What I’ve learned about business from blogging
Over the years I’ve learned a lot about business from Blogging. I’ve learned sometimes you have to step away to gain a new perspective. Since I started blogging as a business I’ve been apart of a few small startup companies that largely failed in some areas and succeeded in others largely because of the inability to scale due to monetization of content and the inability to scale in terms of the reality of man hours needed to make it a success. Recently Raj Dash wrote an article over at Performancing entitled What’s Wrong With The Blogosphere. One thing is for sure in this article Blogging is Hard Work if you are doing it day in and day out and relying on it for income.
Since I worked on two startups that largely relied on monetizing content, and have consulted with countless others I found one thing that I tried my hardest to do. Find a product and build content around that product that in turn becomes the source of monetization. Look at some of my heroes on the web and many of them have a product.
The Business of Blogging is hard, but one of the better ways to monetize content is to find a product and let the product monetize the content naturally. If your passion is travel develop a product and monetize it with your hiqh quality content. Try not to burn yourself out and treat blogging more like a real job and less like a lifestyle.
I’m relatively new to blogging and just started to write The Tokyo Traveler for b5 Media. This is my first commercial blogging venture and I’m trying really hard to let the stats take care of themselves and just focus on providing quality content. But it’s hard sometimes when you want to see those numbers just jump to reward you and all of the hard work and time that you put into the content.