day we die, so what are the choices for a graceful exit?

What are the options?

As far as I can see, there are only really two options:

• you can simply abandon your blog, or
• you can hand it off to someone else

If you’ve never confronted this issue, then by default you probably fall into the first category. That’s right, all the love, sweat, blood and guts (not to mention late nights) you’ve been pouring into the beast you call your blog will one day simply be thrown away and trampled in the dust like yesterday’s newspaper! Not a very inspiring thought, is it?

On the other hand, your blog can live on if you are able to pass it on to someone else when you decide to quit. Whether this will be feasible depends on a number of factors, which is why you need to think about it now.

Is your blog all about you?

If your blog is of a personal nature, it’s very unlikely someone else could take it over. On the other hand, if you run a niche site where the focus is a particular activity, product, or profession, you stand a much greater chance of the site developing an identity of its own. Even then though, blogging by its very nature blurs the lines between blog and blogger, meaning a handover will not go un-noticed. You can ease the transition however by having a period of overlap with the new owner.

What’s your blog worth?

Putting a value on a website is not easy. There does not seem to be a standard formula that you can apply to decide objectively what a site is worth. At the end of the day, it’s worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. But there are a number of indicators that a potential buyer will look at (please note that I’ve never bought or sold a site – what follows is my interpretation of what I’ve read around and about):

• Number of visitors and pageviews. It goes without saying that the more traffic your site has, the more earning potential it has (although not all traffic is of the same quality, so traffic sources are also important).
• How big is your community? This is measured by your feed subscriptions, any mailing lists you may have, and the number of comments your blog attracts.
• How much revenue does your site generate? Anyone who’s thinking about buying your site will be very interested in what kind of return they are likely to get. Indeed, the most common method of valuation that I’ve noticed is a multiple of the site’s current earnings, in much the same way as stocks and shares are valued.
• Do you have a particularly desirable domain name? There have been several high profile cases where domains have changed hands for big money. If you’re lucky enough to own one, this alone could command a premium regardless of your current content.

Of course, maybe none of us will be blogging in ten year’s time – we might have all moved on to the next Big Thing. The whole blog phenomenon, after all has only been around for a decade or so. But it doesn’t hurt to plan ahead, now does it?

Related posts:

1. 5 Reasons for Blogging

People have all kinds of reasons for starting blogs, from the downright inane – “it seemed like a good idea at the time” – to the highly strategic. I decided to explore some of these motivations in a little more depth, not only because it’s interesting, but because I believe it’s an important question for all of us to think about. Why? Well, it gives purpose and direction to the activity, and is also a way of measuring your progress. Now, I’m not one of those 5-year people who can tell you in detail what they’ll be having for breakfast on 14th June 2012, but I like to have a broad idea of where I’m heading.

Image courtesy of Georgios Karamanis

Here are some reasons I believe people get involved in blogging:

• fun
• staying in touch
• fame and fortune
• professional exposure
• lifestyle

Blogging for fun

I suspect that the majority of those signing up for new blogs on WordPress.com or Blogger do so out of curiosity, to see what all the fuss is about. I read recently that a very large percentage of those signing up to these free services update their blogs a total of once! In other words, they sign up, write the obligatory Hello World post, and never return.

Still, there are plenty of others who do stick around, and may even become fairly obsessive about their blog, but their primary motivation is personal fulfillment rather than any of the other reasons I mention here.

Blogging to stay in touch

Blogs started out as online journals, a way for people to keep up with each other’s lives. Nowadays this role has been largely usurped by the social networking phenomenon – MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Interestingly though, accounts in most of these services have a blog component to them.

Blogging for fame and fortune

As with most human activities, there is a small elite in blogging who have become very rich and very well known because of their success in blogging. The reason for this is their sites are very influential in various niches, which allows them to cash in on advertising and affiliate marketing – five figure monthly incomes are the order of the day here. But even apart from this A-list, there is a long tail of those who earn a nice second income from their sites whilst maintaining their day jobs.

Those who make it to the top and stay there are obviously high achievers, but longevity also has something to do with it; it simply takes time to build up the network of contacts that leads to this level of exposure.

Blogging for professional exposure

While those in the previous category make most of their money from selling advertising and affiliate products, there are also lots of people who use blogging as a marketing channel for selling more traditional products and services. Indeed many businesses are waking up to the fact that the informal and interactive nature of blogs enables them to reach their customers in a whole new way.

Blogging for lifestyle

From stay-at-home mums to world travellers, blogging and internet marketing offers the promise of working where and when you find it convenient. All you really need (in theory anyway) is access to the internet.

Why do I blog?

I think I have elements of all these. But mainly, I find the whole concept fascinating: the idea of creating something from nothing, that will be of benefit to others, and even make me some money along the way!

Why do you blog?

How about you? Have you figured it out yet? I’d love to hear your point of view, so please leave your comments below.

Related posts:

1. Book review: Problogger – Secrets for Blogging your way to a Six-figure Income
2. What’s your blogging exit strategy?
3. 10 Essential resources for Blogging