Avoid Being A “Dead Blog”

In yesterday's post, Court asked where did the bloggers go since he started blogging. I did leave a comment. Go read it because it is a good post.

It's not secret that most blogs will be "dead blogs" within the first few months or first year. Most blogs are started because the blogger wanted an outlet to write what they think about a particular subject, share information or a passion. After a while, the blogger stop updating the blog for many reasons(lack of time, start a new blog, ...)

For example, the make money online niche is only a tiny part of the blogs and so money is the main driving force for them. They have a financial goal and thus it's easy for them to calculate the success of a blog. They know it won't happen in a few days and have more patience. This is not the case with new bloggers.

After reading Court's post, I decided to give a few simple rules so that those blogs don't turn into "dead blogs".

My main rules for blogging

• Blog about a subject that you love
• Post often.
• Get your own host and domain
• Add your blog in my blog directory

The first 2 rules are the most important.

The subject

Choosing a subject that you love is the key because you have more to write about. If you love dogs, write about it. If it's gardening, write about it. I write about a few key subject(Blogging, Technology, Money) and created 2 other blogs about entertainment and one for contest. Start with 1 blog first.

Posting often

The first months are the hardest but you will get readers from search engines every time you post something. Some will tell you to post everyday, some a few days a week and some to post often in the same day. Looking at some of the popular bloggers, I noticed that they write at least once a day and sometimes more.

Here are some numbers from October:

	Post	PR	RSS	Alexa
AdesBlog	49	5	551	40 499
Cash Quest	31	5	914	24 460
Court	22	3	662	24 255
Dosh Dosh	32	6	6000+	7 506
John Chow	75	4	13 317	2 430
John Cow	34	3	684	12 781
ProBlogger	97	6	34 763	2 140
Zach Johnson	17	4	984	31 037
TechCrunch	349	7	602 000	658
McGrath Dot Ca	16	5	15-20	185 745

You will notice that both John Chow and ProBlogger are over the 2 posts/day and also got many RSS readers.

TechCrunch is a news blog and got around 11 posts a day. It's not in the make money online niche. Your niche might be more popular!

Why get a 2 domains Linux Package?

It doesn't cost very much now($4.99/month for a 2 domains Linux package). The first domain will be for your blog. You can use the second domain to create an email for each person in your family. This way, you will be able to reduce spam. If you don't want the email, you can go with the $3.99/month package with 1 domain.

The other reason to get a Linux Package is that you can install WordPress for your blog on it. My host offer a pre-package WordPress template but you can't modify it very much. That's why I recommend self installation. The WordPress site gives you the 5 minutes installation guide.

I used my name for the domain because I don't intend on selling it.

Why promote my blog directory?

Yesterday, while browsing a forum, an advertiser asked for a place to find bloggers to test a product. The bloggers would had kept the product after the review in exchange. I always taught of paid reviews but it's another option. I wanted to reply to him to look at my blog directory but I could not because it's almost empty(too new). With 150+ categories, I'm sure he could had find a few bloggers for the product. Plus, if you do a few paid reviews, it could even make more money at the end of the year to cover all your cost and perhaps more. Money could be the nice side effect of your blog.

It's only $2.50/year and you can earn money from the affiliate program. This can be another incentive for you to continue blogging.

The money angle

By paying for a blog, I think most will be more inclined to keep blogging. I do accept a free hosted blog but it's more likely to become a "dead blog" because no monetary investment is in it. I could be wrong but it's my feeling. It's like in real life: when you pay for something, you tend to take care of it more.

If you still decide to stop blogging later, you can sell the blog and recover part of the cost while it's not dead yet. If you have a good PageRank on the next Google update, it could be worth a little more. We often see selling price of 10 times the monthly earnings. Or you could buy an existing blog instead of starting from nothing.
Conclusion

Most of my traffic(86%) still comes from search engines and referrer sites. I sure would like more RSS subscribers or direct visitors but I continue because I love it and I post when I want.

I started my blog on a subdomain and waisted time promoting it in directories until I realized that investing a little(getting it's own domain) would be better on the long run. It's now a PageRank of 5. It cost me nothing because I make a little money from it. Sure, I would like to post more often more but my time is spend on 1 Cool File for now. At least, what I learned from it can often become a new post.
I made some mistakes but if you follow my few rules, you can start in a far better position than me.

If my affiliate program can keep you from quitting tooooo soon, then it will be a bonus.

So, is your blog worth $2.50 per year or are you almost ready to quit?