The 5 Big Hurdles Facing Bloggers On The Path To Revenue

So, you want to build up a popular blog. You want to make some money from it. You want to feel that sense of accomplishment. Plus, this stuff is fun!

So, you sit down at the computer. You open up Firefox. You check your email. You check Google Reader. You read other blogs and get some ideas for your own blog. This is exciting stuff!

Oh, crap. It is late. Time for work, life, sleep.

Next day, perhaps you feel like tweaking your blog. So, you spend a few hours on it, messing around with code. You research PHP stuff. You go through a ton of trial and error with your Wordpress theme. After many hours, your blog might look a little different. But, traffic hasn’t changed. You haven’t even written anything yet

Oh Sh**, Another Damn Product Launch?!

Launch fatigue.

Its been an item of discussion lately in some circles, including by Dave Navarro, who had a great article about it. He also mentions a piece over at Productive Flourishing.

May was a pretty packed month for product launches – in this market. And those of you who pay attention to it all were feeling pretty inundated and ganged up on. Some of the big annoyances I’m seeing out there are:

  • Artificial scarcity plays. Let’s face it, most of this stuff is digital so you need to have a pretty compelling reason to limit availability on something that is digital.
  • Over-hype. Calling something the best thing since sliced bread when it isn’t. I think I’ve seen about every possible way to hype something, but I constantly find more.
  • Tugged in multiple directions. When you have a perfect storm of launches like there was in May, consumers feel ripped apart. And as any marketer will tell you, when you give people too many options, they’ll often just choose none of them.

As Navarro correctly stated, it isn’t product launches that are the problem. It is the repeated pattern.

A Story Of One Of My Failures

I want to tell you a story.

Back before I had any form of public reputation as a blogger, I made some money by doing programming work. In fact, even as I was running PCMech, I was doing client web development on the side to earn more money. PHP/MySQL development was my thing.

As things evolved with PCMech, I saw the need for some kind of content management system. See, I began PCMech in the days where we were manually creating HTML files and linking them together. I’d use Microsoft Frontpage to manage things as a site and hopefully keep everything working. I eventually evolved to using server side includes to make certain things common and make site changes not such a pain in the butt. But, I needed a real CMS.

So, I began making one myself. I put all kinds of work into the thing and was using it to power my own site. Then, it dawned on me that I could probably make some money with it. So, I called it Miraserver and began to sell licenses.

How To Reorganize Your Blog Categories

If you’re anything like me, your blog’s category structure was evolved over time and got to be a bit of a mess.

You write a new post and think, “Well, this doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, so I’ll just make a new category.” Next thing you know, you’ve got an unwieldy list of categories. Some are too general and are loaded with posts while others have barely anything to them.

The solution is to reorganize. But, how?