Blog First, Biz Second
I’m getting ahead of myself again, second post in a row. But I’m anxious to share this idea with you and hear what you think about it.
So what I’d like to suggest is that writing a blog can be a great way to get a biz going, even before you have any real idea how to start a biz for yourself. Maybe you don’t really know how to run a business. Maybe you don’t know how to make money, but you do know an idea or topic you are passionate about. Maybe you have some great skills, but you use them at your job - and you know you do NOT want to depend on those skills in your business. Maybe you just know that having a blog can be a great way to run a business. There are people that have a blog as the center of their business, with affiliate links, paid blog posts and other monetization methods providing them a workable living.
Whatever the reason, here is one major argument I would like to put forward. You can start a blog for like $5 a month - on your own domain! Yes, you can start even easier on blogger.com and hundreds of other places. But believe me - you WANT your own domain. If you don’t know why, trust me, ok? The short explanation is that when you do get noticed by the search engines, if you have a blogger.com blog, then you will be building blogger.com’s already awesome ranking a little stronger. They won’t really notice! Build your blog’s popularity on your own domain, and your Alexa and google rankings can become quite respectable. That helps bring visitors, and visitors click on links. Visitors clicking links cause sales to happen just like the birds and the bees.
But enough of the gory details. My point is this - if you have something you’d like to write about, and writing isn’t akin to having a tooth pulled, then it can be a great start of a business. You could talk about your pet cats, and eventually help people evaluate all the goodies they can find in the local pet store and online to keep their cats happy, and to make your pet-owning experience more convenient. You might not understand how to turn your writing into a business at first. That’s okay. If you do some writing, and if you do a few things that help other people run across your writing, then you’ll make some friends. You’ll gather a flock of people that like to hear what you say. Later when you figure out a focus and business to run, you’ll be very grateful that you’ve got that flock of friendly people out there, scattered around the world listening to what you say.
Let me try to explain my idea like this. Say you know you want to get involved with motorcycle sales. [I still really miss my Honda VFR I had back when I lived in Singapore!] Maybe you figure out pretty quickly that for the business setup and funding you’ll need, it will likely take you 12-18 months to really get started. At the same time, say you have a friend who happens to be working on a new magazine - about motorcycles. You realize that writing an article or two for the motorcycle magazine can really boost your credibility. And when your friend asks if you can help to drive up readership, you realize that you can interact with a lot of people in your future marketplace while talking up the magazine.
Now, what if you were able to leverage some of your writing and new friends to get your motorcycle business up and running in 12 months? Do you think you might get special rates to advertise with your friend? And do you think your business would benefit from all the magazine readers that heard about you long before your cycle shop even opened?
That’s what I mean about starting a blog helping you with starting a business.
But there are a few more benefits I think you might get from this approach. First of all, what if it turns out you’ve picked a bad topic to write about? Say you start writing, all excited. You put up 3 or 4 posts on your blog. You ask a few friends to take a look. And then it becomes hard to write. Say you find yourself avoiding your blog. I saw a statistic recently that many blogs die in less than a month. Maybe your first blog dies of rather natural causes. Let’s look at that. What would you lose in that situation? Well, if you were paying $5 monthly for the blog, you’d be out around $5 - maybe as much as $15 when you realize that your blog has died.
Now, if writing and blogging seem to be the problem - the unnatural activity for you - then maybe authoring a blog for yourself is not such a great idea. I’d say that would be a valuable and inexpensive lesson to learn so quickly, cheaply and easily. Keep in mind that a blog is still very doable for you; just search out the various ways that you can get content for your blog without writing much or any of it yourself. Two methods are using PLR articles and outsourcing the writing. I will write about these soon; drop an email if you’re anxious to hear more about this way of building a blog for yourself.
On the other hand, maybe you love to write. Maybe you have strong opinions on your topic. Maybe it just isn’t something that you want to write about enough to keep a blog going. Did you think you could develop a business built around the topic of your blog, more or less? Yes? Well, let me ask you a question then. If you’ve hit a roadblock writing about your topic in a short 30 or 60 days, is this really a good area of business for you? Do you have enough passion about this topic to get other people excited about becoming your customers? Or, did you just learn a lesson for less than $15 about a potential business topic that doesn’t keep you consistently interested?
Let’s say you decide that is the case. You might be passionate about a topic, but not really crazy about fighting in the marketplace to build a business around that topic. What then? Well, here’s one idea. Take the blog you’ve written, throw it all away, and start up a new blog. Cost to you - $0. Kick off a new blog, hopefully picking a topic that is more suitable and long-lasting for you to write about. Hopefully you collected email addresses on your first blog, so you have some people you can notify about your new blog right away. And start writing. You’ll have learned a bit about blogging from the first experience, right? Again - if we call the first experience a failure (not my view of it, by the way…you learned a lot of things for very little real cost!), let me again stress that it should have cost you the price of a domain for 1 year plus 1 to 3 months of hosting. That’s a cheap lesson to learn. In fact, it may not cost any more than a meal at McDonald’s, or a couple lattes at Starbucks.
Ok, enough talk about the things that might go wrong. What if this really works out for you? What if you do hit on a topic like the blog about your pet cats, or a blog about motorcycles in Madrid - and you can later make money based on your blog. You might be wondering what kind of money you can make from a blog. Well, here are three ways that people make money.
First, you can add links to products - recommend things that you use, or that you believe to be helpful - and you can make money as an “affiliate”. There probably aren’t a lot of things that you cannot get affiliate commissions on anymore. Having a blog about pet cats, you might add links to 4 or 5 cat books from Amazon. You can link to an eBay store that has electric cat boxes. You can post an entry to your blog talking about the expensive toy you just bought your cat - and the fact that the bag laying on the floor got played with more than the $23.92 “Your cat will love it!” toy you carried home in the bag. If you provided a link to that $23.92 item, I’m sure that somebody would buy one periodically. This can grow into the thousands of dollars per month. Don’t get too excited by that, though. Figures over a few hundred dollars monthly require work, and all profits require a measure of patience.
Now, maybe that blog is going fine for you. But let’s say that your pet dies of a heart condition 6 months later. (I love cats. I have 3 at home. This is just a “for instance” scenario.) Would you want to continue your pet cat blog? I’m not sure if I would want to. What then? Well, here’s a second way to profit from a blog. You can sell it! Careful, though - you must have your blog on your own domain for this to work. There are various ways to complete the deal. Done right, you can sell a blog for 6 to 12 times the monthly income you get from it at the time of sale.
For a third idea, you might find after a period of time that you have some valuable advice for cat owners. Maybe you have a rare type of cat, or a type that has it’s particular problems that you’ve learned to solve. One thing about the Internet is that there is always room for an information product. You might write a simple PDF document, which you could sell for $5 or $42. You could get testimonials or actual content interviews with veterinarians or cat breeders - and add $5 or $50 to your product price. Now, to make this exciting - could you actually provide some loving guidance to other cat owners? If so, maybe you could launch a membership site for them. Membership sites can be free. But then there are memberships that are $997 monthly! I haven’t gone to look, but I am sure there are some $100 monthly pet membership sites out there already. The Net is a really big place!
So how does this idea of starting with a blog sound now? It is definitely possible to take a half-baked idea, and get to work writing. While the ideas for a business are percolating in your brain you can already be establishing some blog posts. People love to find an informative site on a topic that touches their heart. You might just develop a warm market of blog readers while your half-baked ideas are being developed. And believe me – writing about a topic can help you to develop your initial ideas into something much more concrete and specific. And while you are writing, the people you attract to read your blog can assist you as well. You can test your ideas out on them. You can get their feedback to your blog posts, and you can put a survey on your blog. Effectively, your readers can help you with market research.
For more details on how to actually put this plan into action, leave a comment, drop me an email, subscribe to my Get Your Biz Going email list - or do all of those. But do take some action. And take advantage of the community here on the Internet - stop back here and see what other people have said as well.
