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.
