I’ve talked about blogging as a hobby and blogging as a job, and now I wanted to talk about blogging as a business. Yes, there is a difference between blogging as a business and blogging as a job, although I certainly didn’t know the difference when I first started out.
As I said before, when you blog as a job, the amount of income that you make directly corresponds with the amount of blogging that you do. If you stopped blogging on your personal blog today, your income would dry up because Google would eventually stop sending traffic your way, your page rank would fall, and your ad revenue would disappear. Quick side note: Nothing I’m about to say can be applied to a blog that is written for a company. When you blog for a company (like I blog for Families) this is a job. It isn’t a business, and you can’t turn it into one. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing – lots and lots of people do it (myself included) and really enjoy it. It all depends on what you want.
Back to the focus of this blog: If you approach your blog as a business, then from day one you will work towards the day of you not having to blog at all, and yet still be making money from the blog. You will be working towards taking yourself out of the equation of Content (blogs) = Traffic = Revenue. I’m not crazy, I promise – you really can stop blogging and still make money, although it takes a while to build your blog up to that point. It can be done in one of two ways: Either finding other people to guest blog for you (or hiring a team of bloggers to work for you) or making money from affiliate links. I will get into how the affiliate business works and what to look for later on, but first I wanted to focus on finding others to guest blog for you.
Guest blogging works by people writing up blogs and sending them to you for you to publish so that you don’t have to write anything but you still have new content being posted on the site. This means you’re still getting hits from Google, ad revenue from Google AdSense, etc.
Why would people willing write up blogs for free and send them to you to post? Well, when your blog is large and has a lot of readers, this is actually fairly easy to do, because people will come knocking on your door, begging to be able to guest blog. They want to be able to do this because in the blog they write for you, they will link to their own blog, thereby driving traffic to their blog, which means an influx of new readers for them. (Their blog is small – your blog is big. They want your traffic.) This will also give them a link from a high ranking blog to their lower ranking blog, which helps with their Page Ranking (something that I will discuss in further detail later on, I promise. Don’t panic if a lot of this is gibberish to you. I will explain everything, and it will make sense. If you get to the end of the series and still have questions, please either e-mail me or leave a comment in the comment section – I would be more than happy to answer any questions you have.)
Speaking of continuing to read, please read on to the second half of this blog to find out how to work towards the goal of using guest bloggers on your site.