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  • What Do You Do When Starting A Blog?

    Posted on September 13th, 2008 Jason 19 comments

    Unluckily, the weekend is over here… however, had a good day with some interesting football games to watch so not all’s bad. :)

    Anyways, time to answer another question – I’m picking random ones off the original post and chose today’s because it seemed easiest to answer I thought you guys might be able to get something from it.

    Otooo asked:

    When you started off (and still now), how much time each day did u spend promoting your blog? What type of promotion did you do?
    What would be a reasonable amount for a high school student like me to spend each day in promotion?

    Well… as the question was about this blog, I’ll answer it in relation to this blog.

    First, let me warn you that this is completely a social blog; if your goal is to make money, do not start out with one of these, as it is crap for making money relative to time put in.

    If you are interested in networking, making buddies online of different levels (which WILL indirectly make you money), a social blog is a great thing to have. The thing is, I meet little / none people when I’m flipping websites on my own for example, whereas I get at least 5-10 instant messenger adds a day through this blog, through which I’ve met quite a few entertaining and helpful people (and some considerably less so ;) ).

    When starting this blog, I was a bit caught up in the hype of the whole make money online thing… I was making around $2,000 – $3,000 a month then, give or take a couple hundred, and by studying blogs that were ‘big’ in the niche, I thought that one had to have a ‘Make Money Online’ blog to succeed more. How wrong I was.

    Anyways, as I thought I needed this blog to do well, I spend quite a bit of time on it – around 5-10 hours a day (yikes!) starting out, and then 3-4 hours a day for the first month and a half. Of course, after it started making around $200 a month for all that work, I decided to look at doing other things :razz:

    Funnily enough, at the beginning… I put in a lot of work trying to build this – guest posting on other blogs, running monthly (and sometimes weekly) contests, commenting on 30 – 50 other blogs a day, dropping shitloads of Entrecards, posting like mad on related forums… the blog grew steadily, but progress was slow.

    What’s funny about it… is that the days I’ve worked least on this blog, growth has been pretty huge. For example, I leave maybe 1-2 comments on other blogs a day these days… not to promote, but because I thought the post was an interesting one or I felt differently on one of the points raised. I honestly can’t remember the last guest post I did, but don’t think it was for some time, the forums I use have no mention of this blog on them and I dropped Entrecard from this blog a month or so ago. Yet, the metric which everyone looks at to measure blogs – RSS count – has shot up to around the 1,000 mark (even if it doesn’t want to stay around that level too strictly :) ).

    What have I learned about promoting social blogs? Work smart, not hard. I’ve said this a few times, but if you had to work hard to succeed online… I’d have stopped doing all this ages ago.

    Anyways, what ways would I recommend promoting your social blog?

    - Contests. Love them, hate them, they work. Give away cash, electronics, even technically worthless things like advertising space or consultation… people will lap it up. Contest Arbitrage works for social blogs too, you know :)

    - Be different. There are a tonne of blogs in every single niche, even the small ones… it’s not different here. If you’re saying the same thing as Marketer A, B, C, D and E, I’m not checking you out. Sorry.

    Offer solid content, and be different… try out some viral marketing. For a direct example, see the password protected post I offered a few weeks ago, or think about the eBook I offered to email subscribers that were subscribed before X day only…. you get the idea. Don’t copy everyone else and try and do your own thing… you’ll get people interested.

    The time spent promoting differs on each person and his / her goal. Do you want your blog to be ‘A-List’, or do you just want a place to express yourself and make some friends? If the former, you’d have to put in more time daily than I did starting out; if the latter, a couple hours a day maximum will be enough. Social blogging is fun, but ultimately unless you pitch a shit load of products and services to your readers – something I’ve tried not to do (and hopefully not done!)… there is a lot more money in other areas.

    Hope I answered the question :)

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