April 19th, 2006

Good Blogging = Good Publishing = Good Business

by Scott Karp

Can’t we lay to rest the endlessly inane debate about whether blogging can succeed as a business? (The latest miss-the-point round is between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler.)

Since everyone seems to be having so much trouble with this, let’s make it really simple:

- Blogging is just a form of publishing

- If you publish useful or entertaining information, people will read it

- If the people reading it are a coherent group that companies want to sell to, those companies will pay to advertise

- The better the blog, the bigger the audience, the better the business

- If you string a bunch blogs together, you’ll have a bigger audience

(This is drugs, this is your brain on drugs.)

This is media 101. It’s NOTHING NEW.

Will all 36 million blogs make a lot of money? Of course not. The vast majority will make none — at least not through advertising, which you’d think was the only source of revenue in the universe.

But as Hugh MacLeod points out: “The other major way to make money with the blogging platform is to use it to market your Global Microbrand, like Thomas did with English Cut. That to me is far more useful to far more people, yet it gets no mention in the Journal article.”

Blogging is a form of self-promotion, as the Boston Globe pointed out the other day.

In many ways blogging is the new novel/screen play writing. At some point, everybody will be doing it, but only a handful of people will be any good at it and achieve any kind of lasting success by doing it.

Topics: Blogging | Blogs | Media Economics

  • totallyace


    It is little bit difficult to make money from blogs, but it will help to gain PR and more traffic. Because You yourself serve online as a brand.

  • erikvlie

    Making money with a blog is hard, period. All of the advice and comments I've read so far on it, are either US-inspired or don't work. That's because the US is one vast market. Live in the EU, and the market is fragmented, due to the number of languages there.

    Remains: your name as a brand. Good thinking, but again only really viable in the US. On IT-Enquirer, a blog annes web magazine on desktop publishing the AdSense income hovers around 8 to 10 USD a day. That's nowhere near a decent income, let alone instant richess. The articles on there are non-biased, though.

    What I learned from managing this site is that some organic SEO is required, just as it is on regular sites.

  • Excellent topic and you covered it nicely. Adsense is indeed a huge player in the online advertising world and I believe any tips and guides are appreciated. Of course, while millions of publishers are running Adsense, only a handful are making serious money off it. As far as I’m concerned, the best way to make money with Adsense is to develop a website on a niche topic that should also be something you are interested in. Hobby-related sites have the best chances of keeping you, as their webmaster, happy and involved, and this will soon show in the number of visitors and the amounts of money you make.

    Another vital thing to consider is ad style and placement. I prefer to use a similar structure for all my websites – one that was proven to work. I will share this with you as I believe in reciprocal help through free advice – I also learned A LOT from browsing blogs such as this and other webmaster resources on Adsense. Ok, so getting back to ad placement: I love the idea of placing a 120x90 or 160x90 adlink box on the left side menu of my sites, in the top left corner, just below the banner. Have a look at my website, Web2earn.com and look at the area below the graphic saying “Online money” – it will house a nice 160x90 adlinks box soon after my site receives enough traffic.

    The second good spot to place a 250x250 or 300x250 ad box is in the article text. Loose the border and make the background of the ads the same as your web background (same is true for the adlink placement mentioned above. The final touch comes with a final ad placed at the end of each araticle. Consider the article a path that leads to the final conclusion – exactly where the ads are. You can also place a small graphic image to the left of the ads, so that they are more attractive from a visual point of view.

    By using such an ad placement most of my sites get CTRs of 10%-15% all the time

    Give it a try and let me know if this sort of ad placement worked in your particular cases – I am also doing a study on this which I will eventually publish on web2earn.com

    Best regards,

    Mihai

  • Three Cheers for the Global Mini Brand!

  • A good blog is the unvarnished views of the person writing it. If you're doing it to make money, it will corrupt what you write. Of course, if you happen to make money while doing it, that's great too, as long as it's not the main point.

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