Last Minute Notes On Blogging In General

To finish the Back To The Basics series with a bang I’ve decided to do something a bit different and discuss some slightly off-topic (but related) topics all on this single post. So, here we go:

Blogging Is Cheaper Than Starbucks

Whoever says blogging is an expensive hobby has no clue what they are talking about. Here’s a breakdown of my bills for the past year of blogging:

Web Hosting (aff-link) - $119.4
Domain - $10
Advertising- $20 (I experimented with this mostly)
——————————————
Total - $149.4

Now if a poor starving 18 year old developer can afford that surely everyone else can (oh and by the way, please donate! I really am broke). I can see how some single mother raising a family of 3 on minimum wage might not be able to afford it, but for everyone else there’s no reason to call it an expensive hobby.

Stop buying that $4 coffee at Starbucks and you’ll have no problem getting an extra $10/month.

And if you really don’t have an extra $100/year, then you can always use a free blog hosting service like Blogger.

Be Ethical With Your Blog’s Monetization

A thing I tried repeating over and over in this series is this - be ethical. Don’t hide affiliate links, don’t lie about getting paid to say something, let your readers know what is going on! It is incredibly scummy to go around hiding links behind redirects, and it is scummy to claim you are not getting paid for a review when you are.

You Don’t Have To Be A Good Writer

I don’t consider myself a good writer at all. Back in school I barely passed grammar and English class by one or two points. Simply put - I suck at writing. Despite that this blog is always getting more and more popular. You don’t have to be a good writer to become a popular blogger.

MySpace bloggers - or as I like to call them: the “HAHA LOLZARS SHEZ HOTZ BOOYA” crowd - are a perfect example of that. Even the popular MySpace users write like 2 year olds.

Respond To As Many People As You Can

If someone replies to one of your posts or comments, take a second and reply to them. It lets them know you care, and believe me it’ll make you feel better as well (and it does help to improve growth quite a bit). Of course if you get to the point of getting 5k hits a day and 50 comments/day this advice is pretty useless (and if you get to that point, don’t forget to link here ).

Be Careful What You Say

Defamation lawsuits are very real and are becoming more common due to the explosion of user-generated content online. Be careful what you say.

Defamation occurs when you say a serious lie about someone else. Saying something like “He’s a stupid fool” isn’t defamation, but “He’s a lying raping crack-head” is (unless the person actually is, in which case get them some help, pronto!). Just be careful, alright?

Make Your Blog Personal

Even if you are running a corporate blog, your blog should be personal. Blogs that are nothing more than “do this and this and you’ll get money” are quite boring and have low readership rates because of that. Ever read any of Google’s blogs? Each blogger has their own writing style, so they don’t sound like robots in every post.

Relax

And perhaps my final chunk of advice would be relax. I had to learn to become patient to blog - you may have to as well. It isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme - it is something that takes months and years to get good at.

There is still one more post left in the series. Remember to come back tomorrow!

Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?