In the last few weeks, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the different types of sites I’ve used in the last few years to produce income. I would classify them into three different categories:
- Niche sites
- Supersites
- Blogs
Each of the three is entirely different but each can be used to make money online.
If you listen to the blogging ‘gurus’, they will tell you that blogging is an awesome way to create passive income. That belief is BULL. The whole point of a blog is the expectation that the blogger will be publishing additional content. You need your readers to believe that you’ll post updates – that’s what makes them come back for more. The entire nature of a blog goes against ‘passive principles’.
Blogging is one of the most high maintenance methods for making money online. It requires a lot more work than email marketing, niche sites, list management, and creating informational supersites. In many cases, blogging will require more work than even a traditional e-commerce site that sells products.
That said, it’s obvious that blogs can produce a LOT of income. However, before you create more work for yourself than you want to take on, you have to ask yourself if you’re willing to put in the time that it takes to maintain your blog’s income. Most of the successful bloggers I know spend all day every day taking care of their blogs and many of them don’t make as much as you would hope.
I personally think that many bloggers would be happier going with a niche site approach or by setting up informational supersites. These methods are a lot more passive, once they are set up and functioning properly.
Blogging Is Better For Certain Personalities
People who are really social seem to do the best with blogs. They crave interaction with other people so posting and taking care of the readership doesn’t seem like a huge task to them. Other people who are less social will struggle a lot more with this aspect.
When you make a decision on what type of online business you want to have, I would ask yourself how much interaction you crave. You can make a lot of money either way so I wouldn’t use money as the determining factor. If you WANT to spend your time interactiong with people all day, a blog is a great choice. If you don’t, it’s a terrible one.
Tags: blogging, passive income
Yah, after two blogging attempts, with mildly successful followings, I gave up on both (and made some decent money selling them too) because as you described in the article, that is definitely NOT my personality.
Many people who are new to this business get hung up on the fact that we use Wordpress, a blogging platform, to build niche sites. They then think they need to ‘blog’ like they see other bloggers in this niche doing. That is not necessarily the case…
Save yourself a lot of time guys, and if you are not too social and don’t want to spend a lot of time on maintaining blogs, then stick to niche sites, or information supersites, and stay away from “blogging”.
I started out blogging like RJ but over time hated the fact that I had to communicate with so many people in order to just get a few people to come to my sites. In fact I spent most of my time on sites like twitter, stumble upon, and facebook and saw terrible results.
Then I came across the keyword academy and I’m now close to hitting my $200 goal this month. Plus I don’t have to do near the work to produce the income. Things are so much easier this way.
Good points. Personally I favour the supersite model these days, although I have a bunch of mini niche sites too. I’ve tried blogging in the past, but always ended up turning off the comments because I’m pretty unsocial & didn’t want to spend lots of time ‘interacting’ – that should have told me blogging wasn’t for me!
I have been thinking about creating a supersite, but experience is with blogging. What platform would you recommend for creating a supersite? Also, what advice do you have for someone going down the supersite model of making money online?
I would still recommend using WordPress as your platform. It’s a pretty easy platform and can do almost anything.
If you decide to go down this route, you want to modify your WordPress theme so that the site doesn’t look like a blog. This usually means changing your home page to look more like a traditional site.
Hey Court,
I am going to play devil’s advocate here and disagree….to an extent….
You are right that managing a successful blog takes a certain degree of personality. But the bigger rub to that is that you have to establish yourself as an expert in the field. I know…I know…so clique but it is true. And in competitive niches, you not only have to establish a solid reputation, you also have something that is unique from all the other “me-too” blogs out there. That is a tall order, especially for someone who has made up their minds to attack a niche that they like but know very little about.
But sometimes it isn’t really as much about the blog as many would think. Now, I am speaking more as a marketer than a blogger so bear with me. For most marketers, the blog is nothing more than a way to build up more visibility and credibility. Most of the time, the readers get funneled to a list in which they can make offers to….people buy, get funneled to another “buy” list and then start to work their way from offer to offer.
From a credibility perspective, a blogger who knows what they are talking about and has managed to connect with their reader will be far more likely to make sales than a niche site. I know you know this to be true. If enough people like you, and enough people will vouch for you, the conversions come so much easier than simply herding people via organic search to your niche site.
In short, people buy because they believe what you say. I built my first business around that premise and I have found that while my niche sites (which get traffic organically) will garner a CTR/conversion rates of 2-5%/1-4% for a soft sell and up to 10%/1-5% for a hard sell, the readers to my blog will click through at double, sometime triple the rate even for a soft sale and if I have targeted the right offer, the conversion rates will be closer to the 30% range.
What this means is that if you have the personality and if you can connect and if you have a decent “feel” for marketing in general, then you can make more sales with less traffic.
There are some issues with blogging though. The biggest is the “me-too” trap. If you can’t formulate a good strategy that makes you even remotely unique in your market, you are sunk.
Branding is another issue. With a niche site, you simply create content with your keywords and then build links…no branding necessary. With blogging, the design needs to be slick enough to get people to notice and you really have to brand yourself as the “whatever-your-unique-selling-position-is” person in the niche. Ugly blogs are just less likely to work (another clique and one that I go back and forth on)
And while it is true that blogging is definitely not passive, neither is anything else that has to do with making money online, including niche marketing. Let’s face it, getting ranked is work but the idea that once you are ranked, you are good to go and can start raking in passive income is just as false. And as competition increases, you can expect that many niche marketers will find that they are spending just as much time toying with backlinks as bloggers do toying with content creation.
Blogging in and of itself won’t make you money. But add a couple marketing elements into the mix to improve your connectivity with the reader (and no, I am not talking about RSS subscriptions) and sprinkle it with a good branding campaign and unique selling position (after all, you are selling yourself) that makes sense and matters to your readers and you will have to create an ass ton of niche sites to compete with that.
Now people will naturally disagree and while I am definitely not in either camp as pro or against (I tend to think in terms of what will work best within the market I am attacking), I don’t think that either is better or worse. I just think that both require different strategies.
Anyway, love the article. Figured I would give you some additional content for this post…:)
Leo I definitely agree with a lot of what you said. I have made a lot of money blogging and the reasons why have a lot to do with the things you said.
I do wonder how much niche marketing you’ve done because it’s extremely passive. I have rankings that are still sitting at #1 after four years with zero new links. The whole point of niche marketing is choosing keywords that are extremely easy and uncompetitive.
The bottom line is that the differences come down mostly to time management. People need to ask themselves what they need to spend their time doing. To be successful people are going to have to spend a lot of time working either way. My contention is that their income will be a lot more passive if they stay away from blogging.
Agreed. Blogging is NOT passive.
. I’m one of those social personalities of which you speak, so keeping up with my blogs is not cumbersome at all. A lot of work, yeah. But, I enjoy it.
I agree with everything. Nothing is passive income and requires much attention. I started blogging a few months ago, not knowing anything. I have made a few affiliate sales but now want to move onto something a little more lucrative.
I put up a small e-commerce site a few months ago, did it totally wrong, but now I intend to try another more niche type site. I’m sure it will take considerable time and worry too.
But that is my point. Everything does. You just have to convince yourself it is worth it and you will survive. Next thing you know, you have survived.
My self-titled blog was NEVER anything to do with making money – but it did dispite me being in charge of it LOL. I’d agree with Leo re once you have trust the buying rate is a lot higher – I realised that me – the ultimate anti-consumer – did indeed buy online but only from people I “knew” – generally via a blog!
I think one of things greatly under-estimated online is the requirement for friends – not JV partnes – but people in the same business that you actually trust and that you can both help the other. Google is getting better and better at its algorithms – but it will never be able to figure out the “friend” factor – Griz has proved that fairly conclusively.
I definitely agree about the part which talks about personality types. I don’t plan on turning any of my supersites into a reader blog, but I am thinking about putting interesting news articles on the front end since it’s interesting to me, and it will improve the look of the site. I also haven’t been putting adsense on the home page of my supersites since my root keyword is not that targeted and to make it look less MFA.
As someone who makes a decent portion of his income from blogging, I can definitely confirm that it is not passive at all. There is a constant need to produce new content that will attract visitors. I’m not one of those social personalities, but I enjoy working on a project like a blog where I can see growth over a period of time.
I think that many people see ‘blogging’ as using WordPress (and maybe Blogger) as a content management system (CMS) for a site. It’s almost become a generic term and it’s good that you’re making a distinction between what’s actually going on in the site and the code behind the scenes driving it.
For example, OpTempo began as a more or less social blog but has evolved into a semi-static supersite. Traffic has remained stable even though I don’t post very regularly. The only thing I miss out on traffic-wise is trends based search traffic.
my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it
Hi Guys,
I agree about the blogging is a lot of work. I created a static “old school” website in a week, did a niche blog and that is sucking a lot of my time to keep it updated – I’m beginning to hate it.
Joined KWA last year, life got in the way and now I’m back – for good! Thanks for the clarity on this blogging thing. For those of us who really do not have the social personality, it makes more financial sense to do niche sites and really make the difference to our bottom line.