The Difference Between Blogging and Writing for Sites like Associated Content

A lot of freelance writers do not understand the difference between blogging, and writing for websites like Associated Content. The rules of the game change with each platform, but at the end of the day your responsibility is to drive sales. On the surface that seems odd, because if you wanted to drive sales, you would just get a job at a call center and put on a headset or work somewhere on the front line with the customers right? Well not exactly, let me explain.

When you are writing for a site like Associated Content you get paid for your performance. The more page views, or "hits", your content receives, the more money you make. Once you pass certain thresholds, such as from Clout 1 to Clout 2, the amount of money you make for each page view increases. Once you reach Clout 10, you have some hard choices to make. It took me 4 years to get to Clout 10, and I am in my fifth year at Associated Content. There is no where else for me to go.

There are different ways to reach Clout 10. You can write about whatever you want to write about, or you can write about subjects that are actually of interest to people. If you write for the market you will reach Clout 10 quicker than you would than if you simply wrote about topics that were only of interest to you. People will click on your articles, they will comment on your articles, they will Tweet and "Facebook" your articles and propel you into the stratosphere.

Another way to reach Clout 10 is to write on what the editors at whichever site you are writing for suggest that you write about. Editors understand what topics people want to read about, and better yet, what topics actually work for the site you are submitting your articles to. You can either mirror your articles to reflect the topics that the editors are asking for, or explicitly write to those particular topics given the tools your site of choice is offering. Either way you will reach Clout 10 rather quickly. You may end up talking about stuff that is not necessarily of interest to you, but if people are a fan of your particular style of writing and they like your voice those articles will work for you anyway.

You can also write about the hottest gossip, or the breaking news stories of the day. Readers understand that your article is going to be your own personal take on what happened, but they might prefer to hear it from you. So keep in mind that it is not always about being the first one to find a story and bring it to your readers; if you are a good storyteller you can always come out on top.

So at the end of the day you have done all of these things and you bring in $10, $20, $50, $100 or more a month. People are promoting your work, you are promoting your own work, you are going onto message boards and social networks and spreading the good news, if you are confident that it will pay off, you might even take out a few ads and spend your own money getting people to check out your work. You think that is a lot of money, but the honest truth is, just how effective is your work?

What happens when you try to develop your own website, blog, journal, social experience outside of Associated Content, or a content mill? People are clicking on your articles, reading them, and then moving on. You are getting a hundred page views a day, but you aren't getting any revenue. You may end up learning what you should have learned a long time ago writing for someone else. Articles that are going to encourage someone to check out the products and services that are offered in and around the article you have written are among the most lucrative. So you have another hard choice to make; write what people will read, or write what puts money into your pocket. Sometimes the two are "one and the same", sometimes they are not.

Now you are in the real world. You are outside of the safety net of your content mill. You now have to compete with the entire Internet, and not just your competition on Associated Content or whatever site you find yourself at. Your focus changes from getting people to read what you have written, to getting people to buying what you are trying to sell. People are not going to see what you are trying to sell if your articles are boring and they are not worth reading. At the same time, without your ads, there is no revenue. You may not want to deal with ads, people are very philosophical about ads, some people care, some do not, some click, some do not. You might be trading in one type of reader for another. You might find yourself attracting other readers, that are more into the pop culture "shiny object", big picture, multimedia aspects of the Internet, as opposed to the scholars that read your work on sites like Associated Content. People that only click on web pages that have something for them to look at. Give them something to look at and find a way to keep them on your page before they click on something else that is more interesting. Write shorter articles. Write 20 to 50 word articles; give them a picture, video, or a song and find a way to market to them. It is a lot harder than it looks. There is a difference between extremely long articles in which you finish when you run out of things to say, and short blurbs that end when the average attention span of someone that cannot get enough of being online ends.

The same articles that brought in $100 a month on a site like Associated Content are only bringing in a few bucks on an advertising platform like Google Adsense. The problem is not the articles. The problem is developing your own brand in cyberspace. You have good articles, but they are not getting into the right hands. Furthermore they are not getting into the hands of potential customers for the products and services your ads are trying to sell, or another destination if your goal is to get people to an actual place in real life, or even another website if that is where your money is made and you find yourself writing your own ads to explicitly sell something to consumers. You may not have thought you were selling anything previously, but if you were successful as a writer, someone purchased something along the way from someone else.

When it came to promoting my own blog I developed an aggressive approach that involved social media, messaging boards, Google Adwords, and even pinging my blog to get the word out there. I only spend a dollar a day because that is all that I can afford. I tried the platform that Facebook offers, but it is prohibitively expensive and I ran through my money quickly. Facebook may work for some things, or certain concepts, but I found it did not work for the product that I was trying to sell, which at the time was an actual "real world" product you can actually touch and feel.

There are two ways of developing a presence online. You can create a blog on one specific topic of interest and in time, your advertising platform will only reflect ads on those particular topics. People who are looking for articles on your topic of choice may go to your blog, chose the services you present them with, and you will get revenue from your advertising platform of choice. As your blog becomes more popular your page rank increases and you become even easier for people to find. The blog is not explicitly about one topic, but will always approach whatever is discussed from the same point of view. That point of view is how you market your product and extend your brand. Good examples of this are Media Take Out, or World Star Hip-Hop. These are very simple "MySpace" like, "pedestrian" websites, but they work because they reflect the world view of their readers. They don't come out and say that they are African-American websites, but they do reflect what some would construe as a ghetto, Black, working poor, point of view. To call themselves "Black" websites would be politically incorrect, but the look and feel of their sites insinuates who would check out that site, and their comment sections can be used as a social networking tool to duplicate the experience of watching TMZ or Rap City with a bunch of your friends in cyberspace.

Another method is to create what is essentially a personal blog in hopes that people will find you. There is that slight chance that people who come for one thing, may find something else that is of interest to them. This can work if you find the right avenues in which to promote your work. Find out where people are talking about whatever your ad reflects. Offer an opinion, and provide the link to your work. Some message boards, like City-Data (which I used to work), prohibit this as it is a violation of their rules. Others, like Topix, have programs that actually scrub the Internet looking for articles and will then create threads based upon those topics and people will then have discussions if the article looks promising. Chances are if your blog is indexed Topix may inevitably come around to your article, as it did with one of mine a year ago, and create a topic for you. I would not wait for Topix though; visit some of their message boards and see what people are talking about on there and then create your own topics.

There is no fail proof methods that work every time. But each time you promote yourself, you are selling and marketing not just that topic, and not just your articles, but your own brand. This is why people follow you on social networks. This is why people pass on the links to your work to someone else. It is not enough to write an article these days. There are millions of articles on the exact same subject that are just as good if not better than the one you are writing. You have to differentiate yourself through your marketing efforts. When it is your website you cannot rely on editors to put your article on the front page, you know, just because it was that good and they like it that much. Sure Blogger has their Blogs Of Note, but I am not holding my breath. How many blogs are on Blogger? How many blogs are in cyberspace?

Technorati alone counted over 112 million blogs as of 2008. There are only 3 million plus articles on Associated Content, from only 400,000 contributors. If you only write for Associated Content that means your competition, roughly, is 280 times what it is on AC if you decide to "fly solo". If you factored in the true number of blogs out there; another 72 million in China alone as of 2008, unregistered blogs, abandoned blogs, social media, your competition could be as much as, I don't know, 500, 600, 700 times what it is Associated Content?

Associated Content, and other writing sites are only going to grow over time. Before you know it there will be 500,000 content producers, then 700,000, then one million. You can keep up or you can get left behind. At the same time, truly writing for yourself may not pay off for years to come. You could spend as much time establishing your brand and laying down a foundation, as sites like Associated Content have been in existence. You may not even make money through traditional channels; the blog could lead to other opportunities outside of cyberspace. No matter what happens, have a plan B. Write your articles on Google Docs, Word, Open Office, make sure they are in more than one place so if Associated Content or your favorite site of choice ever goes down, for whatever reason, you can still access your work. Give some of your content away, but do not give away the rights to every single thing that you write. Learn how to put your best foot forward. Last but not least do your research; you could be wrong, and you should be open to people telling that you are wrong no one's opinions are written in stone, there is no observation, mindset, point of view, school of thought that cannot be challenged by someone else. Everything should be open to interpretation it is better to have your readers talking among each other, or arguing with you, than for them not to respond at all. The last thing you want is for someone to get angry, write their own blog post somewhere else, and then use your brand to build up their presence, at the cost of destroying everything you have built online. Blogs are not dead, and social media is not going anywhere. Learn how to use these tools to increase revenue. Writing articles is but one way of getting money online; be open to various ways of getting people connected with the right products and services, leave them with an experience that will want them to come back for more and figure out what is worth talking about online and what is a complete and total waste of time.