Blogging Isn’t High ROI
Until It Is
I went through a weird period between 2016-2018 where people referred to me as “a blogger.”
Which was kind of weird, but I suppose it’s an interesting relic of the times; you could be a professional blogger in that time period, I had a semi-popular blog, and in terms of outward facing stuff, the blog was all you could see.
I’d write a 1,000 + blog post every day. That generally comprised about a tenth of my output. Maybe an eighth.
I made very little money from the blog for the first couple of years. From the blog itself; the affiliate, the Direct Response Newsletter, and the odd other promotional bit; I made little money.
Blogging was a low ROI activity.
Until It Wasn’t
Realistically though, through the network effects that blogging had; I was discoverable, mysterious, competent and so on; I got a bunch of high-profile people interested in what I could do, and sometimes more importantly for me, what I couldn’t do, and from there; I got to expand unlike the majority of copywriters do – to the point I wasn’t really a copywriter anymore at all – and I got into niches, areas and ventures that simply aren’t accessible to the majority of people who’ll ever try their hand at online business.
There’s also the hypersigil effect, which I’ll talk about in a later post. Probably tomorrow, for anyone that’s reading this as a live thing.
(That’ll be about ten of you currently; the indexing still hasn’t kicked in anywhere. It’s liberating to talk to myself.)
The Lesson
I guess in short the lesson is that blogging is a low ROI activity, however, so is any hobby that doesn’t have an inherent money-generating focus.
If you start a window-cleaning business, then sure, you clean a window, you get paid.
However, with most hobbies, the challenge is in tailoring the hobby to making money, and also working on the discoverability. Blogging was a way to do this quite seamlessly back in the day, in the way that social media is now.
Blogging has inherent discoverability built-in when compared to other forms of writing; you write, it’s out there mostly gathering dust until you do something with it.
Blogging, inherently, can lead to money-generating opportunities with a little twist; we’re effectively writing webpages, and they can be a sales page as easily as they are a running diary.
Blogging also has one strength that’s overlooked.
Intellectual Property Creation For Dummies
One of my mentors writes blog posts, which he then utilises not only in the general syndication sense; video content, tweets, social posts, but also, in the form of collections that go into books, and he slightly tweaks the content to use in different contexts over and over again.
So, naturally, when I complained to him about the Vault project and the struggle I’m having with coming up with high quality material, specifically for the Foundations course and so on, he laughed at me.
Then he roasted me a little.
And quite rightly.
Because I have clearly, painstakingly and exhaustively covered the foundations of online business already on this blog, (and its properties; emails, products and social media posts.) It’s just a case of putting together a skeleton of all the pieces of the things I’ve written over the years, and then taking that skeleton and using it to put together guides in a coherent form.
If you’re a writer of any kind, you are constantly in the process of creating things that can be used in a myriad ways. The words themselves become assets and tools.
Funnily enough, the above links back to one of my first ever blog articles. Every Word You Write Is An Asset.
And I didn’t intend to announce this quite yet, but it segues nicely into an idea I’ve had: Whenever I can’t think of a topic, I’m going to dip into the archive and revisit an old one.
Because all of these old pieces of my writing are currently collecting dust in the digital mausoleum; but we can bring them back to life.
More on this on Friday’s post, where I’ll discuss what I’m calling Cthulhu Marketing.
(Incidentally, that’s a great book title, and so I’m going to put it out there. It’ll be in the Vault first, but I have to launch that. Soon, dear readers, soon.)
Until then though, I’ll see you in the next one.