Are Bloggers Wasting Their Breath?

There’s a fantastic Copyblogger article titled Why You Can’t Make Money Blogging that hit me right in the brain pan.

With the tremendous amount of people starting new blogs each day and pouring their heart and soul into the effort, why aren’t more of us turning our work into revenue?

Simply put, most bloggers SUCK at Developing a Business Model.

Blog To Promote Your Competitive Advantage

I think the hardest part about blogging is being honest about what we’re good at.

For example, if you want to publish a daily blog about iPhones, you’ve got a hell of a lot of competition staring you in the face.

It’s going to be hard to sell ads on a page that doesn’t have a clear competitive advantage to pull in active buyers.

I see one of the challenges to bloggers being the desire to publish and make a name for themselves online.

After all, seeing your name in print is exciting, especially in the beginning.

But take a step back and think the way a business does.

No company invests capital in a product or service without a clear plan for generating income (ok, the dot com bubble of the late 90′s is the exception).

So what can you be best at?

Hard Work For a Worthy Cause

Blogging is still beneficial, especially if you’ve developed a solid game plan.

If you’re a coupon clipping strategist who can create a video that shows people how to save hundreds of dollars a month on groceries, that’s a powerful product.

Sell it! Package it in a video and blog about it too. Create a network of loyal followers around your niche idea and share helpful information that brings them back.

You don’t need to hard sell anyone, but let’s not be fooled.

You can either corner a market that will become wildly popular in the future (very difficult) or create a killer product that people buy simply because of the network you’ve built (in part thanks to your blog).

The really cool part? You don’t need to own a million websites to grow your audience.

Third party blogs (like the ones on local news sites and Ning) can grab you some free ‘promotional juice’ too.

More to come…

Photo credit timetrax23