Netizen

Friday, June 12, 2009

How To Become A Professional Blogger

Create A Blog

Get a blog for free at Blogger. Some people also use WordPress and quite like it. Think of Disqus and Zemanta as part of the blog creation process. You don't get extra points for those, and both are free. The same applies to Google Analytics. There is no excuse not to have it.

Blog Daily

Unless you can create good, original, regular content, you are not a blogger. Go do something else. Or blog as a hobby. Do not try to pass for a professional blogger. Maybe you have a day job.

Traffic Is Key

All revenue you generate from your blog is in direct proportion to your blog's traffic. It is almost certain you will not start with a huge traffic for your blog unless you are Oprah, and that is okay. It is not where you start, it is where you end up.

Content Creation

There is the stuff you write.
There are photos you post.
There are images - say from Zemanta - and videos - say from YouTube - that you integrate into your blog posts.
There are websites and news articles you link to.

A blogger is a writer, but also an editor. Links are not sly, they are integral to your blog posts. The stuff you write has to be the center of what you do, but stuff you write can't be the only thing you present.

Boosting Traffic

Referring Sites
Direct Traffic
Search Engines

Mark Penn, Hillary 2008 campaign manager, says in his famous Wall Street Journal article that at 100,000 unique visits per month, a blogger hits 75K in income. There is a suggestion that there is a direct correlation between how much traffic you get and how much you make as a blogger.

That comes to about 3,300 uniques per day. You might start out at 50 a day. You have to set goals. How about 200 per day? How about 300? 500? How about 1,000 uniques per day? It is very hard to move from 50 to 300. It is like a rocket taking off. A lot of fuel gets burnt during phase one. You can't give up along the way. Trying to get to 500 uniques per day is also where a lot of the learning takes place. So think of that early stage as the education part, not the income part. The money comes later, when you go up in page hits.

Seek Out Revenue Sources

You can get all the traffic in the world and still not have monetized your blog. In that case, you don't make any money. Monetization is key, it is conscious effort. And this talk should have been part of the first paragraph. Here are a few sources, there are several other good ones.

There is a reason why several of them require that you have been blogging for a while. If your blog has been up less than three months, stick to the dollars and cents from Google AdSense, mostly cents.

By the way, just yesterday I made about $13 each from each of these blog post ads, I worked about five minutes on each.

How To Blog Daily

What is your primary passion in life? That should be the primary passion at your blog. If you are lucky, that will also end up being your blog's niche in the market. What is your niche? Google Analytics will help you determine that. What keywords do people use at the search engines to end up at your blog? Which of your blog posts have received the most traffic? Which referring sites have generated the most traffic for you?

50% of your blog posts should be about your passion/niche. 25% can be about anything and everything that you might fancy. That is how you end up with tech bloggers waxing eloquent about politics, in the same breath. 25% can be about you and can read like journal entries. Does it have to be 50-25-25? Not really. 53-26-21 would be fine too. I am just suggesting. 60-20-20 might be better, 70-15-15 might be better still.

Every time you get a blog post idea, write it down. Better still, start a blog post, write down the idea in the subject line like you are about to write a full blog post, and save it as a draft for later.

Do You Have To Blog Daily

Not really. You could put out two great blog posts per week and still do fine. There are some successful bloggers who do that. But guess what they do for many other hours? They visit other great blogs, read their posts, participate in their comments sections, make friends, network in their part of the blogosphere.

But if your goal is to become a full time professional blogger, blogging daily is not the goal, that is the minimum. Eventually you are going to have to blog several times a day. So how often you blog depends on what you want out of the blogging experience.

More On Boosting Traffic

Creating great content, boosting traffic, and seeking out revenue sources are topics you will keep learning about for as long as you keep blogging. Those are the fundamentals. At each new traffic level, your perspective changes slightly.

Starting out you have to try out anything and everything. You have to experiment a lot to find out what is right for you, what works for you.

Blogging is not for everybody, but it is for many people. I happen to think it can be a wonderful secondary career. I think of it this way. Blogging is a fundamental skill for the knowledge worker. So if you think of it as a secondary career, you are more likely to keep polishing your blogging skills, which would be a great thing for your primary career. And if you are the entrepreneur type, you better believe it that every cent counts. Google makes its billions in cents not dollars.

Netizen Is No Spam Blog
Best Way To Increase Traffic To Your Blog
Google: Tweet Me Baby One More Time
Taking The Number 2 Spot On Google Search For Donut Android
Hitting Number 4 For Google Search Results on Cupcake Android
The Big Money Is Not In Blogging
Google Analytics Says I Am Paul Krugman Friend, Cupcake Android Expert
What Does Your Resume Look Like Today?
Content Is Queen, Marketing Is Princess
Content Is Queen
Blogging: Monkey Business?
Blogging = Learning + Teaching + Churning + Entertaining
Spamming Om Malik

Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts
Blogging Several Times A Day
Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Google Wave: Organizations Will Go Topsy Turvy

Preamble

The Google Wave team, or at least those who look after the official Google Wave Developer Blog and The Official Google Blog have been nice to me, they have been nice to my blog. They have given my blog posts on Google Wave special status. I am honored. But more than honored, I am excited. I am so excited I feel like I could be putting out blog posts on Google Wave daily. Right before that Google got me excited with Android, with the donut talk. And now I am thinking, between Google Wave and Android, Google might just have taken over this blog for the rest of this year, because I can't imagine bigger topics in tech for the rest of this year than Google Wave and Android. Bring it on.

Taking The Number 2 Spot On Google Search For Donut Android
Hitting Number 4 For Google Search Results on Cupcake Android

Now I just need one of the Googlers on either the Wave or the Android teams to walk over to the Google Ventures people and put in word for me that they need to go ahead and buy 2% of my company for 100K: Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures.

Reader Response

One reader wrote in one of my comments sections saying I came to your blog thinking you will throw some light on Google Wave's architecture, but I did not find anything. I guess so far I have been more interested in the implications of the Google Wave architecture rather than the architecture itself. But soon enough I will get around to the actual architecture, the technology of it. But for now let me have one more go at the implications. What will it mean to have Google Wave?

Organizations Will Go Topsy Turvy

You will not be able to prevent your workers, your team members from using Google Wave, it is not like you will be able to say, sorry, it's not in the budget, maybe next year. There will be bigger lines - virtually speaking - forming for Google Wave than ever did for the iPhone or the iPod. Just wait until we get nearer to the release date.

The product will be free. The product will be mind-blowing. Organizations that resist will be blown out of the water.

But email did not kill organizations. Wave will not kill organizations, quite the opposite. Wave will breathe new life into organizations. Collaboration will take a whole new meaning, a meaning that collaboration never had before. And that is a good thing.

All I am saying is this: resistance is futile.

Google Wave: Enormous Buzz
Possible Google Wave Applications And Innovations
Google Wave Architecture: Designed For Mass, Massive, Global Innovation
The Google Wave Architecture
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Blogs

The Making of the Sudoku Gadget
Google Wave API Office Hours
Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

Get creative with the Google Chrome icon
Join the Google Chrome icon project
Google Mobile App for BlackBerry goes Indian
Back from Google I/O
Zemanta helps you "blog smarter"
Google Fusion Tables
Labeling in Gmail for Android, iPhone browsers
Introducing Google Quick Search Box
Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Outer Space edition!
Use Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps for email, contacts, and calendar
Sojourning at SouthEast LinuxFest

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