Blogging

It’s no secret that one-man blogs can make a lot of money. Steve Pavlina makes over $100,000 per month with his; Darren Rowse had an estimated $300,000+ month when he launched his last eBook and my friend Al’s site, Coolest Gadgets, was having $60,000 months way back in 2007.

In a sea of over 100 million blogs, these guys are the exception. It’s certainly not easy or quick to build a blog to reach these income levels. If it were, they wouldn’t be called the exceptions. Many bloggers will tell you that there’s no “one size fits all” strategy when it comes to building a huge blog. Well, I’m going to leave the personal sites alone, and possibly prove those people wrong by examining the Technorati Top 10.

Note from Glen: At your request, I’ve added a Print option to the bottom of all posts. This post is quite long, so you may want to give it a try. As there are over 100 million active blogs online I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of them don’t earn much money at all. I suspect a lot of blog owners can’t even cover their hosting costs. Whilst there are other benefits to blogging besides making an income, many people do aim to be financially rewarded for the efforts they put in.

If you don’t want to make money from your blog (which I totally respect) then this blog post is probably not for you. If you do want to get a return on the time and creative effort that goes into building a blog, then this guide will show you how to do just that.

I hope that my old English teacher is reading this post. The one who openly told me in front of 28 other students that “writing is not for you.” Whilst I’ve said time and time again that I don’t think I’m a great writer, I do know that my writing has greatly improved in recent years and I’ve been able to use my words to earn me a lot of money.

What you say online is far more important than how you say it, of course, but being able to convey complex messages in a simple manner is not an easy task. To quote Blaise Pascal, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” In this post I want to share the steps that took me from someone who was verbally raped by my English teachers and hated writing to writing for thousands of people on a weekly basis.

I’m deviating from the typical type of post here at ViperChill today as I have something pretty awesome to announce: My first plugin, Reputation Management for WordPress, is now available for download. And it’s free. I’ve been using this plugin personally for months and decided that other people would really benefit from it, so now I’m releasing it here.

Reputation management (or monitoring, in this case) is about tracking your brand online. Just imagine if you could easily see when people are talking about your blog, your name, your products or anything else you want to track – all via your WordPress Dashboard. It’s always good to see who is singing your praises and it’s important to know who is criticising you or your brand so you can respond where necessary. Now you can see all that, quickly and easily.

A few months ago something was bothering me quite a lot. One of my best friends, Diggy, was implementing all of the traffic methods I recommend to grow a blog and was seeing results, but not the kind of results he really deserved for his efforts.

He writes in the same niche as I did when I grew PluginID to 6,500 subscribers, so my traffic advice was both relevant and from experience. For a while I couldn’t work out why his site wasn’t growing as it should’ve been, but a few hours after sitting down and inspecting the blog, I had a large checklist of suggested improvements that have really taken Upgrade Reality to the next level.

When I analysed the most tweeted blog posts ever, I found that Twitter users like posts that are around 1,100 words long. When I wrote the most important blogging analysis ever, I found that the average length of popular posts was 1,600 words. This was quite surprising to a lot of readers and is a figure far higher than most people are producing.

In the comments for one of these posts, someone gave me the idea of analysing different industries to see the average post length in each, so they could gauge how long their articles should be. I’m not a blogger who will guess numbers and just throw stats out there, so I decided to do an in-depth analysis. I picked 3 posts from 5 blogs in 8 different niches (confused yet?) and noted the word count for each.

As I announced last week, I have sold my biggest blog, PluginID. The site was around 19 months old, had 6,600 subscribers, and according to a tool that monitors different niches online, was the 10th biggest personal development blog in the world.

I have revealed my reasons for selling over on PluginID, so go there for more details. If you’re wondering how much I sold the site for then my best answer, based on legal limitations, is simply “a mid five-figure fee.” Instead of dwelling on the sale, I want to praise the growth of such a big community and share the steps involved in duplicating my success.

I ran a poll in the sidebar here for a few days asking people what their main goals were for 2010 in terms of internet marketing. The two clear favourites were: “Quitting your job to make a living online” and “Increase website traffic”. The latter, of course, is people looking for more eyeballs on their content. And, although it may not be obvious, so is the first.

You can make a beautiful, well-structured site that contains excellent content, but it isn’t going to make any money unless it starts getting visitors. No matter what webmasters like to say is ‘king’ online these days, everything we do is for traffic. It’s what matters on the web.