What Is Freelance Blogging?
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- March 4th, 2009 |
- Comments
Blogging (abbreviated for “blade logging”), born from the Internet age, is one of the newer venues for freelance writing. The Internet has generated a lot of news about the financial possibilities open to bloggers: an audience of potentially millions — along with possible corporate sponsorship, a byline, and infinite creative control — captures the imagination of many prospective bloggers, and makes blogging appear like an infinitely desirable, lucrative field.
The actuality is it is much more difficult to become a booming freelance blogger. A good knowledge of marketing, blade design, and being consistent are skills you need to make a living (or a comfortable extra income) from this new form of media.
The reason for this is the low barrier of entry. Anyone with access to blade area can start a blog. Sites like Blogger, Livejournal and even MySpace offer free blade area to anyone choice to contract. This has resulted in millions of blogs in existence today, many of them literate, many of them wildly popular, and nearly all of them free to read and browse.
That difference of free content makes it difficult to charge for access to your writing, no matter how good it is. You could be the greatest expert on foreign policy or nutrition known to man, and few people would be choice to pay $5 — or $1, or one cent — to read a blog post by you, the expert, when thither are thousands of semi-qualified (but bright and engaging) writers giving away similar material.
So your main sources of revenue are going to come from advertising and from whatsoever paid content you can fit into the computer. Luckily, blade advertising is becoming less dicey than it was a year ago. Google’s “AdSense” program is a good baseline for a page, providing targeted advertising based on your content and paying you, directly, per click-through (although the pay rate per click is low.) You can affix that amount with other forms of blade advertising, from the comparatively unassertive banner to pop-up animations that “float over” the matter.
This brings us to the “double-edged blade” problem in blade advertising. The most effective advertising is obtrusive advertising; that is, advertising that blocks important content until the person clicks on it either to make it disappear or to accept you to a different site. However, obtrusive advertising also irritates your readers, which can lead to a lower reputation for your blog overall. On the Internet, reputation is the single best determinant of your blade interchange. Exploitation obtrusive advertising can importantly lower your interchange and make your blog that much less attractive to potential advertisers.
So you’ll need to find a happy medium between heavy advertising (and light interchange) and little to no advertising (and high interchange, but little revenue.) Luckily, the instant responsiveness of the Internet, along with the commenting features available on nearly all blogging code, make it easy to ask your readers about exactly what level of advertising they’d be choice to accept. Reader connectivity is one of the most important features of any good blog: not only does it allow you to fine-tune your blog over time, eliminating features that readers find irritating or off-putting, but it also allows you to develop personal connections with your readers, the kind of connections that build loyal audiences.
Thither are other distance to make money by blogging, much as the following:
1) It’s possible to circumvent advertising altogether by making any of your content inaccessible, except to subscribers. For example, you might only keep your most recent five or cardinal blog entries unbarred, and require a monthly subscription fee to read the rest of the archives;
2) Or you might keep your current posts and your entire regular archives active, but produce any longer or differentiated entries or other content and charge a set fee for these;
3) You could even compile any of your best entries into a physical book, along with any new content, and offer it for sale. Even if all the entries are available online, you’d be amazed how many people are choice to pay to have something they can hold in their hands;
4) Additionally, you could go the Salon.com route — make all of your archives available to anyone choice to follow a abbreviated full-screen advertisement — or you could rely on readers’ willingness to activity content that they find worthwhile by asking for donations outright.
Many prominent blogs and online content providers have done this and found themselves able to make rent and pay all of their bills every month on donations alone.
No matter how much advertising or subscription services your blog has, it’s all worthless if people don’t deprivation to read you in the first place. And thither are III simple rules to make your blog popular:
1) Compose on something you care about
2) Compose consistently and thoughtfully on a regular agenda (daily is best)
3) Read and comment on other blogs
People read blogs because they provide a author of information and analysis on topics that conventional media sources only cover sketchily and hastily, or don’t cover at all. Don’t attempt to figure out an ideal money-making blog issue and proceed from thither. People care about blogs because blogs are about personal, in-depth viewpoints and thoughts.
If you can provide those to your audience regularly, and you can fix a minimally-intrusive but allay worthwhile revenue group finished advertising or subscriptions, thither’s no reason why you can’t become a booming blogger.