It may be hard to believe, but some people make a good living just by publishing a blog. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs, however, only a small minority are at all profitable. Never mind that. Blogs can provide other benefits — in addition to direct profits — that make it a no-brainer to start your own.
If you are among the small minority of people who love to write, write well, and have something interesting to say about a subject of interest to many other people, then you may be able to make a blog your primary business. But even if you hate to write, must struggle to put a literate sentence together, and feel you have nothing of particular interest to say — start a blog. It won’t take much of your time, and the benefits are tremendous.
The first and easiest benefit you can derive from having a blog is the power to link to other sites. Now, that may seem fairly basic (and it is) — but links are valuable. Blame Google for that. Google has a system for ranking web pages based in part on how many links they have pointing at them. The strength of the links is also important — and that is related to the same rating system — better ranked links are more valuable than poorly rated links — but any link has some value. So if you start a blog today, and six months from now put up a wonderful website to promote your business — you will be able to link to that new site from your blog and give it instant credence in the Google ranking system.
Having Google or any of the other search engines find your site in the first place requires links. It is much easier to put a link in your own blog, and have the search engines find your new website through that link, than it is to go out and find other sites that will link to you. As I’ve said, links have value, and most sites are reluctant to give away links to those sites that need them most — new upstarts — it is safer and easier to link to old established sites. The exception is blogs. Blogs have a tradition of linking to one another. There are also sites, called blog aggregators, that will link to your new blog, even if it only has one post in it. We will be discussing getting links more in a future post, but for now — just start your blog!
If you are completely new to Internet marketing and having your own website, I’d suggest you begin by placing a blog on wordpress.com — it is free. More importantly, WordPress provides the best blogging software in existence, so learning to use it will be a benefit to your future endeavors. They provide two ways for you to use their software — you can go to the site and click the sign-up button, and start a blog on their site. Or, you can download their software, enter a few variables into the configuration file, and upload it to server space you have rented (with your own URL/web address). When you are ready, you will want to do the latter, but just to start out — use their free service. It comes with support forums that will walk you through the process step-by-step, and help if you get flummoxed.
Lots of people never start a blog because they think it just too much commitment. You have to post every day, you have to write long articles, you have to be entertaining. While those factors are one formula for crating a successful blog, they are not the only options available. Blogs are websites — there is no ‘rule’ that you must post every day (follow this blog and you will see that we don’t always post messages — that doesn’t diminish the value of messages previously posted). Articles can be as long or as short as you like. If you can’t be entertaining, be informative — it is much easier and just as welcomed by the Internet community.
If you can’t write, all is not lost. Take my WordPress blog Musician Biographies for example. Currently it has a respectable PR4 rank with Google, and it is in both Google and Yahoo indexes. It has only a little over 40 posts so far, and I add a new one about once per month. And I hardly wrote a word of it. The site content comes from an old (expired copyright) book on musician biographies. I expand some of the acronyms, reword some of the text to make it flow smoother than the abbreviated style of the original, and put it on the site. Many of these musicians are so obscure that this is the only site that mentions them. There are plenty of sites with biographies of famous musicians, but this is the first with little-known artists. The fact that it is a blog, rather than a static website, is of no relevance one way or the other — except that it helped me get the site into Google faster at the beginning. The right column has the usual ‘blogroll’ and other links — all totally under my control. I can’t advertise on a free WordPress blog, but I can place valuable links. In a future post we will discuss affiliate links — those can be highly profitable, and may be used on free blogs.
So start your blog today. Don’t think of it as your main website, or your only website, just your first website. It will be a valuable tool for you in the future.