Why so many people are in on the ‘make money blogging’ game and the reality of doing it properly.
1. No initial investment required
Other than a few dollars to register a domain name and buy some cheap hosting for the year, there are no costs. Bluehost sell .com domains for $10 per year, about £5.95, and yearly unlimited hosting packages for $59.40. A total business start-up cost of $69.40 or £41.50.
As John Chow points out so often, the low barrier of entry for starting a blog has its downsides. Because there’s nothing to lose, what’s going to make you work hard at it consistently? If you had invested $100,000 in starting up your blog, would you still be treating it in the same half-assed way as you do today?
2. Work whenever and from anywhere
You could be anywhere in the world with a laptop and internet connection and still be able to work.
In fact, you can automate every Facebook update, tweet and blog post for the next 2 weeks while you’re away on holiday if you like. Write a bunch of posts and use Wordpress to schedule when they are published. Use Twitter scheduled tweets and Facebook scheduled status updates to promote posts.
As long as you put in the 42 hours of work before you go away on holiday, yeah you can automate it.
3. Seemingly little time required each day to maintain a blog
Spend a couple of hours a day writing a blog post or two, anyone could do that.
Then there’s guest posting on other blogs, networking, creating informational products, optimizing the website layout and content for SEO, and attending business events all to build traffic.
The money doesn’t come in just by writing the posts and sticking a few ads on the site. Still got time after all that to create a clear business plan and monetization strategy?
4. The bigger bloggers make it look easy to become an overnight success
Chris Brogan produced a great video series on this. Too many people start up blogs and become discouraged after a couple of months when they’re still only averaging around 20 unique hits per day.
The success of your blog isn’t 100% based on the quality of content. What use is good content if no one is reading it? It can take months of plugging your blog, establishing authority and reputation to build a following.
The reward of earning $40,000 a month from a blog comes after years of hard work.
5. No shipping costs, no production costs, no customers
Okay, so in a way you do have customers.
They’re the people who buy your informational products, click on your ads or buy other people’s stuff through your affiliate schemes. And you have to provide customer service in the form of answering emails and contributing to discussions.
But unlike other businesses there’s no need to waste time putting together quotes, tendering for contracts, and giving sales talks to clients who may never actually sign up for your service or buy your product.
Have any other ideas why?
Let me know on Twitter. Id be happy to make this 10, or even 20 reasons why blogging is such an attractive business model.
