Blog Popularity And Your Blogging Profit Plan

In recent studies by the American Life Project and The
Guardian (UK), researchers asked whether or not the
popularity of blogs today was growing in the two
countries; and if so, why? The results on the
popularity of blogs today were not exactly what most
members of the blogosphere might expect.

Researchers working on the American Life Project found
that the popularity of blogs today in terms of
readerships in the United States was absolutely
exploding; however, they also found that the amount of
blogs available was increasing slower in comparison. In
the last six months of 2004, for instance, blog readers
grew from a mere 17% of the population to a robust
37%--a significant increase. However, blog writers
only increased from 5% and 7%; and largely maintained
their homogeneous composition, which is predominantly
male, young, and wealthy. The ALP attributed this
explosion in readerships to the Presidential race,
where both candidates employed blogging in some form
to attract campaign donors.

The Guardian, which performed their study more
recently, also found similar results in the United
Kingdom on the popularity of blogs today. While they
also found that readerships had increased
dramatically, they did not find the same issue of slow
blog growth; however, they did find out that a fairly
astonishing 30% of frequent Internet users had never
even heard of a blog.

So, in which direction is the popularity of blogs
today moving?--To greater profusion or to obscurity?

Given that blogs are the best intermediary between
websites and forums, it is hard to imagine that they
will decrease in popularity; conversely, however, it
isn't hard to imagine that they will improve
significantly in continuation with how they have
changed since their inception in the mid-1990s.

In the short term, it is fairly safe to imagine that
larger blogs will experiment with video technology
while older blogs stick with easy, faster-loading
models. It is also fairly safe to assume that blog
indexing methods will continue to improve and may even
break away from the traditional algorithm method.

Planning Your Blogging Profit Plan

Planning your blogging profit plan is crucial part of
the construction of any monetized blog. But what does
it usually involve? Generally, planning your blogging
profit plan consists of two things: working on a
traffic generation plan and improving conversion
rates.

When planning your blogging profit plan, you may want
to work on the conversion side first. If you begin
sending traffic to your blog before it is monetized
properly, your conversion rates could be too low to
earn a significant return on your investment; this is
especially true if you are paying for traffic from
pay-per-click sources, such as Adwords.

One important thing you must consider when planning
your blogging profit plan is how you can improve the
quality of your copywriting. If you do not feel that
you have the expertise or writing skills to convince
someone to buy your product, you may want to hire
someone to write your salespage for you.

With the recent boom in freelancing markets, you
should be able to find a talented copywriter on
elance.com or guru.com for a relatively low price per
word or page. If your copy is bad, your conversion
rate will also be bad, which means you are wasting
traffic.

Additionally, you should consider including
pre-selling tactics while planning your blog profit
plan. You may want to include such pre-selling methods
as giveaways, cash prizes, or some other form of
interaction for visitors.

The other important thing to consider while planning
your blog profit plan is your traffic generation
methods. No matter what the topic of your blog, you
generally have five basic traffic generation methods:
pay-per-click programs, which allow you to pay for
targeted traffic; natural search engine traffic, which
you can build by optimizing onpage and offpage factors;
link-based traffic, which you can build by purchasing
links from link brokers; list marketing traffic, which
you can build by purchasing solo ads from list-owners;
and repeat traffic, which you can build by giving
visitors a reason to return and by persuading them to
bookmark your site.

All things being equal, you must concentrate on
traffic generation and conversion rates while planning
your blogging profit plan.