Q&A Friday #40: The Difference Between Blogging For Fun And Blogging For Profit

Question: What’s the difference between a casual blog for fun and a blog as a business? How does a blogger focus on business rather than simply a casual effort?” — Christopher_Taylor

Answer: I’m toying with the idea of writing a more detailed post about this, but here are 4 of the basic concepts:

Would you run a business that way? If you ran your own restaurant, you wouldn’t just decide not to show up some days, would you? You wouldn’t decide that, “We’re not going to clean the tables because we don’t feel like it,” right? Well, if you look at blogging as a business, you don’t just arbitrarily decide not to post anything today or not show up for a few days. You consistently provide people with the level of service they’ve come to expect.

Maximize your ad space: You need to think in terms of putting as much ad space as possible, in as many high profile spots as possible, without seriously annoying your readers.

How many bloggers only have one column? How many don’t have banner ads? How many have no premium ad slots with Blogads? How many bloggers put trivial things higher up on their page than ads? A lot. Those are mistakes that may cost them a lot of money.

How do you stack up to your competitors? If you look at the “A-List” blogs out there, could you fairly be said to be in their league? Is your content as good? Do you post as often? The standard is set by the people at the head of the pack and you have to make sure that you can keep up.

Work To Draw In New Customers: If a business isn’t getting enough customers, then they do promotions, giveaways, and sales to get people to beat feet into their store. In the blogosphere, think of the equivalent to that as doing splashy articles that will help draw extra attention to a blog. So why aren’t we seeing more interviews in the blogosphere? Why don’t more people write 2,000 word, heavily researched documents? Remember Eject!Eject!Eject!? Here was a guy who built up traffic by doing almost nothing but semi-regularly pumping out long, well written editorials. Why aren’t other people trying that? Why not try new formats? If doing the, “same old, same old,” isn’t bringing in enough customers, try something different.

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