My original purpose for creating a blog was to learn more about the blog scene and to make a second income stream without having to leave the house. I needed another source of income where I could work from home while my kids were in bed. I didn’t want to waste 1/2 of my income earnings for a baby sitter I couldn’t trust anyway to watch my kids while I worked at night.
In researching my blog I have browsed and viewed many other blogs, literally several hundred blogs to help determine what type of blog I wanted to create and how other blogs were monetizing their blogs and earning an income. I saw several blogs that were just one paid post after another, with each legitimate post being merely a paragraph of two of fluff, and other blogs that were pure content with no advertisement posts at all.
Blogs that were personal diaries, blogs purely devoted to Technology, countless blogs about celebrity news and Hollywood entertainment, and others very unique and solely about humor or one that is just pictures of cats with funny captions.
I tailored my blog to be a mix at this point, though it has been recommended to me to make my blogs more specialized and focus oriented. My goal is eventually to make Dragonblogger much more “Internet/technology” and branch off two or three other blogs for “Entertainment, Personal Diary, and maybe Local Arizona related information”, but currently I am focusing on Dragonblogger and putting a mix of categories and genres.
I realize that people who only read technology blogs are not interested in the TV Show reviews and vice versa (except, many IT/Tech Geeks like Heroes, so I would be surprised if you were an IT Guy and you didn’t like the show).
My blog still needs to bring in a certain level of income to cover my expenses and help out my family, as a result I do take paid advertisements. I am trying to keep 10% of my content paid posts or less, this means 1 out of every 10 posts will be a paid post. This is much lower than some sites, and with over 90 posts so far, I have less than 10% that are paid or advertisement posts.
I have lost a few readers recently who have complained that I do some quality content, but have “Sold Out” by posting paid posts. So my question is, for those of you who monetize your blog, how do you keep your readership yet still post your advertisement posts and make a little money. Is there no way to keep a real RSS readership and post paid content?
You can’t please everyone is my take, but I do take the loss and feedback from a subscriber very seriously and will try to come up with a better system if possible. I figured I could just “Bash” out paid posts 1 day per week, and then do quality posts, but this would mean my traffic would die that one day per week once people learned the pattern.
So I hope that most of my content is quality enough to keep people coming back to see what is being said, I do post as much helpful blogger tips, reviews of stuff and even some other information where needed. When I do branch out into three or four other blogs, I will be sure to let my readers know, so they can focus on the blog with the content that is suited to what they are looking for.
In the meantime, I am still learning and I have only been blogging for about two months, with Dragonblogger being only about five weeks old. So I am still considered a blog in its infancy, trying to find its place in the blogging universe.
