I was reading an interesting post at ReadWriteWeb (though admittedly, it’s from March and about sponsored blogging). There was a particular quote that I found interesting:
[…]many of the other participants in the KMart program are marketing bloggers who approach blogging in the style of John Chow, who says plainly: "I make money online by telling people how much money I make online."
This is interesting for me because it tells of the reason why so many bloggers are spending so much of their time trying to get traffic to their blogs, get subscribers, increase all of their "major" numbers—to make the kind of money online that John Chow et al make (et al encompassing any of the major bloggers that are blogging about how to make money from blogging). They get the big bucks because they tell others how to make the big bucks.
That frustrates me as a blogger because it seems that every online social venue that I entered is inundated with these kinds of bloggers. They aren’t overly interested in blogging for the sake of blogging. They don’t want to hear that the most interesting blogs are written by bloggers who are passionate about their material. They don’t want to know how to make a career out of writing for someone else. They want to make the big bucks from their blogs that these other people are making.
But they can’t. The market for it is completely saturated. And the market where they could make this money is the “make money online” niche. They would have to use all of their influence to convince other people that they are great at making the big bucks, so that more people—who are looking to make the big bucks—will somehow find their blog amongst all the noise. At this point it’s nearly impossible to break in to get at the top of the search results for getting paid to blog because there are just so many of them. And the only people that are going to care what a new MMO blogger is saying are those just entering the market—who are using Google to find the advice.
So, they read what the big names are writing, follow their advice and find themselves disillusioned because they aren’t making the money. “Am I a good blogger? Am I doing it right? Why aren’t people flocking to my site in droves? How I break out? Tell me what I’m doing wrong!”
Why they’re doing wrong is following the advice of those who initially started the MMO craze. They are on top because they gained the audience early on and they managed to market themselves as experts as well as get to the top of the search results. They got in early and they cashed in on that. Now they’re continuing by convincing new arrivals that they have all the answers while not giving the one answer that matters—it was a matter of timing with regard to their niche. That’s all. Timing and the ability to enamor the poor saps who really think they have a chance to grab the same brass ring that is now so far out of their reach they’ll never even get a glimpse of it.
I’ve actually seen the questions posed above. One person was upset because she didn’t feel that her writing was any good. She thought she just wasn’t a good enough blogger. I looked at her blog and noticed that she used keywords “effectively”, tagged her posts “properly” and asked the “right” questions to get people to converse in the comments. She was a good student of the experts. But she forgot something incredibly important—passion. None of the posts on her front page inspired anything in me. They seemed mechanical. Which is good according to the “experts” but if you’re not making mega-bucks off your blog right away, lack of passion can lead to lack of inspiration and lack of blogging.
I’m not an expert on making money online. I’m not even an expert of getting thousands of hits a day on my blog. But I do know what keeps me blogging and why writing to my blog is almost necessary for me. I also know that generic, non-passionate, emotionless posts won’t do it for me, because I’ve gone that route. And it only works if I’m trading boring, uninspired comments with other bored and uninspired bloggers. The really good bloggers, whether they make money or not, stir some kind emotion in their readers—that happens when the passion flows from the heart through the keyboard and to the blog.
