Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 8m 1,995 #blogbusiness
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Blogging Dream to Blogging Reality
You had this dream. You knew you wanted a website. You wanted to communicate with the world. You took the best course of action and you learned how to start a blog. You may have started off by finding a cheap host, maybe latched on to some website like blogger.com or wordpress.com, learning how to put your website on the Internet, or even downloading and installing WordPress and choosing a theme to host on your own domain.
It is really official: If you can do that, you are a web designer. You call your blog your website because it is. The terms have almost become interchangeable. You decide on some hot topics that you know enough about and you talk to them regularly. You are actually getting people who comment on your blog. Popularity is rising! Amazing!
You try to write an article at least once a day, sometimes writing dozens of articles within a week, storing them for another day to published. You are publishing a few times a week, maybe you have become lucky enough to publish for the entire week, or maybe you decided to stick to a plan and publish only on the weekdays. Blogging has become your hobby and what you “do for fun.” You have become so good at it that you don’t even think about it. You just do it and it becomes part of your routine. You don’t yet get paid, and if you do get paid, you don’t feel like you earn enough, but you do it anyway and you do it for free, because it is your blog, and you love it. You would be so lost without it.
You keep writing about new things, acquiring more readers, and your blog is months to years old, being discovered now very easily, with the help of Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks. People are actually seeing that you exist. What a great feeling to know that just a few months ago or years ago, you were just a small unknown website trying to get its name out there. While millions of people have discovered your website, billions more have yet to see it; unless you managed to go viral worldwide. What great feeling to know that when your analytics tell you that there are people from all over the world, and organizations, charities, and businesses wanting to do business with your website.
When people come to rely on your blog to distribute their articles and tend to rely on you to help them get discovered, and you feel it is your duty and obligation to ensure your website has a near-100% uptime, and that you need to help them get discovered; relying not only on your own social media, but that of others, you have turned your blog into a business. When your blog becomes your job, it is becomes a great business to you, whether it is nonprofit or for profit.
Logging into your blog becomes a passion; a task you look forward to doing; a silent place for you to think; a blog for you to write words on to make complete thoughts a reality; striking each key to make a paragraph; selecting and uploading images; a place where you can finally share information with people who are just as curious about it as you are. You strive to be a “good source” of information and you have succeeded in doing so. You hold the key to getting their company name out there, marketing for them, branding, and just being a fairly accurate source that does its best not to lie, change, or rewrite articles. You just want the truth exposed because only in truth can we all find our happiness.
Your blog is a potential money maker and you advertise it as a place that can make money because you have somehow managed to acquire enough readers to matter. It may only be a few hundred people a day, but its thousands over the course of the month, and those are eyes and minds that can see and read advertisements or links to whatever awaits on the other side. Whether you write sponsored articles or you advertise space, you somehow managed to do what you always wanted: you managed to turn your blog into a business and make money doing it.
The interesting thing about becoming a blog that has turned into a business is that you begin to take it all for granted. Remember that one time where you sought help to get known? SEO companies wouldn’t even email you because they could not know that your website had existed at the time. Now they are emailing you like crazy because they, all of a sudden, discovered you, want to become your “professional SEO company” and act like they did all the work, after you already established yourself.
Where were they when the website first started? That’s right, they managed to find your website through a link and now they want to help get discovered? You only had about 10 blog posts out on your website in the beginning and your Mom shared it with her friends, so your Mom and her friends were your visitors. (Hi Mom! I know you read my website sometimes… I love you! Thanks for being my number two fan! Kudos to Googlebot for being number one! Without Googlebot, I would definitely not be where I am today, and neither would you. Google is your real master! They find your little blog speck that can barely be seen [compare Earth to the every single universe in existence, the Internet is like that, with millions of new websites created each day], and they show you off to the world!) (Did I just have a thought within a thought? Inception thoughts anyone?)
Your blog has become your business and you treat it with all the care and professionalism in the world. You are officially an authorized source. Not that you are “News Media Source” worthy, but if you think about it: Blogs are much more honest than a News Media Source is. The “big six” (Comcast, Walt Disney, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and the CBS Corporation are able to control everything. What they cannot control is what you put on the Internet. The unseen war of a lifetime that we are going to see very soon is the fight between “REAL BLOGGERS AS AUTHENTIC NEWS SOURCES” over “BIASED MEDIA AS AUTHENTIC NEWS SOURCES“, which will devastate the billion dollar companies if they were to realize the power that bloggers have.
If your blog has managed to become popular and seen as an authority, which can source in or out news, than your blog could actually be seen as the competition of “the big six”. Every blogger in the world has an opinion and deserves to be paid for their efforts. The majority have volunteered hundreds to thousands of hours to run their blog and while they do it for themselves, the ultimate goal is that they actually doing it for others in sharing knowledge and information. It is unfortunate that the blogging tool has not been recognized for what it is: The voice box of every human being in the world who has access to the Internet.
The downside to trusting blog sources is that any bloggers can lie just as much as the media, if not worse. It happens all the time: Bloggers write fake news articles and it gets passed off as if it were a true story and authentic news. There are companies that pay plenty of money for bloggers to write fake ridiculous articles; the Onion comes to mind. Sometimes “credible” sources try to pass off some articles as newsworthy, but the headline is enough to not even bother reading it. Whether to instill fear and panic into people, or just get views for advertisements, fake news stories sell just as much, if not more, than the real ones.
If an article can set a trend in society, and change everyone who is addicted to social media or to reading news, those companies or blogs temporarily have the minds of everyone, for why the focus on just one thing, often for an entire week, when there is too much happening in the world to really report on. The media bias distracts everyone from the whole truth, distracting them away from what really matters; which by the way, is another story: Does news really matter to anyone? Unless it is in your area and affecting you directly, do you really care? Sure, it is extremely upsetting to see a child die at Disney; a gorilla get shot in a cage because of a neglectful parent; or other similar sad news stories. One thing is certain: Nothing surprises us anymore.
To learn about a van being driven into an audience of people is the most upsetting thing in the world, but it had the potential of happening every single day. Every time we get into a car and turn the key: we are driving a weapon; a tank if you will. Every day that happens, there are more terrorists (we’ll term that “people who are hellbent on disturbing the peace and the destruction of life), who are thinking about ways to kill law-abiding citizens who just want to go about their business. Find a blogger who reports on the same thing for a week and see how legit they’d be treated as a news source. The news writes a dozen different perspectives on the same thing, and it simply serves as a distraction. Be the blogger who stands out. Deliver your article once and be done with it. If there are updates, add to it, or at least reference the old article. Don’t beat a dead horse.
Your blog, however, remains a pretty good source of information, and you seek to keep it authentic and going for as long as you can. Your blog has opened up new worlds for you, helped you network, allowed you to communicate with thousands of different people who emailed you. The world of blogging is wonderful and you can meet so many people without ever setting foot outside your door. When blogging becomes your access to the world, in order for you to keep some sanity in this crazy world, and you captivate an audience, than blogging has become worth everything, even during the rough times, where you thought about giving it up, because only your Mom and a few of your friends were reading it. Failed bloggers only failed because they gave up and lost interest in making blogging their business. Bloggers who keep the passion and strive to keep writing to amuse themselves and to amuse others will inevitably find success in blogging as a business.
Blogging is a successful money making business that has almost no starting costs and simply requires that you have a brain, some time to write, and ponder on what you want to say to your audience, and do it in such a way that they want to keep coming back to read more on your writings. Never feel bad for wanting to earn money for your blog. It is easy to set up a blog, but it is hard to make money by blogging. Some bloggers get lucky and within the first month, they are making money. Other bloggers take years to see any ROI for the amount of time they spent working on their blog. When you do figure it out, appreciate the fact that you are earning money for your hard work in making your blog your business.
Great job. Keep up the great work. My hope for everyone who decides to start a blog is that you stay true to your message and make enough money from your blog that you could quit your day job and blog full time.
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