Do you remember Michael Buffington who back in Febuary started a grand experiment in blogging for dollars by starting the Asbestos Blog – a blog designed for the one intention of making money from a blog with a topic which is always touted as attracting high paying Adsense Ads?
Stephen Baker from Business Week Blog does a follow up post on the grand experiment and tracks how it fared after the initial burst of traffic from those attacking Michael for blatantly using his blog to chase a quick buck. Stephen writes:
‘Check out his site today and you see that the last post was in mid March. Buffington has backburnered it. Turns out that blogging for bucks, he says, “was really hard work.” That might be the most useful lesson his experiment leaves behind. In the initial burst of publicity, he was picked up by Slashdot and traffic rocketed. But as the weeks wore on, he was spending lots and lots of time trying to be the definitive guide to things asbestos, and traffic trailed off.
“There aren’t that many people who want to visit an asbestos site,” he says.’
It’s a good lesson for all Pro Bloggers wanting to explore niche blogging and illustrates that when choosing a topic it’s important to look for high paying keywords.
Also worth considering are factors like:
- Will you be able to sustain writing on your chosen topic in the long term – are you interested enough in the topic to write on it every day?
- Is there a market for your content (ie do people search for it?)
- How many others are writing on the topic? (high paying ads tend to have a lot of competition which makes it hard to get highly ranked in Search Engines.
I think it is also important to have enough news sources to sustain a topic, especially if the blog is being run for profit not passion. Not only can you comment on the actual news being published but you can track down press releases from companies and so produce your own articles. Relying on a handful of sources day in day out is going to turn your readers off, and ultimately yourself as well.
I’m not surprised at all…and I could never quite understand it, though it was certainly an interesting experiment. There is seldom a quick buck to be made anywhere, at least for the long run, without lots of hard work…I can only imagine how many hours YOU put in keeping all your blogs fresh : )
Good job, by the way. I think ProBlogger is fantastic. It always gets me thinking!
ProBlogger is great and a must read for me everyday, sometimes 4-5 times a day! You must be putting in a lot of time and I realise that a break (entire June, I think) for you is a must.
“There aren’t that many people who want to visit an asbestos site”. That is right. The Asbestos euphoria is over.
One blog I have considered (and mostly discarded the idea of) is a Martial Arts blog. The aim I had in mind was to cover martial arts events and news, perhaps with the occasional link to reviews of heavilly martial arts related movies.
The problem with this is that most events are highly regionalised – and reading about events you can’t get to, involving people you’ll never meet is just pointless. There’s not enough news to make for an interesting blog, and reviews are accessible all over the place. Although it’s a subject I’m interested in, my final analysis told me that it wasn’t worth the effort of doing – I wouldn’t be able to add enough value to hold an audience.
I imagine there are dozens/hundreds of similar topics – interesting to the author and a potential audience, but hard to add enough value to keep the audience coming back.
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