Jane Chin’s Reality Check on Blogging for Money or “Problogging”
Copyright 2008 by Jane Chin, All Rights Reserved.
When monetization of blogs began proliferating all over the web, many people decided that they could cash in on fake blogs.
Splogs are blogs that have fake content and even stolen content.
I know, because I’ve seen some of my blog posts copied and pasted on splogs. Of course, there’s usually no contact information to be found for me to ask that my content be removed.
Why do splogs exist? To make money from Adsense. I’m specifying Adsense since most other text-link ad providers have some type of selection criteria to accept a blog within their publishers’ network. Only some of my blogs get accepted to these text-link ad providers, but all of my blogs can run Adsense within minutes.
When you decide to make money from blogging, you have to make a few decisions that can shape the direction of your blogging:
The first decision, of course, is that you want to make money from blogging. You may want to blog full time, or in my case, part time.
The second decision is what you’ll be writing about, which you probably already have an idea before you even read this article. A corollary to this second decision is how often you need to write. Posting frequency is more about your blogging strategy than just “getting a lot of traffic” and I’ll cover this in another article.
The third decision is how many blogs you want to write. This will affect your posting frequency for each blog.
Many people prefer to dedicate themselves to writing one blog, and really invest themselves in cultivating this one blog. This is a good decision. A few people may choose to write multiple blogs. Multiblog bloggers may want to increase their chances of making money across more than one website or because they have many interests they want to write about.
I am a “multiblog blogger.” I chose to be a multiblog blogger because I have some interest in many things. If I only kept one or two blogs, I may be blogging “off topic” too often. If I started writing about healthcare issues on a website where my readers came to read about careers, success, and life purpose - well - they’ll get annoyed very soon.
There are at least two dangers of being a multiblog blogger.
Danger #1: You can dilute your efforts across too many blogs.
You may not get enough critical mass built for any one of your list of blogs unless you offer something unique enough on each to keep visitors coming back. I definitely run into this danger, because my interests may change, and because I tend to write long articles that are time-consuming. If you do a quick count of my blog list, you’re only seeing a fraction of the domains I’ve actually developed. I’m still deciding what I’d do with the other hundred domain names.
Danger #2: You may end up creating splogs.
Let’s say one of your blogs do well in generating ad revenues, and you say, “this is a good thing, why not make more of it?” Here is where splogs can happen, although most of the time bona fide bloggers don’t deliberately create splogs. Most splogs come from people who don’t care about sharing valuable information at all - only about replicating websites and falsely bloat up their rankings on search engines.
The truth is splogs have become big business in further enabling splogs. There are individuals who want to sell you “Adsense Templates” that come supplied with generic articles so you can get a splog - or ten - running in minutes. A newsletter that I subscribe to recently had an “affiliate advertisement” on some free templates available. I downloaded four over the weekend, uploaded them, and assigned an Adsense code to them to see how well they’d do. So far (and almost one year later), nothing. Zero. $0.00 Earnings! This means if I had paid this company money to gain access to more of their templates, I’d be making multiples of zero dollars. Maybe the real money to be made here is selling YOU pre-made Adsense templates.
If you’re even reading this article, chances are you have a genuine interest in value exchange. You have valuable information you want to share, and you would like to generate some revenue in exchange for your value creation. Splogs may stick around, but visitors are smart enough to click off a fake blog site, and it may be a matter of time before value run out for fake bloggers.
Related: UK Guardian talks about cashing in on fake blogs.
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