BlogCraving

Most of the advice published here on BlogCraving comes from the perspective of taking your hobby blog and turning it into a small business.  Do we mean “quit your day job” type business?  That would be awesome, but no.

By business we mean a site that can easily pay for itself (hosting cost and what not) as well as put a few extra bucks in your pocket each month.

For those that are really dedicated, you can keep your forward momentum going right into the kind of business that becomes a full-time job.

Unfortunately, what most people don’t realize is the time it takes to reach these milestones.

Waking up one day and deciding that you want to turn your hobby blog into a money-making enterprise is definitely the first step.  Congratulations!

Step 2: Don’t stop.  It won’t happen in 3 months.  It might not happen in 6 months.  Honestly, it may be well over a year before your site really starts to get traction.   That’s totally normal.

The trick is to just keep going.  There are so many opportunities along the way just give up.  It can be depressing in the early days when you don’t have many people reading your great content.  That’s ok.  Just keep moving forward.

Patience is the key.  And if you don’t believe me, take it from social media and video blogger Gary Vaynerchuk in the clip above.

If one ad unit is good, two ad units must be twice as good.  Right?

Not exactly.  One common mistake made by noob bloggers looking to start monetizing their sites is getting over excited by how easy it is to put up ads.

9 time out of 10, the new blogger joins every ad network they find and starts putting up one skyscraper after another.  Before you know it, there’s 8 ads on a single page from 4 different ad networks.

It’s a flashy, animated, blinking, weight loss, acai berry drinking good time all right.

Unfortunately, that means they’ve made one of the critical mistakes in blog business.  They took their eyes off the ball. (more…)

I always encourage bloggers that want to take themselves seriously to get their own hosting, and manage their own site.  The most common pushback I get is the price of hosting.  You can get your blog hosted for free.  It is pretty easy.

First some perspective.

Let’s say you really do have your blog hosted for free right now on a site like Blogger or Wordpress.com.  That’s great.  If you are happy, god bless.  If you want to step up you game a little, you are going to have to move on to a self hosted solution.

What are we talking about price wise?  Roughly $80 – $120 per year.  You can pretty easily get your hosting done for about $7.95 per month.  That’s really cheap.  Granted, that is much more expensive than free…I will give you that.  However, it is a small price to pay for the potential increase in revenue and content flexibility that is then afforded to you.

How to get your hosting for free?

There are two easy ways, but first consider our goal.  We need to come up with $7.95 in revenue every month to offset the cost of hosting.  That is not a lot of money. (more…)

That’s right. Don’t.

Bear with me on the following journey.  I promise, there is an important lesson to be learned that will make you money.

I happen to find myself at a variety of business networking events in New York City through out the year.  I tend to go there because I have to go.  I’m usually dragged there by co-workers.

Hey, if there’s an open bar, why not.

Inevitably, someone ends up trying to force a conversation on me about their business.  Most of the time, I could really care less.

Can you tell I am not in sales?

Well, since I’m not in sales, I end up telling these guys what I do, and start asking some questions about their websites (or lack thereof) because I really don’t want to them give me their hard sell anymore. (more…)

What’s the most common problem that growing blogs always run into?  Their Wordpress site needs to be cached in order to handle the growing influx of traffic.

The lifespan of the common blogger goes something like this.

1. Blogger starts blog at Wordpress.com, Blogger, or Typepad.
2. Blogger realizes they want more flexibility and ability to generate a little revenue.
3. Blogger moves their site over to a self hosted Wordpress.org setup on a cheap blog host.
4. Blogger’s traffic continues to grow.
5. BOOM.  Site begins to fail because their shared PHP server and database are overwhelmed.

That’s where most bloggers start scratching their head.  They start to do some research about all the errors they are getting.  Of course, their lame hosts have no good answers and just tell them to upgrade their hosting plans. (more…)

Making your own custom Wordpress shortcode is actually very easy to do.  All you need to do is add a little bit of code to your site to generate a new Wordpress shortcode.

Everyone loves the convenience of shortcodes such as the built in Wordpress gallery shortcode.  All you do is put [shortcodehere] into your post, and the gallery shows up

You may have used some plugins that implement their own custom shortcodes as well.  For example, if you want a poll in your post, your plugin may just tell you to throw something like this in your post:

[poll id=43]

That tells your blog to go get poll number 43 and place it into the post with all the proper formatting. (more…)

For most blogs, comments are the lifeblood of pageviews.  What do pageviews turn into?  Ad impressions.

That’s the business gold behind comments, but there are a lot more benefits including community building, site loyalty, and more.  There are many ways to get more comments on your blog, and they are all very easy.

1) Just ask for them.  Duh.

Did you ever think to just ask?  No seriously.  Most of the time it is just that easy.

Try ending your post with, “What do you think?  Comment below.”  Or how about, “Your thoughts? Let me know below.”

Those are some of the pretty obvious, more formal (cough, cough boring *cough*) ways to write it.  Be more casual and conversational when soliciting for comments.  How about, “I can’t possibly be the only one that thinks this is crazy, right? Please tell me I’m not the only sane one.”

You are phrasing it like a rhetorical question, but it actually makes the reader want to respond to you. (more…)

If you are sick of hearing about social networking, join the club.  However, there is real value in the traffic that it can generate for your site.  Does that mean you need to add social networking buttons to your blog or website?

Probably.

But don’t go crazy.

You should care about the traffic that can be generated by social networking sites to your blog.

The value of having the little buttons or chicklets on your blog or website is going to be tough to measure.  Sure, there are some free service like Share This that allow you to track the number of clicks the social networking buttons get. That’s all great to know.

At the end of the day, what you really need to know is how much traffic back to your site is generated thanks to these buttons.  It is much harder to track the entire traffic path. (more…)