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How My Big Blogging Failure Became an Accidental Success: In Three Different Ways
By SEO Advisor | December 27, 2009
Back in the dim and distance past – okay, it was January 2008 – I started a blog. So did quite a lot of other folk, no doubt: January’s a popular month for new blogs.
I’d been reading ProBlogger and Steve Pavlina and a handful of other big blogs, and I was totally fired up. I was sure that, if I worked hard at my blog, I’d pretty soon be reaching thousands upon thousands of readers, and changing their lives.
In reality? By November 2008 – eleven months later – I received my first dollars from that blog, in the form of an Adsense check. I had about eight hundred readers. I was also running out of things to say in my niche, and a couple of months later, I stopped blogging there altogether.
It wasn’t exactly the great success I was hoping for. Thankfully, there were three ways in which that failed blog turned into success for me:
1. Freelance Writing
For over a year now, I’ve been paying all my rent and bills by working as a “staff blogger” on several different sites.
I got into this completely by accident: when I started that ill-fated blog back in 2008, I sent an email to a much bigger blog in the niche with a guest post attached. The blog editor liked it, the readers liked it, and I was offered a paid position writing for the blog. I had no idea that paid blogging even existed.
Fast forward a few months, I’d found a couple of other regular gigs (by emailing editors of blogs that I loved, and offering guest posts for free before asking for a job), and with more in the pipeline and some money saved up, I was able to quit my day job.
Several hundred blog posts later, I wrote a complete self-study guide to teach others what I do, the Staff Blogging Course. I was hugely excited when Freelance Folder’s Mason Hipp called it “an excellent resource that explains in detail every step necessary to start earning money as a staff blogger”.
2. Experience Gained
That blog might have been a failure – but it taught me a lot of lessons. I learnt how to use Wordpress; I made some great friends in the blogosphere, and I became a much better writer and blogger. I could’ve spent the last year reading about blogging, but nothing’s the same as hands-on experience.
With that blogging failure under my belt, I was able to launch my new blog Aliventures in July 2009 and take it to over 500 subscribers in under four months – despite posting far less often than on my previous blog.
3. Passive Advertising Income
Finally, that “failure” of a blog came up with a big surprise for me in January 2009: I got emailed by someone who wanted to pay to advertise there. All those posts I’d written – more than 230 – had gathered enough traffic that people were willing to pay to have a text link advert on the site.
It’s not paying my rent (yet!) but the advertising money from that site is definitely a nice addition to my monthly income … and it’s completely passive income that will keep going for years.
I only learnt retrospectively that it takes serious time (and patience!) before a blog starts making money. Never give up after six months or even twelve months just because you’ve not seen monetary results: if your subscribers and/or daily hits are going up, you’re doing something right and you’ll get there in the end.
Take-home lessons:
- Blogging is not a way to get rich quick. For every A-lister, there are literally thousands of other bloggers working hard and not making very much money at all.
- Don’t get too fixed on one way of getting income from blogging. You might find that affiliate reviews work for you, not advertising – or you might freelance, like I did.
- If your first attempt at blogging doesn’t work out, don’t worry. It took me a while to find my voice and figure out what I really wanted to write about.
- Conversely, don’t keep starting and quitting blogs: tell yourself that you’ll give it at least a year.
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Topics: Internet Marketing, Network Marketing, Network Marketing | No Comments »