Tag: Blogging

Today I’m going to talk about lessons learned about monetizing a hobby blog. I don’t generally like to talk about making money from blogging, or what I earn, because I’ve never really blogged with the express intention to make money. Turns out, it’s just something that happened along the way for me.

Back when blogging was all the hype, a hand full of dedicated and very lucky bloggers managed to make a living off of it. Word got around, and then suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the pie. Just set up your own blog, write a few posts and you’ll have money rolling in!

Only… that’s not how it works.

It didn’t work that way back then, and it really doesn’t work that way now with video often being an overshadowing influence on the written post. Folks have moved away from wanting to make money online with a blog to wanting to make money online streaming or posting YouTube videos.

While I have no authority in the video side of content creation, I’m going to guess it’s probably not any easier to launch a professional channel than it’s ever been to make a living wage off of blogging. I’d never given into the idea that it would be, and that’s why I didn’t try too hard to monetize my own blog.

Lessons About Making Money from Blogging

Lesson 1 – If you’re blogging only to make money, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Especially starting out. You’ll put money into hosting, themes, plugins, etc. and unless you’ve really stumbled upon a lucky gold mine, you won’t see a cent of it back because…

Lesson 2 – It takes a lot of long-term hard work, writing, and research to make any serious money from blogging (or content creation in general). Building a blog and an audience does not happen easily or quickly. There is no “if you build it they will come” magic to content creation. Especially with so much competition.

Lesson 3 – No traffic, no earnings. Focus on building a relationship with your audience before you think about making money from them.

Lesson 4 – Monetizing a blog takes a lot of time, dedication, and patience. If you don’t have all three of these in some fashion, you may want to reconsider your goals for blogging.

When I say reconsider, do I mean quit blogging? No.

I mean you should consider tempering your expectations about what kind of income you hope to get from a blog.

Some Actual Numbers

Even when you start making money from your blog – depending on so many factors I can’t list them all – you may not make very much in the beginning.

I run several hobby/creative blogs. Only my main blog has enough traffic to be monetized. For years, I’ve hosted my own blogs without ever seeing a cent in return – I’ve spent far more on my hosting and blogs than I made. This was a personal choice as blogging is a hobby for me.

But when WordPress notified me that I could try out for their WordAds program, I decided to give it a whirl. The one catch was that I had to upgrade my WordPress package account – which meant that I’d be spending more to host with them. The hope was that WordAds would bring in enough to pay for my hosting upgrade… eventually.

Here are some real numbers from when I first started with WordAds. Keep in mind, my blog was already 4 years old in development before I tried to monetize it.

Are you ready?

As you can see, my very first month (at the bottom) I didn’t even break $2.00 in earnings. I struggled with a lot of ups and downs for months. But I wasn’t focused on my earnings, thankfully, or this could have become really discouraging really fast.

Over time, this trend changed. I’m not sure what caused this, to be honest. I have been bringing in more traffic (thanks to pillar posts), but I’m also seeing that the quality of the ads on my blog (and the CPM) have improved.

It hasn’t been until this year that I began to see a stronger upward trend in my earnings.

Last month, my earnings were $29.33. For some unknown reason, it shot up to $45.02 (so far) for this month. I don’t expect this to be a new average for my blog, but I’d love it if it would be!

Seeing that WordAds only pays out once you hit at least $100, the faster I can hit that payout threshold the sooner I can actually see my earnings. Hosting with WordPress costs me $90 a year for this one blog (this doesn’t count the other blogs, domains and hosting I have). So, generally, this blog has been able to pay for its hosting for the past two years.

This year, I’ve already been paid once. With this unexpected jump, I foresee a second payment, so this actually pays for the cost of the blog hosting with a bit of a profit (which actually just pays for the cost of all my other webhosting). I’m perfectly pleased with this, as small as it seems. When a hobby pays for itself, that’s fine with me!

To Summarize

I’m not saying that it’s impossible to make money blogging. Obviously, there’s some folks who are invested and lucky enough to do so. But it’s more rare than you might imagine, and it takes a lot more work than you expect.

The numbers above shows a more realistic look at monetizing a hobby blog. Just a reminder that:

• My blog was already 4 years old at the time I began WordAds – I’d already built a small audience
• My blog is a more generalized hobby blog without a heavy focus on any one topic
• I didn’t work too hard to monetize my blog as this wasn’t my focus in blogging
• Once you join WordAds on a WordPress hosted blog, you can’t advertise with other networks (unless you pay for a business package) – so this is 100% earnings just from WordAds and no experimentation with other networks

I’m sure there are folks out there who know a lot more about all of this than I do. But this is just a look at my experience in monetization.

The bottom line – Blog first and foremost because you love the topic(s) you write about and because you want to connect with other people. If money eventually comes from this, that’s just a cherry on top.

This was one of those lessons I learned back when I was a freelance writer.

As a freelancer, the idea of putting all your eggs into one basket meant that you blindly relied on one or two clients/gigs to be the foundation for most of your income. When writing for clients the web, you are at the mercy of whomever is employing you for a job. When the job is done, it’s done. So, you want to branch out enough to have other opportunities to fall back on just in case something doesn’t work out.

As a blogger, this is less about making money and more about building an audience and essentially a successful blog. Having focus is good, but when you limit yourself so much that you don’t have room to pivot should you need to, that will only hurt you in the end.

Too Much Focus on One Topic

Take, for example, focusing too much on just one topic. In my case, putting all my eggs in the basket of one video game.

I don’t want to get too much into the politics of the whole current Blizzard/WoW fiasco, but for content creators who were so focused on WoW, and WoW only, this has been a tough time. Not just for the individuals who make their livelihood off of their content – be it written or video – but also the small content creators that began building a focused platform around WoW or Blizzard games.

Those who allowed themselves some wiggle room had the freedom to make other choices and transition into new kinds of content if they felt that was the right thing to do. But those who have placed all their eggs in the WoW basket now have a harder choice to make.

This blog covers a lot more than just FFXIV, for example, and sometimes even strays from just talking about games. I know that even if I chose to put FFXIV away someday (hopefully not anytime soon), my main blog would continue on because I’ve established a wide base of topics there.

Locked into One Platform

For me, the lesson came in the form of closing myself off on to only one platform – namely, Tumblr. In my defense, when I first launched this blog on Tumblr, I had no idea that it would become such an important project to me. It was an experiment in character, story, blogging and social media… and somehow it worked.

For a while.

Due to experiences I’ve had, and due to the Tumblr environment, I began to realize that I needed to branch out if I wanted to keep this project from suffocating due to being locked down too much to one platform. That’s when I made the transfer of the bulk of my content to WordPress and decided to make my Tumblr more of a mirror site. I also began to build up connections on other social media accounts, such as Twitter and Instagram.

It’s taken time for me to earn the same amount of interaction that I used to have on Tumblr in other places. But finally, after months of working at it, I feel like I’m starting to make ground on Twitter. I’ve been much happier for it, too.

Taking part in Blaugust was another step to widen the audience and awareness of this blog, opening it to people in other blogging circles. I have yet to gauge how well this will stick, but it couldn’t have been a bad thing to try, right?

I’m not fully sure where I’m going to take Spot of Mummery in the future – I’ve always just sorta winged it when it came to this project. But I feel like I’ve made some steps in branching out, making new connections and trying new things when it comes to both my blog and the social media accounts connected to it.

Perhaps once Blaugust is over with, I will sit down and figure out some kind of content plan.

But more likely, I won’t. 🙂

Since this is Blaugust’s motivation week, I chose to write a little about two things I latch on to for motivation — especially when I’ve been playing a single game for a very long time, or I write mostly only about a single game. It’s also the weekend, so I’m going to take a little break by writing something shorter for a change!

Game Events

Naturally, if the game you write for has updates and patches, such as an MMO, this could be considered an “event” that would offer a lot of new content to draw upon for topics. When an expansion comes out, that’s even more so. You can make a lot of great series posts blogging about progress through an expansion – just make sure to keep a mind on spoilers if you write about them.

Also, in-game events, such as seasonal events, are great motivation to pull from for blog posts. I rarely ever blog about the quests in an event, however. Everyone has done those, so they’re not usually of great interest to other players – unless there’s something funky about them.

FFXIV event quests are different every year, as are the rewards, but they’re usually tame and feel-good events. There’s rarely anything about the quest storyline itself I put into a post. However, if there’s a special experience (like a weird FATE) that is part of the questline, I might focus on that. I also like to focus on community interactions during the event.

For example, the fact that we fought a big blue bomb for Moonfire Faire this year wasn’t a shock – we did something similar last year. But the fact that the community decided to build a tower of the polar bear mounts and had a parade around the island was worth writing about.

Community driven events based on seasonal events are also great to write about. As another example, I wrote about attending a beach party that took place on the site of the Moonfire Faire event.

Projects

Game events as topics for post motivation isn’t anything surprising. But what do you do when you game doesn’t have an update for a while? That’s where what I call a “project” comes in.

I often set a project goal for myself in a game and use the progression I make in that as motivation to blog about it. Writing posts about a project does two things – obviously, it gives me content for my blog, but it also keeps me accountable in reaching for an in-game goal. I know that because I’m publicly “reporting” progress in my blog, I’m far more likely to keep working towards that goal in the long run.

A good example of a project is when I decided I was going to try healing in FFXIV. I’d healed in groups a little here and there before, but I wasn’t comfortable enough to do it consistently, and not for harder content.

Back in last December, I set out to change that. I made an in-character storyline for why Amon could be a White Mage healer. I then started leveling White Mage from level 1 scratch, with the help of my best friend who is a healer main. I documented the process for several months, mostly talking about leveling (sometimes from my character’s point of view), showing off the newest glamours I ran across, thinking about the new spells I got – that sort of thing.

I leveled and practiced playing White Mage just about every night using an Alliance Roulette. Not only was this a lot of fun to write about, but it gave me goals to work towards in game and eventually taught me how to be an okay-ish healer. And here I am writing a post about that process on top of it!

So whenever you set goals that can possibly translate into a project, consider tapping into that as motivation for your blogging!

In the last post, I talked about WordPress Reader – a feature that all blogs hosted at WordPress.com can take advantage of. Today I want to talk about how to ensure your posts are getting shared on Reader as widely as possible. It’s actually very simple – it’s all about tags.

Think of tags like hashtags on Twitter. These are topics that help WordPress know what your post is about. Without them, WordPress doesn’t know you’ve written a post about “cats” or “music” or “games.” This is where you come in!

How to Tag Your Post

When you create a new WordPress post, you can add tags to it in the Tags section of the right-hand menu. If you don’t see this, click the gear icon in the top right corner and make sure you’re looking at the Post tab. It should look something like this:

You can see that in my tags section, WordPress offers up the tags I most use – of course I use a lot more than this, but these are the ones it’s determined that I add most often. This helps to speed things up, but don’t only go by the suggestions or you could miss a few tags!

Now that you know where to tag, let’s talk about some thoughts about tagging strategy.

Tagging Strategy

Let me walk through my thoughts on using tags. I try to go for both focused and wide topic tags for my posts.

Since I usually write about FFXIV, I’ll use a normal FFXIV post as my example.

1. This is a FFXIV post, so I use FFXIV as a very focused tag.
2. FFXIV is a game, so I tag it as Games for a wider audience.
3. However games include board games, tabletop games, etc. So I focus that down by also adding the tag Video Games.
4. But there are many kinds of video games. FFXIV is a MMO/MMORPG. So I tag both MMO and MMORPG.
5. I add some additional tags such as Gaming, MMO Gaming, Gamer, etc. This isn’t required, but it’s good to explore sub-tags and related tags just to see if it helps.
6. If there’s anything very specific within FFXIV that the post is about – maybe, say, housing – I’ll add a specific tag like FFXIV Housing.

And there you have it – a pool of tags both focused and wide.

Every time you add a tag to your post, your post will appear in Reader on the tag page for that topic. Let’s look at that a bit.

Explore Tag Pages

Within reader, you’ll find a Tags section at the bottom of the menu.

At the very bottom of the Tags section, you can enter a tag, such as “Games” to add it to your followed tags. This allows you to come back to that tag page and see all the other blogs that have used this tag in their posts (including your own).

Below is an example of the tags I follow. You can add a tag and remove a tag at any time.

Research Your Tags

Use this tag pages to do research on the tags that you use in your own posts.

See which tags seem to have a LOT of new posts popping up frequently. Maybe those are popular tags, which could be good (because lots of people are interested in them) or bad (because your posts get lost in all the other posts).

See which tags seem to rarely have any new posts in them. This could be good (you’ve got a niche you can corner and explore) or bad (there isn’t much of an audience for this tag on Reader).

Use this to determine which tags serve your posts the best. Feel free to explore!

Also, while you’re on those tag pages, you can see who your blogging peers are and what they’re writing about. Use this as an opportunity to network!

Follow other blogs who use similar tags. Leave likes and (even better) comments on their posts.

This helps to build interaction between yourself and other bloggers on Reader. This may take some time and effort on your part, but if you have a newer blog and you’re looking to build an audience, connecting with other bloggers is a good place to start.

Not everyone will always respond or follow back. But some will, and you never know who might become a blogging friend from just a few comments exchanged. It’s always great to encourage new bloggers that you stumble across in tags, because that makes the community as a whole stronger.

So now that you know about tagging and a bit about tagging strategy, next time you create a post, start building that list of suggested tags. It only gets easier as WordPress learns the tags you like to use the most!

Good luck!

Yes, I’m making a series about series! So meta!

This time around, we’re talking about creating navigation between your series posts… and if you even need to. It might seem like a simple topic, but providing your readers a way to move between posts on your blog is important – especially if you aren’t writing a daily series and will have posts in between series posts. There’s a number of ways you can approach this!

WordPress Plugins

For WordPress, there are some third-party plugins that are made just for building series posts and linking between them. You can use one of those – and I have in the past – but I often found it more cumbersome to use in the long run. It’s been so long since I’ve used one – especially since I’m running a WordPress.com blog that doesn’t allow me to install plugins – I’ve just learned how to do without. But if you’re self-hosted, do see if there’s something out there that can assist if you need it!

Link in Post Text

Sometimes a series (such as the Valheim series I wrote about in the last post) isn’t important enough to make a navigation. Or perhaps you can just link to the previous post in the text (like I just did above). Sometimes I do that at the beginning of a post with a short summary of what happened last time.

For example:

The link here leads to the previous post that I’d written. That way, if they missed the previous post, or they are curious about looking back at what you’re referencing from before, they have a way to do that.

Just make sure that the link opens up the previous post in a new tab so that you don’t take the reader away from the post they’re currently reading.

Previous and Next Links

Another way you can approach this is to manually create forward and back links between posts. I do this for my Spot of Simmery posts on this blog. It looks something like this:

So this is post 10, and it links back to post 9 and forward to post 11. Pretty simple. I also have a link to the overall archive page – I’ll be talking about creating an easy archive page next time!

There’s a few things to keep in mind about this approach:

• You have to remember to continue adding the navigation each time you create a new post
• You have to remember to go back to the previous post to add a forward link as well
• If you move your blog or change your URL, these links will likely need to be updated

There are plugins that provide forward and backwards navigation between posts, and some WordPress themes have previous and next post navigation built into the posts already. But those only work when you’re writing a series of posts back to back.

So while manually linking takes a little more work, I find it the best way to move a reader directly through posts in a series.

WordPress Category

One other thing you can do is to create a WordPress category especially for your series. When you do that, every post in your series will appear on the category page, starting with the newest post first.

However, if you want an auto-updating archive page that’s in order from first to last, that’s a topic I’ll tackle next time!