Blogging for a second income - does anyone else here do this?

pitersmith

This is a goof idea to start a blog within your knowledge and make real updates everyday. Choose any subject you know of. Write everyday at least 1 post. This will be picked up by the search engines and once they are picked up, your reader will increase automatically. Use of "Google Adsense" is a real way to earn money from your blog. You can start blogging but it will take some time to generate income.

gatita

Thank you pitersmith for your reply,i understand what you said, but this case is slightly different.
She has recently been asked to write a blog about the website she is working for. So, she is getting her salary,
but has NOW been asked to writ this blog. It involves quite a lot of research, so she is wondering if perhaps she could ask for a small raise?

motorguy

gatita wrote: »

Thank you pitersmith for your reply,i understand what you said, but this case is slightly different.
She has recently been asked to write a blog about the website she is working for. So, she is getting her salary,
but has NOW been asked to writ this blog. It involves quite a lot of research, so she is wondering if perhaps she could ask for a small raise?

Is she writing the blog / doing the research in working hours?

If shes not, then she needs to explain to her employers that this is taking her 'x' hours per week to do of her own time, and either get that time integrated into her working day, or get some sort of overtime / extra payment for it.

ButterPie_2

Just a quick question for any helpful bloggers out there...

Is it better to have one blog that is quite wide ranging, or several with narrower remits? My husband is a good writer, and I have agreed to do all the sorting out so he can start to get his writing out there, and hopefully start making a bit of money. His best writing is of a kind of "ranty" style - he has had small blogs before that have been very popular, and his writing has been in demand for a good while, but he has never actually tried to make any money from it (even when he wrote in the local paper in his youth, he did it for expenses only, and when that opportunity stopped, he never tried to get any more as he was by then writing for the uni paper, which won national awards while he was one of the two main writers, then he did an independent student paper with some friends, which then immediately won the low budget category of the national award. He has written lyrics for local bands, popular ebay listings and all sorts. Everyone around him nags him to do something with his writing, but he just needs a push!)

Anyway, so we were thinking maybe one blog of ranting and a more serious one of reviews and so on - does that sound good? Or should they be together?

mismax

Hi Butterpie,

If you want the writing to be for the web, you need to understand the system behind how the search engines find your pages - otherwise the only readers will be family and friends and the occaisional extra one from time to time.

For example, I have a website that is for a business I don't operate anymore. I have google tracker on it so I can still monitor activity on it. But as it is not needed anymore I will let it expire at the end of the year. When I was using it and handing out flyers etc it got a steady stream of traffic but since I don't do that anymore, it got a grand total of 16 visitors last year!

My other sites, that I am driving traffic to via SEO in order to generate an income, although much newer are getting thousands of hits a month.

So, before you decide on your niche - what is the reaoning behind the blog? Is it as a showcase for his writing with the idea of picking up additional writing work or is it intended to generate an income by itself?

Let me know a bit more about your thoughts and hopefully I can help further:)

daz501

I'd always go for the niche.

MisMax, what kind of flyers were you handing out? Did you hand out many thousands or was it less? I've experimented with a few hundred flyers to attract people to a FaceBook fan page for a takeaway menus site, but I don't think it really helped. It's hard to measure the success of offline promotion

ButterPie_2

Thanks MisMax - I think our focus for now would have to be on making money straight off, as we are both relying entirely on mystery shopping, ebay and the like for our income at the moment- every little helps. Obviously it would be lovely if he could get some more reliable work from it, but for now, we need income.

If it helps, he will be on tv later in the year, as a contestant on a quiz show. (Well, he is auditioning tomorrow, but, since he got to the semi final of the show last time he was on and the producers loved him, he should be fine) Last time he was on, he had quite a few people seek him out on twitter, facebook and youtube, so maybe he could use that to his advantage?

ButterPie_2

Also, he has managed 2000 hits in the last 24 hours on an ebay listing he did - people seem to be sharing it amoungst themselves - can that be translated into something good for the blog?

mismax

Daz - the flyers were related to a local business so offline promotion made sense in that case. I would not use it now for my web based businesses as it would not do anything more than give me a couple of days spike in traffic.

Butterpie - You say you need the income now. In that case I would say that blogging or affiliate marketing is not what you are looking for. Done correctly, you can build a successful business online but that is exactly what you are doing, building a business and it cannot be done overnight.

The best analogy I find is that of a restaurant. The guy who opens the restaurant takes all the heavy workload upfront. He has to find the premises, make it look good, hire the staff, sort out the menus and no doubt while he is doing this he is not drawing a wage but is working endless hours to build his business. He is doing this because long term he hopes to have the freedom created by being his own boss, the largest share of the income once the business takes off and the pride in standing back and seeing what he has created.

The waiter has none of the stress or hassle. He takes home a steady wage from the outset but in return for this he accepts that he won't see much difference to that wage or future growth. He accepts a days work for a days pay and trades long term gain for immediate rewards.

The online business world is no different. The blogger / website owner is equivalent to the restaurant owner and the content writer is equivalent to the waiter. The only difference between online and offline business is that you can step away from an online business for a while and it carries on without you. For example, I have not been able to work on my business for the last 3 weeks but growth has continued steadily. I need to get back to it though or the search engines will think the site is getting outdated. Further down the line I will be able to leave it to its own devices for longer and the income will continue to come in.

If you need immediate income, check out the threads here on article writing. There are various sites such as elance, freelancer, fiverr.com etc. You write your article and you receive your pay, simple.

If you want to invest time into building a business where you will take an income later (6 to 12 months later depending on your input into it), then it sounds like your hubby has the talent to create the great content the search engines love. If you are going to do all the work for him behind the scenes though, you have a really steep learning curve ahead of you to research keywords, cost per click, affiliate programmes for products, supply and demand for keywords, pros and cons of the various hosting platforms, niche selection, link building etc etc.

There are various tools out there to help you with these but be careful of anything that requires upfront investment. It should not be necessary. I pay my monthly hosting fee and everything else is included that I listed above. There are a lot of schemes out there promising "get rich quick" from the internet. My experience is that this doesn't happen, apart from for the guy who is selling you all the seperate tools you absolutley "need"!!

Best of luck and let us know what you decide:)

ashleygerrald

Article writing is sure a good way to earn some money in your spare time. There is huge demand for people who can write well for the web.