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Saturday
Sep262009
Debate: Can You Still Build a Profitable Blog?
Young Urban Professional
Earlier this week I appeared on Canadian TV (specifically BNN.ca) where I discussed blogging vs. lifestreaming with Lainey Lui of Laineygossip.com and eTalk. During the interview I maintained that it's difficult today to build a profitable blog since many of the big niches are taken. Lainey disagreed. What's your view?
Reader Comments (18)
I think you can still do it, you just really have to have an innovative angle. AND having a network presence already helps a ton. What's to stop you from building a community on a blog and making profit from it? People still read blogs, you just need to get creative since it's competitive.
Getting in on the ground floor of a new niche helps. I started Liliputing just under 18 months ago and it's been profitable pretty much since day one.
Building a profitable blog has always been "difficult," if you mean that it takes hard work and determination so it strikes me as obvious.Like business books, magazines, Web sites generally, etc, I don't think there's any lower ability to "break in" to the blogging field now than there ever was, so it's certainly no more difficult than it ever was as long as you're on top of your game.I suspect you could have a wager with an established blogger (like Darren Rowse, say) that would say he couldn't start a blog in a popular field and make a profit within 6 months - because I rather suspect someone like him could without significant difficulty.
Steve, you are absolutely right. People have built brand equity, SEO and subscribers to a point, where there are high barriers to entry for blogging now.
What qualifies as profitable? I agree with most of what was said here in defence of blogs but profit or ROI can be a number of things. And has Neville Hobson pointed out, (http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/09/23/too-little-measurement/) There is not enough effort in monitoring much less in setting a guideline on what is a good return of investment or profit. (And the debate goes back to 2004, http://www.nevon.net/nevon/2004/12/real_blog_roi.html)Also, do we really need a niche? The idea of niche seems too correlated to a market orientation and that can be an error. Starting a blog can be a means of establishing channels of communication with one or more key publics and that can bring fourth a great number of intangible values.
yeah you are right it is difficult to maintain a profitable blog or even build one at first place but it is possible. if you are writing daily and are current to the topics that are being discussed
It is hard to build something of size of TechCrunch in these days, you must be very creative and innovative. But you can start a blog today in any niche and build an audience of few hundreds, maybe a thousand of real fans, and that is usually enough to make a profitable business.
Steve, is always a pleasure to read or watch you. You are a guy with the antennas always vibrating. :-)In my humble view, building a profitable blog is more difficult now than before only if you are targeting a mainstream niche. Most people trying to build a profitable blog are unfortunately in the business of making money online and that makes for a bad, smelly mix. Serving a niche of a few hundred or thousand via a niche blog, can certainly be profitable and very profitable to this very day. The wrong idea everyone starts with is thinking that a profitable blog is built by having a large site, with thousands of visitors and a line-up of advertisers waiting to get a spot on your pages. That is the old way. Sustainable online businesses are more easily built around valuable know-how and expertise that can be monetized in many different ways: events, courses, books and ebooks, services, tools, online consulting, in-depth reports. A blog per se can't be a monetizable resource beyond its advertising potential. But a blog is only what you want to be and that remains open for everyone to be interpreted differently.In general, as far as I have seen, those who say that blogs can't be made profitable are those who have never made one. I think it would be nice to see an open face-to-face challenge between two or more vocal people in these two opposite territories.
Blogging is very profitable - as part of your overall sell to a market niche. Stand alone, funded by adverts is hard (not impossible) but blogging (on all platforms) can be an amazing boost to your brand, driving new customers, partners, and legitimacy to your business.A blog I started in 2005 brings in beer money in ads, but has led me to highly profitable consulting contracts, started the industry that Brad Linder (above) now thrives in, and even got me the dream job I now have. This type of blogging payoff is still wide open.
(off topic) a Posterous deficiency: You cannot link to individual comments on a post. Be nice if they used the date marker on the left for that.
While it may be more competitive it is definitely still possible to create a profitable niche blog. Where many make a mistake is in targeting something too saturated like how to make money blogging when they have never done that themselves in the first place. If they will create quality content around a subject they know and love success is still possible. It does NOT come overnight though and it is far more complicated than most realize. There are many quality resources for finding out what works and I am continually compiling processes for what to do and how to track your activities. It takes hundreds or even thousands of steps to reach profitability.
I don't think blogging is dead. And even for startups in a saturated niche there is a still a bite left. It's just a matter of who can stick to regular blogging for at least three years. Most bloggers quit very soon, for the reason of not enough motivation or claiming to be an expert while they are not.
As you said, either a niche or really creative and different than other equivalent blogs.
To me, lifestream is owning your content and pushing it out over the years through evolving channels, not hosting it ON a channel (like posterous) that may or may not be around in 5 years and constantly moving to the next thing that "isn't a blog," or isn't whatever you used to have.What happens to your content when posterous goes away? Isn't what you'd do if posterous disappeared what you ought to be doing anyway?I've owned my domain for coming up on 10 years. Years ago, seeing the pace of innovation in content delivery and consumption habits, I decided to host my own content and push it out through the ebb and flow of channels. There was no sense trying to keep up with change but rather keep up with where the audiences have collectively decided is the new public square. That way when those channels come and go, the content doesn't.I recently started following you on Twitter... a place you say is dying :)
And sometimes I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, Steve ;)
Steve - here are my thoughts:1. For people attempting to break into a niche that have similar, or even slightly better content than the current "owner" of the niche, life will be tough.2. For people breaking into a niche that have something that blows the doors off what the current "owner" is providing, there is certainly room to make a lot of money.3. # 2 is very hard to do. As Dan commented above - the barriers to entry are high - but only for people with average ideas and content. For the lucky few who can nail #2, there are NO barriers to entry. That's the beauty of the Internet.
I dont understand why he is talking like a politician..
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