I believe that my blog has good content but people can’t find me. I talk about green living content based upon my own experiences building a green house, and believe me, with
everyone seems to become green experts all of the sudden! (I like your eco comment, Jennifer!)

I have guest posted in a couple of popular blogs but I see most of my traffic comes from my comments. People see I know what I am talking about. I think if you want to make money at blogging you have to invest time in really marketing yourself by posting comments and advertising if you can afford it. Design of your blog is really important. It is the first thing that people see. (part of the marketing concept) I am going to redesign my blog soon for this reason.

I don’t think it is enough to just have good content unless you talk about something a lot of people want to know about such as this blog. You have to find out what people want to read. I am still struggling with this.

One of my best read post was about green toilet paper. Who would figure that?

Now, if everyone in my circle is doing sponsored posts, I may not read them anymore but rather concentrate on my own blog content.

- Wakish -

Glad you hit on this point. I see to many people posting stories that they copy and paste and nonsense that nobody would ever want to read.

Take the extra 20 minutes to research the topic before posting and become educated on it. Even if you are a know it all of that area still it would not hurt to refresh yourself on it.

I always try to write something original in my blog posts. Even if I am writing about a very popular topic that thousands of other blogs are writing about, I still try to find an original angle.

There are too many blog out there that just repeat or consolidate what other blogs say, I like to call them ‘parrot blogs’. I can’t see them becoming beacons of blogging in the long run as they don’t offer anything original.

Blogging for money is just like any other business venture, you’ve got to have a unique selling point or other something new if you want to be succesful.

The bubble might still exist out there and only the best will survive should the bubble burst. Companies with excellent products, blogs with great articles will ensure it to last ..

I think i’ve summarized in few words all the content:)

Thank you for all your work!
Pierluigi Rotundo

You are looking from from your vantage point inside the blogging world. You see how crowded it is because you know your way around. if you ask a friend who hasn’t discovered the value blogs yet, to ask her friends if they read blogs, I’ll wager that two thirds do not. Your world is not representative of the world at large.

Is the universe crowded because it has untold billions of stars? Not really if all you can see are a handful by comparison. Besides, the universe is infinite, but then so is the internet in a manner of thinking.

In the brick-and-mortar world, if there were suddenly far too many big box stores, we would see a market correction. The weaker would vanish, and the stronger would remain because they accepted the challenge to offer more value, and were skilled at implementing it. I think the same thing will happen in the blogging world.

I have in fact become so enamored with my exploration of blogging, that I may just add to those numbers and help trigger that critical mass :-)

Cheers,
John

Mike and David write about the growing competitiveness of the blogging world, and how those blogs that eventually fail were never destined for greatness in the first place.

And I loved Landon’s comment on “the blog world as a worldwide conversation. Some people only have conversations with themselves, while others are having giant town hall meetings with hundreds or thousands of people…
I don’t like to think that blogs will ever become overcrowded, because conversation and communication will never run dry.”

Mark, thanks for the insightful post, and thanks everyone else for the engaging bit of discussion.

I believe that my blog has good content but people can’t find me. I talk about green living content based upon my own experiences building a green house, and believe me, with
everyone seems to become green experts all of the sudden! (I like your eco comment, Jennifer!)

I have guest posted in a couple of popular blogs but I see most of my traffic comes from my comments. People see I know what I am talking about. I think if you want to make money at blogging you have to invest time in really marketing yourself by posting comments and advertising if you can afford it. Design of your blog is really important. It is the first thing that people see. (part of the marketing concept) I am going to redesign my blog soon for this reason.

I don’t think it is enough to just have good content unless you talk about something a lot of people want to know about such as this blog. You have to find out what people want to read. I am still struggling with this.

One of my best read post was about green toilet paper. Who would figure that?

As far as the market itself goes, I think we’ll see individuals shifting to other forms of social media which have evolved out of blogging and that have blogging-like components to them (facebook and twitter). More businesses will shift from non-blog sites to blogging. Blogging internally within organizations will also grow.

As you noted, I do try to envision that every post will be viewed by a potential employer or client hence the job interview analogy. However, I would really like to hear of alternative approaches and angles.

Mark

Thanks for the tips. All too often I throw stuff out there without thinking seriously about the “job interview” concept. This has given me lots to think about and apply.

@everyone else ~ as I stated in the post, I want to try and continually improve my blogging/writing/branding so I really appreciate the input and suggestions, both pro and con.

Mark

Web sites I launched 7 years about to sell a book of e-book yielded much more than the few I have tried today.

I just pulled the plug on a blog that was offering unique grants for writers, generated good traffic, but could not sell a single related, affiliate product — or even a heavily discounted subscription to grants that were not being posted.

I averaged three clicks out of 1,000 visitors.

This blog took about 25 hours of my time a week. I earned less than $20 in four months!

Because of the abundance of blogs, I find people simply gleaned my sites for the free listing and moved on. Very few stayed to read the accompanying articles.

I believe, for me, blogging is no longer a viable income-producing option. Delivering newspapers would pay much more!

However, if you want to blog for fun, join the many millions already clogging the Internet.

I think there are a couple of things that will drive up the quality of blogs and sustain this for long. There are two big groups that will drive this –

1) There are so many creative folks out there in the developing countries who are just hooking on to Internet, and are most definitely out of blogosphere. Many of these countries are now getting access to faster and cheaper Internet connections. This has potential transform the whole arena.

2) The whole lot of “non-techies” – like the artists Cory was mentioning about. These are folks who were not able to put up websites because of the technical complexity and/or cost. They are still gradually getting introduced to this, and will bring with them newer ideas and insufficiently explored areas – adding interesting dimensions to this.

These two groups are likely to come in faster if we find newer and simpler mechanisms to monetize through blogs… and when all this happens will it be called something else?