MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

BearMountainBooks · 11-03-2016, 09:48 PM

Most blogs were making money a few years ago--and that money is part of the reason they blogged!

I've been blogging for years and I can tell you the number one issue right now is: Keeping an audience. Sooooo many people have wandered off to facebook, that there's a void. My blog has always paid for itself (I'm an associate at wal-mart, amazon, kobo, depositphotos, etc). But it's very difficult to get people interested in stopping by like they used to. I cross-post at facebook, but any post that contains a link that causes people to leave facebook isn't shown as often. And if the first few people to see it don't click, facebook stops showing it. If I post the entire article on fb, people see it, comment, like and so on. But it's a problem, because you can't gain subscribers or get clicks through to affiliate links if people are on facebook. (It is possible to post affiliate links, but results vary. Sometimes they don't seem to work at all and there's a question of whether they work on a share versus just an original link. You can't control how many people see it so if you sell ads, you can claim to have 400k fb followers, but anyone who has studied the issue knows that FB isn't going to show a single post to more than 10 percent of those followers unless paid to do so. There are various other algos that help it get shown, but for a single post, you are not reaching anywhere close to 400k or whatever the total is.)

My traffic has gone down considerably in the last two years and that's true of just about every blogger I've talked to. This leads to blogs shutting down. Five years ago I was making money on my blog via the affiliate links. These days I'm just trying to make sure I cover the costs of the blog. An author today doesn't have to have a blog or website. They can exist on FB and not have the maintenance, the cost, or the headache. Starting a new blog and gaining an audience is very difficult. Getting that blog to pay for itself or pay enough to be worth blogging every day? Fewer and fewer blogs can do it.

I think that will swing back around, but right now the casual audience is sitting over at FB reading random posts that show up in the feed.

11-03-2016, 09:48 PM	#24
BearMountainBooks Maria Schneider Posts: 3,746 Karma: 26439330 Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Near Austin, Texas Device: 3g Kindle Keyboard	Most blogs were making money a few years ago--and that money is part of the reason they blogged! I've been blogging for years and I can tell you the number one issue right now is: Keeping an audience. Sooooo many people have wandered off to facebook, that there's a void. My blog has always paid for itself (I'm an associate at wal-mart, amazon, kobo, depositphotos, etc). But it's very difficult to get people interested in stopping by like they used to. I cross-post at facebook, but any post that contains a link that causes people to leave facebook isn't shown as often. And if the first few people to see it don't click, facebook stops showing it. If I post the entire article on fb, people see it, comment, like and so on. But it's a problem, because you can't gain subscribers or get clicks through to affiliate links if people are on facebook. (It is possible to post affiliate links, but results vary. Sometimes they don't seem to work at all and there's a question of whether they work on a share versus just an original link. You can't control how many people see it so if you sell ads, you can claim to have 400k fb followers, but anyone who has studied the issue knows that FB isn't going to show a single post to more than 10 percent of those followers unless paid to do so. There are various other algos that help it get shown, but for a single post, you are not reaching anywhere close to 400k or whatever the total is.) My traffic has gone down considerably in the last two years and that's true of just about every blogger I've talked to. This leads to blogs shutting down. Five years ago I was making money on my blog via the affiliate links. These days I'm just trying to make sure I cover the costs of the blog. An author today doesn't have to have a blog or website. They can exist on FB and not have the maintenance, the cost, or the headache. Starting a new blog and gaining an audience is very difficult. Getting that blog to pay for itself or pay enough to be worth blogging every day? Fewer and fewer blogs can do it. I think that will swing back around, but right now the casual audience is sitting over at FB reading random posts that show up in the feed.