This Guest Post has been submitted by J.T Dabbagian.
When I worked for my community college’s newspaper, I was told a story about a man whose goal was to work for the Los Angeles Times. My teacher stated that it was his New Yorker. Not to be confused with the Literary Magazine The New Yorker, the term ‘New Yorker’ is given to the print, literary, or other media outlet that is the dream or goal outlet of a person.
As bloggers, a good deal of us have blogs that we greatly admire, and many would jump at the chance to work, or even contribute to such a blog. For me, my New Yorker is the productivity blog Lifehacker. For others, it could be sites like Problogger, or a Google Blog, or any other blog. Whether your goal is to actually work for the blog, or merely to continue having your own blog, you can benefit from having a New Yorker to look up to.
Remember that in blogging, it’s best to have a role model in the blogosphere. Your New Yorker should be none other then that very role model in your blogging experience. Want to write for The Motley Fool? Learn their style; it’s probably one of the reasons why they’re so popular. Don’t completely rip off their articles, obviously, but there is something to be said in copying the professional style of a blog. How does this tie in to making money? It works in two ways: Directly, with contribution, and indirectly, with reference.
Making a contribution to the site
If you’re a contributor to one of the sites, or an author, odds are for the bigger blogs that you might be able to work out a deal for either a segment of the revenue, or maybe be paid directly by the site! Often times, even the smaller blogs, or blogs that don’t rely too much on revenue can often give you something in return, such as hosting, or a recommendation on LinkedIn.
Furthermore, If you become an author of said site, their influence, their reach, all becomes YOUR reach! Also, their audience becomes your audience as well, to an extent, which means more traffic driven to you, more ads clicked, and more money!
So what do you do? Write a query email to the blog’s head writer, and send a proposal of your topic article. Later on, as you post more entries, you might consider offering your services as an editor.
References and Recommendations
For blogs that look down on generating money or revenue, or can’t generate good revenue, you can still get a good deal out of working your blog in a similar style. When the blog site in question posts a blog entry to something similar to what you’ve done, comment and show the blog entry in question.
In another aspect, you can also email the blog any time you have an interesting entry you’d like them to read. Email then with something like ìInteresting blog entry (Blog topic)î in the subject, then describe the post, and why it’s relevant to their blog. Best case scenario is that they link to that blog, in a way recommending the post. This way, you still get traffic, a link to your blog, and a potential reference for later.
So with that in mind, the question I’d like to ask you is what YOUR New Yorker is? Post in the comments!
Read more of J.T’s posts at www.jtdabbagian.com
