Opportunities in Blogging

Publishing is changing quickly as more and more readers migrate from
paper-based products to electronic media, whether it’s a computer, a
tablet, a mobile device, or an e-reader. Change of this sort always creates
opportunities, and in the last few years it’s become clear that professional
blogging is one of them.
The last decade saw a generation of blogs grow from being side projects
and hobbies, into sites with enormous readerships and real revenues.
Very quickly blogging has become a legitimate publishing business, and
today a survey of the top 100 blogs shows that with a few notable celebrity
exceptions, almost all of them are backed by real publishing businesses.
While today the blogging industry has some very professional outfits
operating, there is still lots and lots of room for the newcomer. To start with,
there are very few household names in blogging. While most people might
recognize and know names like Time, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, there
are significantly less who know Gawker (http://gawker.com), TechCrunch
(http://techcrunch.com), Huffington Post (http://huffingtonpost.com), and
PopSugar (http://popsugar.com), which are just three of the more high
profile sites. There are still many, many people who don’t read online but
who will eventually. These folk mean that blogging is an industry with a
lot of growth ahead of it, and growth is good for business and good
for newcomers.
Opportunities in blogging also arise from the many niches and topics
that are still wide open. If you walk into any bookstore and look through
the myriad magazines that line the racks, you’ll find there are audiences
interested in reading about everything from sewing to tattoos, boating to
cooking, movies to shopping. Can you name the blog to read on tattoos?
How about a great blog about boating? Think you can find one?
Moreover, for every niche that is big enough to sustain a real paper
publication, there are dozens more that are too small for print but big
enough online. Where the distribution costs are small and even nil,distributed groups can be clumped together to form real audiences, and
bloggers have access to audiences that have never really counted before:
the so-called “long tail.”
As was often touted during the dotcom boom, the internet is a great
equalizer. The difference between one domain name and another is just
a few keystrokes. And while you shouldn’t read too much into this (after
all, people have to know your domain name to type it in), it is worth
remembering that a new voice in blogging can quickly catch on.
Of course because blogging is so accessible, it’s a tempting first business to
get into. There is a perception that it’s a zero-cost set-up, and in some ways
that’s true. You can start a new blog with not much more than a domain
name and a cheap-as-chips hosting account. This is certainly a claim that
you could never make about, say, starting a magazine or newspaper, where
the physical costs of making and distributing the product can be prohibitive.
What isn’t so obvious, is that to build a blog that is self-sustaining and
eventually profitable, does require cash, and it can be a significant amount
at that. For as easy as it is to start a blog, it is still hard to produce
consistent levels of content, to acquire traffic and readership, and to
ultimately generate revenue. While thousands of blogs may open their
proverbial doors every day, the funnel of survival can be harsh and many fall
into disrepair very quickly.
For hobby bloggers, the costs of operating a blog are hidden in the
blogger’s own time. They do the posting, the marketing, and all the other
chores of running a blog themselves, effectively eating the costs by doing
it in their spare time. But make no mistake, those costs are there and if you
want to approach blogging with a business mindset, you need to account
for them all.
On the flip side, by looking at blogging as a business, you also bring
the longevity that blogging needs to succeed. While hobbyists and less
organized competitors fall by the wayside, your operation will keep chipping
away, building audiences, growing search traffic, creating a bigger and
bigger content archive. In many ways, blogging is an endurance race,
requiring a lot of momentum to build up to become a true success story.So building a business out of blogging, like any business, involves
investment both in time and money. The questions you want to ask are:
What costs need to be accounted for? Where will the revenue come from?
How long will it take? Along with these high-level business questions, you’ll
also be wondering about the practicalities of running a blog as a business,
planning direction, finding and hiring staff, creating content, and marketing.
In this book I aim to answer all these questions as well as to give you a
practical, hands-on guide to building a business out of blogging. Like
any business, it will take hard work, dedication, savvy, and a bit of luck.
As someone who has built a number of blogs, I hope reading through my
experience and methods will help you find your path to success.