Blogging isn't something I want to shy people away from, but I do think that "blogging for money" is just a bad idea all around. While I do find that there are certain bloggers that are worth reading regularly, for the most part blogs have an intrinsic nature to them that makes them less viable for the mass markets.
What I hope to expand on here are the reasons that blogging is bad, and alternatives for potential publishers.
First let's talk about the positives associated with blogs in general:
- Concentration on Content - The best thing about blogs in my mind is that almost everything else is taken care of for you - all you have to do is sit down and write. They handle the tasks of publishing the html for you and even handle a bit of the promotional activities without the author having to lift a finger. After all, in today's internet, Content is still arguably the King.
- Structural Soundness - whether you are laying things out in different categories, by date, by keyword, or using some other layout structure, beyond your first few publications on a new template, you can rest assured that your link and document structures are replicated with logic.
- Built in Promotion - you automatically can tell people who want to know that you have new content up and ready to read. This is a very effective promotional avenue.
- Community - There are really two aspects to this one - first you have a built in community communication device in the built in commenting systems that most blogging platforms produce for you. Second, the blogging community in general is active and accepting of newcomers assuming that they are posting content that is useful and engaging.
Now for the down side...
Blogging is looked down upon by the search engines. One reason for this is that many blogs have pretty strong SEO built in right out of the box - so much so that as blogging became a more popular activity, the search results accross the board became littered with blog entries. Web Spammers caught on and produced SPLOGs just to rake in search engine traffic without any real useful content. Then there's the whole comment spamming issue. Google took it upon themselves to produce their own Blog search engine separate from their regular search engine and stripped their own SERPs of much of the existing blog results. This isn't a statement of fact, more a working theory of my own, but it is based on my own experience.
Another issue is that many bloggers expect other blogs to mimic the default blog structure - a series of personal notes and thoughts presented in a relatively static fashion. Sure there are interesting blog interface designs out there, but such a high percentage of them are variations on the same theme. If you have a topical blog that is more a presentation of information on a particular subject rather than a personal log of things, then the blogging community at large isn't quite as accepting of you. Again, this is partially because of all the SPLOGs that are out there.
If you go back to building everything in dreamweaver or a text editor rather than using a CMS platform, then you end up losing all of the bonuses associated with blogging. Publication becomese more difficult, promotion becomes more difficult, etc. - but at the same time, you aren't putting yourself in the position to be seen as a potential SPLOGGER. I think the right thing to do is to manage a portion of your site using blogging software as a CMS, and in doing so taking some of the advantages, but then managing the remaining portion of your site outside the blogging platform. (there is more to your site than a series of articles isn't there?).
More on this subject when I can get around to it.
Blogging is Bad Feedback
