How do you market your blog?
I’m starting a series of posts that I’ve decided to call ‘The Pessimists Guide to Blogging’… over the next couple of weeks (perhaps even longer if these posts are met with a little more than a dull dose of apathy), I’m going to look at one rather pessimistic view of the blogging life and see if we can come up with some more optimistic lessons that’ll help us to achieve our goals and promote our blogs.
Will it work? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Will you come out of this with the Holy Grail of blogging wisdom? I doubt it, but I’ve already outlined several posts so I may as well kill a few electrons and make you suffer through them while I remind you how much we all suck and try to convince you to give up blogging now, while you still have your sanity.
I thought Ambition would be a good place to start, and not just because it’s near the beginning alphabetically, but because I know we all have it and therefore crushing it now would seem like an efficient and worthwhile task.
Here’s the pessimistic (nay, the real world) view of ambition…
In case you can’t read the above image, it says this: “Ambition - The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.”
As a blogger, I’m sure you’ve heard the sayings ‘one post at a time’, ‘hang in there, it takes commitment and time to build an audience’, etc. The facts are that over 100,000 new blogs are started every day (many of them won’t survive longer than a month), Technorati track over 112 million total blogs… what do you think your chances of cracking the top 100 are?
If you do have the ambition, and a little bit of passion, then you might make it past the first few months, but then what? If you’re dedicated, you might manage 1 post per day, at 500 words per post, that’s about 45,000 words over three months, and for what? 100 RSS subscribers and $50 in earnings from Adsense?
Do you have hopes and dreams of earning a full-time income from blogging? if you quit your day job, launch yourself into the blogsphere to the point where you’ve burnt yourself out after a couple of months, what position will you find yourself in then… 112 million blogs are out there, what’s going to make enough people notice yours over the next one?
You might indeed take those one thousand steps, but instead of reaching your destination, you’ll be lucky if you manage to find your way back to where you started.
The Optimistic View
Now it’s time to look at the glass as half-full… “Ambition - The journey of a thousand miles starts with just one step” - that’s the more popular saying, and it’s one many people draw inspiration from. There is a lot of money to be made in blogging, and you don’t need to make the Technorati top 100 to earn a comfortable living.
Do you have the ambition? Have you been blogging for months and getting nowhere? are you yet to even begin? What’s it going to take to get to that next step?
If you have the ambition to succeed in blogging, then what’s holding you back? YOU need to be proactive - the knowledge is out there, countless examples of successful blogs are there for you to dissect and analyse, many top bloggers give you priceless advice for free… use your ambition, drive yourself forward, figure out what you need to do so that you can take that next step, and the one after, and the one after that (plan for it, make it happen).
For a little added incentive, take a look at the TechCrunch advertiser page… TechCrunch is the #2 most popular blog on the Internet according to Technorati and for 2.8 million unique views per month, they get to charge advertisers a healthy $12,000 / month for the privelage of sticking a 125×125 banner on their site… I count 10 of those banners there right now, and that’s not the only advertising they run - you do the math, I’ll be happy with 5%.
The above image - and many more - can be found on despair.com… you can even get it printed on a coffee mug if you like.
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it was nice you posted the optimist view immediately - i could have bailed out… lol
it’s really hard to get past those ‘dedication and commitment’ thing… and we’re not even talking about ‘niche’ yet…
fortunately there are helpful blogs (like yours) who encourages and teaches newbie bloggers like me.
;)
I’m optimistic by nature, but sometimes that can send you off running in the wrong direction… I like to look at things pessimistically from time to time, just to get that reality check and figure out where I should be heading. All that and these demotivating pics appeal to my warped sense of humour and I just had to write about them, lol.
[...] with… two young kids make sure of that). The previous article in this series was about Ambition if you’ve got plans of being a full-time blogger, then you’d better get over there and [...]