Blogging for Fun and Profit
My friend Melissa called me the other day with questions regarding how to setup a blog with profit in mind. Since I obviously don't have any experience with this (I've never had, nor do I ever intend to place ads here) I wasn't sure if I could really be any help, but I offered the following. If you have any ideas of your own, or think that I'm wrong, please comment below:
Here are some good Vancouver blogs:
And here are some excellent Toronto blogs:
There are also a number of blogs out there that specialise in a subject rather than a particular location:
These are off the top of my head but there are literally thousands, if not millions of them out there. All of the above however are profit-driven while the majority of blogs out there are not.
Some of the things I know they do:
- Focus on readership:
- Post every day to keep your site fresh, this keeps search engines happy.
- Don't do anything too personal, but don't be too professional either.
- Link to everyone else in your sphere
- If you have an environment blog, link to other environment blogs.
- If you have an urban blog, link to people who blog in your city.
- Tap into the multiple other social networking tools out there:
- Flickr
- Technorati
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- In each of these sites, link to other bloggers in your sphere.
- Advertise using a tasteful ad broker.
- Suite66 (my old employer)
- Google AdWords
- RealMedia
- Collect statistics on your traffic.
- The trick to all of this is to:
- Be interesting. No one will read your stuff (or link to it, thereby increasing your search engine rank) if what you're writing isn't either fun or witty, or accurate.
- Be current. Your search engine rank is based partially on how often your content changes.
- Use Wordpress. It's a software package designed explicitly for blogging. I don't use it because it's not as powerful as I like (and I'm a control freak, I like to roll my own code) but most of the big bloggers out there use it. Either that or Drupal.
So, did I miss anything?
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