Oh Blogger, Where Art Thou…Going?

I love bloggers. And I love blogging. And I’ve learned a tremendous amount about the art and science of blogging in the past 8 months. I have had some successes. I have definitely had some failures. I’ll have more still for sure. In fact, I can’t wait for those failures, because I’ll just learn from them and then never make them again.

But as blogging matures, which it surely is, I sense a lot frustration out there in the blogging universe. I have spoken to at least 15 bloggers in the past month or so who have all, in one way or another, expressed exasperation with their projects. Most of the bloggers I have spoken to, or otherwise conversed with, are moderately successful.

Of course how we define successful is pretty important I suppose. Monetization? Sponsors? Unique Visitors? RSS Subscribers? Twitter Followers?

Everyone has their own criteria, for me though, it is more a mixture of these above elements but more than that I would regard influence and loyalty as things that denote a successful blogger.

But where do these moderately successful bloggers go from here?

On Becoming a Professional Blogger

The number one ambition I hear from these bloggers is that they want to become professional; that is, find a way to support themselves, even thrive financially, through their blogs, brands or websites.

There is nothing wrong with that ambition and I predict that there will be more and more professional bloggers in the years to come. What I haven’t seen out of these bloggers is any idea how to do it. And I think I know why.

These bloggers have the art down. They’ve developed a voice, they’ve stuck to their schedules. They’ve found a way to integrate their offline and online lives into a fully formed personality that lives on their blog. They are good at what they do, and they are valuable to a nice, and growing, audience. They’ve invested in pretty good blogs from a design and technology standpoint, either through hiring someone decent or learning to do it themselves.

And they’ve pushed the envelope beyond blogging. They’ve started twitter accounts, found a great way to market their blogs, and in the meantime they’ve also met a whole new set of people interested in just what they are interested in. They’ve expanded their networks, they’ve connected, they may have even found their soul mates. I have a found a few of mine on Twitter. And I’m always on the look out for more.

But What About The Science of Blogging

What about the heavy lifting beyond the art of blogging? Ah, now that is the rub for so many people. I am not sure what it is. These are all creative, accomplished people. They are good at blogging because they are good at lots of things. They have careers and could continue to have those careers, but their hearts are in blogging. And I sympathize with that. Blogging is for failed writers. And well, human beings like to write as much as they like to breathe. It’s why fiction will never die.

So blogging has opened up a way for lots of failed and frustrated writers…to WRITE!. And write they have. And then something curious happened, which is that a lot of failed writers discovered that in fact, they never failed. They just had the TIMING off. Isn’t so much of life timing?

So these bloggers, who thought of themselves as failed writers, all of a sudden get a brief glimpse at success. And there appetites are whetted. And they want more. They can feel it, they can taste it, they can sense that success, as THEY define it, is there, somewhere, out there in the ether. And they know they want it.

But they just don’t know how. They don’t know how to take the marketing to the next level. They don’t know how to make money. But that is because they are still thinking of themselves as writers. Previously failed writers who now aren’t failures. But writers don’t have to do anything else right? They just write. Others handle the nitty gritty of distribution and monetization. Publishing houses, agents, lawyers, New York Times Bestseller Lists. Riiiight.

Consolidation and Community Is The Next Step for Bloggers

These bloggers need to start thinking outside their own box. Almost everyone I spoke to, no scratch that, EVERYONE I spoke to was looking for answers that don’t exist. They weren’t asking the right questions. They didn’t want to. How do I know they didn’t want to?

Because as soon as I made the following suggestions, they acquiesced. They agreed. It was there all along.

Go beyond yourself. Go beyond your brand. Go beyond your own voice.

Link up with other bloggers in your niche. Start a super site, build a community. The sum will be greater than its constituent parts. This is the answer to the moderately successful bloggers.

Why? Why is this the answer?

Because this is the way to get on the path towards building something greater than yourself. It also involves taking the longer view of things.

Let’s say you are a wine blogger. You have 5k followers on Twitter, a year old blog, 2400 pageviews a day, maybe 1000 uniques a day. You’ve done the stumbling and digging and other bookmarking and realized its not for you. Takes too long and the results are iffy.

You are respected, your posts get comments. But your traffic is still too small to make anything close to approaching a living via ads.

So what do you do?

Well, team up a with a team of wine and food bloggers. Maybe include a fine foods person as well. Cover all the bases. Get varied voices. Have lots of fresh content. Create something of real value. Bring all your various audiences into ONE place. Say you get 5 bloggers of similar success to do a regional wine blog covering Nashville, TN and surrounding areas.

Be THE voice and THE place for wine, food and other related content for that area. Be the best. Update frequently. Post constantly. But then monetize. Try! Experiment!

Hold a dinner at a restaurant and charge 50 bucks a head. Do it once a month. See what happens.

Cut deals with local wine shops and upscale grocery stores for advertisements, sponsorships or do some affiliate marketing. Get 10 area restaurants to commit to 3 months of ads, each venue putting in 50 bucks a month. That’s 500 a month right there that didn’t exist. And build it from there. What about vacations? Trips to wineries or farms?

There is a whole word of opportunity out there, the only thing is no one is going to do it for you! Not in this lifetime, not in a world so diverse and content rich.

This is the part of the equation that bloggers aren’t seeing. This is the part that we will start to see moderately successful bloggers take chances and risks to jump into the hallowed grounds of professional blogging.

Image Source: Notions Captial on Flickr

Tagged as: Blogging, Making Money with Social Media