I had heart to heart talks with my brother, my wife, and Jeff about what course my life and career were taking.
Jeff has taken a great job, and can't contribute as before to the startup. Not knowing what else to do, I considered entering a business plan competition, to follow up on my work with ego.migra.
Steve Blank would say my problem is untested; it may be real for me, but is it real enough such that if we built a solution, would people actually pay me for it? We need to be sure of these issues before we write up a business plan to obtain financing.
I'll continue to explore the problem space of lonely house dads by blogging. When I feel there is a critical mass of content, perhaps after a year, I'll collate and self-publish the whole shebang on Amazon or on another system.
If the experience goes well, and Jeff sticks with his job, I may not start a business - I may just keep writing, because I am really enjoying it.
As far as I know writing is not a good business model. For instance, Gunter Dueck, a decent author of 18 books, explained recently in a podcast-interview that he earns only about 1000 EUR per month from book sales.
ReplyDeleteAlso almost all bloggers seem not earn any money (lostineu explained this week that the earnings of the last 4 months have been 0.75 EUR in total, http://lostineu.eu/75-cent-fur-100-000/)
The only way making a reasonable income out of writing seems to be giving additionally talks on the subject.
I have considered trying to make money from my blog, or book of my blog posts, but I have heard similar stories as you posted, so I haven't pursued it vigorously.
DeleteSo right now my path is to simply publish as much content as I can, because I have rich experiences, in a very unique niche.
I believe people appreciate my work since my audience continues to grow, though slowly, since I am not aggressively pushing traffic toward my blog.
As you implied, perhaps the greatest value from blogging can be the reputation for expertise a blogger can develop, and an audience who trusts the blogger.
My friend's first job was as a copyboy for an aerospace contractor. He asked an engineer how he could make the engineer's salary, which was 10 times as much. The engineer said, "Publish."
So perhaps we should see publishing, whether book or blog, as a community platform, to provide an audience and establish reputation, to support a person's main job function. However to be a full time write would be a dream job.
I've been thinking about self-publishing on PubLit since they give the author a retail store and customer data, so the authors can understand their customers better, so they can deliver a better product. I think this will help authors earn more income. They are only available on the Swedish market but they say they will expand internationally.
DeleteHere's the link about PubLit:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2012/11/28/publit-helps-publishers-sell-direct-to-consumers/
Without an reputation you cannot sell talks either.
DeleteTo sum it up: The publishing can make the difference between an unknown expert and a known expert maybe additionally with reputation and fans. And this makes the difference in income, even if the income does not come from the publishing itself.
By the way: I have earned with my blog 0.91 EUR with 5000 page views without trying to make money out of it.
As you may have seen, I've tried advertising on my blog to understand the system. Just as you I learned it takes a massive audience to earn any money. I haven't tried affiliate advertising because I feel I would start writing only about material stuff, and I like to write about emotion.
DeleteAre you registered with VG Wort? If so, please share your experiences. I would like to set it up, I just need to find the time.
I never tried Google Adsence. (I tried such things 14 years ago and they were not working.) But I looked on the public available data of SPON, the most popular German news website. SPON have an official price for ads of 40 EUR per 1000 page impressions, but they actual earn around 4 EUR per 1000 PI. A economy blogger told me, that he things a total income between 1 and 2 EUR per 1000 PI is doable for good, popular blogs, like Postillion.
DeleteVG Wort pays around XX EUR for articles with 2 norm-pages (1800 chars) with XXXX PI in the last (calendar) year from single German visitors (maybe with additional conditions, like accepting cookies, which is necessary for their counting system). I do not know the actual numbers and if they are available in advance. If every article of a blog has, say, 2000-10000 German PIs then VG Wort is probably the (best) source of earnings.
Another side of this issue is driving traffic to the site through SEO, advertising, or other means. I tried using AdWords, and traffic doubled. However these new viewers typically don't return. I suspended AdWords for now, I am currently writing as much content as I can.
DeleteOf course social media is the best way to reach an audience. A couple of months into blogging, I would get about 10 to 40 hits for each time I would post on FB, Twitter, and Google+ about a new blog post. Now I am getting 40 to 100 hits after posting on FB. It's encouraging.
70% of my readers are still coming from FB, so they are probably my FB friends. And the percentage of new viewers have dropped from 33% to 25% over the last three months. So I would like to gain more readers.
Have you tried to actively gain more readership?
> Have you tried to actively gain more readership?
DeleteNo.
IMHO, SEO is overrated. If you build your website in a sane way (or as for blogs use a standard template), then the website should be suitable for any search robot. Anything else will not help (at least not permanently).
Especially since Google is changing a lot of things frequently. New content once a day seem to be appreciated by Google's algorithm at the moment.
Links between blogs (pingbacks) have been quite successful for a long time. But at some point the whole blogosphere was too self-referencive.
It seem to be a common experience that G+ and Twitter are by far not as effective as FB (cp., www.10000flies.de). Blogs and News get far more FB likes the +1's. There is even a news-website special optimizing every post (headline, teaser, teaser-photo) and the whole website (late slide-in of the like button) to get as much likes as possible.