Niche Blogging | Home Business Weblog Automation
The online world has been on fire with blogging since about 1999, and you may well ask, "so what, and what does this have to do with home business?" Before I try to answer that, I want to first mention that the word "blog" has its origin in the word, "weblog" and refers to the online logs, or journals written by Internet voyagers for their own personal use and use of their friends, associates, and random surfers. Some of these blogs, as they do these days, went "viral," becoming well-known and highly trafficked as if by magic. Well, the magic of word-of-mouth. As the blogging phenomenon developed and blogging software platforms became increasingly easier to set up and use, clever, entrepreneurial people started putting them to business use. Thus, the blog, like early online bulletin boards and message boards took on an expanded life as a way to sell stuff.
What's a Blog Platform?
I'm going to pause for a moment to further define blog and blogging platform for anyone who may be unsure of what this is, and why I'm talking about it. In the "old" days of the Internet, blogs were just .html websites (websites where the pages all ended in .html), and people just cut and pasted new entries into the pages every time they had something new to say. If we fast forward to present time, we now have relatively sophisticated, easy to use software that automates much of the publishing and blog site appearance. A blogging platform refers to a system of managing content, or a content management system. A blog content management system is a software program that allows you to publish content on the fly and have it appear in the context of a fully developed site.
There are a number of different sorts of blogging platforms. Some are free, some are paid. Some require your own hosting and domain name; some use third-party servers, such as Blogger, Wordpress.com, MySpace, and Typepad. Two of the most famous, free, third-party platforms are Wordpress.com and Blogger. You simply set up an account, log in and start blogging. Typepad is another well-known third party platform but requires a low, monthly subscription, though you get a high quality site on a protected web space. Moveable Type is a well-known, highly regarded blog platform that you install on your own hosting; however you must buy a license in order to use the platform for business use.
Wordpress is a free, easy to use, open source blogging platform that you install on your own hosting, though most hosting companies include the means to do an automatic install of Wordpress on your domain. The Simpleocity website is a Wordpress blog, for example. When I talk about blogging, I will be doing so with Wordpress in mind because it is
- free
- reliable
- easy to install
- highly adaptable
- low cost way to do publish a home business site
So why blogging?
See the 5 bullet points above. Because it is a cheap, easy way to to reach huge numbers of potential customers and is highly adaptable to almost any business model. You can use blogging as a stand-alone business model or as an adjunct to an already existing business whether online or off. You can monetize a blog in any number of ways. Examples of famous blogs and bloggers would be Perez Hilton, Mark Cuban, Shoemoney, Chocolate & Zuchini, and footnoted.org. You can find many example of sucessful blogs at blogs.com. Blogs can be simple, complicated, ugly, or elegant. What you do with your blog is up to you and depends on your goals and objectives.
Niche Blogging
Personally, I think any kind of blogging can probably be tweaked to at least pay for itself. If you plan on developing blogging as a business model, remember that you have to do your business homework or product research, market research, promotion and so forth. Niche blogging and niche blogging networks have taken on a kind of life of their own in recent times. Niche blogging refers to a relatively narrow market area or closely defined topic area. The reason for their popularity has to do with the fact that blogs are relatively easy to set up, and in the area of business, relatively easy to monetize and make money from.
Automated Niche Blogging
Keeping a blog updated and fresh with your own original content, thoughts, ideas and so forth is not for everybody. However, that doesn't mean that blogging can't work for you. A more recent development in the world of blogging is the automated niche blog. This is a blog developed purely for money making purposes where you automate the acquisition and publishing of conent and concentrate on monetization, promotion, and developing other blogs. The business model is more the creation of blog networks all running to a large degree on autopilot designed to appeal to a particular niche interest group. How income is produced depends on how you choose to monetize your blogs. Generally, you make money from blogs by selling your own products, running pay per click ads, selling affiliate products, selling advertising space, and through developing a list of subscribers.
In my opinion, success with automated niche blogging largely depends on how well you identify a niche with earning potential, how well you focus the blog/network on the niche, and how well you promote your blogs. There really is no one right way to do this.
In a future post, I will discuss different kinds of automation for niche blogs. If you do a little research on your own, you will see that people have come up with ingenious ways automating or partially automating their blogs, and that the solutions employed say quite a bit about the owners' perspective on marketing and business planning.
I have just recently posted a six part video series on automated niche blogging available through the link above. The course takes you from blog installation through indexing, marketing, and promotion, and shows you how to set up a particular kind of automation. If you are new to Wordpress and automated blogging, this course will mark the path for you.
