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.

• Blogsvertise
• Smorty
• Chitika
• InfoLinks
• LinkWorth
• Sponsored Reviews
• Amazon Affiliate

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.

• HDA’s Home Plan Magazine, DesignAmerica Redesigned...
• Jumpstart On Summer At Breezes Curaçao
• Online Savings Calculator
• Scrubs & Beyond Offers Latest Styles In Their Prin...
• Modify365
• HD Radio Song Tagging
• AMS Fulfillment
• Many Benefits of Hughes Net Internet

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.

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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

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• Zemanta - Is Worth a Second Look (agingreluctantly.com)
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Onto Digital Publishing

I don't know a whole lot about publishing but I have an Internet enthusiast's feel for some of what is going on. There is a tectonic shift underway.

"......so I'm interested in your thougts on the matter. I'm a magazine publisher, and we're transitioning from print into digital media...so I'm trying to figure it all out...like everybody else in print and TV....."

That is such a huge topic. A paradigm shift is under way. And there will be winners and there will be losers. The winners will be those who choose to ride the wave. The losers will be those who stay stubborn and get washed away.

Murdoch said while buying the WSJ, people don't want to pay. As in, he was thinking of turning the WSJ into something entirely ad supported, give everything out for free. No subscription, nothing. Print will not go away completely, and subscriptions will not go away completely, but that top dog just might have a point.

(1) Focus like crazy on serving ads. Have a good ad team. Gawker Media asked for and got premium prices. They did not exactly do AdSense.
(2) Your site should be a multi media experience.
(3) There should be the latest web functionalities. Which these days seems to mean the web experience should feel social.
(4) Remember, you are serving content, but you are also building community. But never forget content, your number one offering.
(5) Keep an open mind. Change should be not a decision for today, it should be a lifestyle, or rather, workstyle.

"I felt like I was previewing the future of media." (on the CNN Facebook collaboration for January 20)

Case in study. Plum. Comes out once a year. Has a niche market that I am going to call prime real estate, beachfront property. Some of what might apply to Plum would also apply to the New York Times. When the New York Times goes completely online, it gets read globally. Its readership expands like huge. But the revenue per reader is less than it was with print circulation. You lower the price and you make money on volume. Check out the 99 cent pizza place on 41st and Ninth.

There are pregnant women above 35 in America. Well, they also exist in Europe, and Japan, and India, and elsewhere. In going digital a media property like Plum could go global with no additional cost in terms of content creation. And if you manage to build community, many users create content for you for free.

You are looking at becoming a global brand name, and a media powerhouse. From coming out once a year, it becomes a web destination that people visit every day. It already has a great ad base, it looks like.

What makes Plum cutting edge is it has a very sharply defined niche, this collection of rich women, to put it mildly. So Plum is digital edge cutting edge. The new medium is all about niches. And the niche you find can be global. Plum got there in terms of concept before it got there in terms of technology.




http://upendra.shardanand.com My friend Upendra seems to be doing some cutting edge, insane quality work, right at the edge.
Daylife Select a game-changer for online publishing: the mind-bending Daylife Select. ...... gorgeous new pages of constantly updating content ...... lets publishers launch instant content portals containing thousands or millions of pages, with stories, topics, photo galleries, search (much like you see on our showcase, daylife.com), all in their own brand, voice, look, and feel. And without developer resources. It all happens through a simple point-and-click interface, not unlike launching a social network on Ning or a blog on WordPress. ........ through our integration tools, it can blend seamlessly with (or around) your existing property. ...... a content cloud computer ...... not only Daylife-collected content, but a huge range social media sources ...... videos from YouTube, photos from Flickr, topical streams from Twitter, search results from Yahoo!, comments from Disqus, and entries from Wikipedia. ....... ANY Google Gadget. .... not only do you have millions of pages – but every piece of every page is embeddable and shareable – so you now have millions of widgets ........ Smart Context automatically inserts hyperlinks into topical keywords ....... increase your URLs exponentially, which have huge downstream impacts on SEO and, of course, organic traffic acquisition. ...... let’s you curate the world around your content – do what you do best and outsource the rest.
The New Architecture of News news consumption is, if anything, increasing – it remains one of the top three activities on the web ...... news organizations are just now turning from self-preservation to re-invention ...... all about offering superior navigation to the content ...... do what you do best and link to the rest. ........ More than ever, publishers need something unique - in voice, brand, content - around which to build. ...... even more need for differentiation. ...... unique, differentiated content & products can see increasing returns. ....... intelligent, malleable technology platform for organizing news from thousands of content-creators ...... News will do more than survive. It will flourish.
Ethic of the link, revisited « The Future of Journalism

MediaTalk; A Journal for Women Pregnant Later in Life - New York Times
Plum, the first pregnancy magazine aimed at women over 35 .....
produced by Groundbreak Publishing, is described as a joint effort
with the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists. ........
Rebekah Meola, Groundbreak's principal ..... The 200-page glossy, to
appear annually ...... 400,000 readers who are typically well-educated
and affluent.
http://www.plummagazine.com/content/story_65.php award-winning
title's creative team. ..... Plum magazine, the award-winning
publication for pregnant women 35 and older .... world-renowned
publication designers ...... "We immediately recognized in Plum the
spirit of a great magazine," says Milton Glaser. ...... Plum's
commitment to continued excellence in both editorial and design. In
just its second year, the magazine is building on the successes of its
landmark debut by aligning itself not only with the leading
practitioners in the fields of obstetrics and gynecology, but with the
best the design industry has to offer. ....... wide range of
editorial subjects, including health, fashion, child care, personal
memoir, celebrity and personality profiles ......... text,
photography, illustration, and exclusive graphic elements .......
educated, sophisticated, established women facing motherhood at a
critical phase of their lives. .........
www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/25364.php New York-based publisher
Rebekah Meola ...... scheduled to be published only once per year and
distributed exclusively through doctors' offices, is "a cross between
a woman's beauty and lifestyle magazine and a health/pregnancy manual
...... "one of the country's fastest growing demographics" -- older
pregnant women. ....... between 1990 and 2002, the birth rate among
women ages 35 to 39 increased 30%, while the birth rate among women
ages 40 to 44 increased 51%
www.telegraphindia.com/1040905/asp/look/story_3715336.asp women who
do not know what to expect while expecting .... Plum, the first
pregnancy magazine aimed at women over 35 ...... Rebekah Meola,
Groundbreak's principal, said older, expectant mothers shared many of
the same concerns as younger ones, but often had greater anxiety about
medical complications, infertility and return to work.
www.spoke.com/info/c5x1RHN/GroundBreakPublishingInc
http://www.newsweek.com/id/150312 Many of these women put kids on
hold as they climbed career ladders. Translation: they're smart,
they've got money to spare and they want the absolute best for their
babies. As a result, advertiser interest in the magazine--which will
be distributed free to patients by the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists--has been "exceptional," says Plum
publisher Rebekah Meola, with heavy hitters like Volvo,
Hewlett-Packard and Johnson & Johnson signed on.