Do You Run a Personal Blog? - Effects on Marketing

In addition to any business blog you may run, do you run a personal blog? And if so, how has it affected your marketing efforts (if at all)?

For a while, I'd been wanting to launch a company blog, but I was running so many others, including one already on PR issues, that it just didn't seem worth it. I did, however, run a personal writing blog. It helped to bring in a few clients, although it's not really what I intended it to do... I just wanted it as a sort of safe haven to ramble on about writing and to network with other writers.

I just sold my personal writing blog's domain (writing-online.com), and moved that blog to www.Jennifer-Mattern.com. I'm expanding it from just writing to talk about other things... still writing, my sites and blogs, my informational products, etc., but also a bit on my business values and plans, PR and marketing work, more development stuff, my BlogTalkRadio show, etc. I'm hoping doing something more comprehensive will both better represent me personally and professionally and also make my life a bit easier with being able to keep it all in one place. How have personal blogs worked out for you so far?

 

I've tried it but I soon realised sitting at a computer for so long each day didn't make for interesting reading and my extra-curricula activities were too raunchy to risk publishing.

From what I have read over the last few years it's very rare for a personal blog to make any real money unless the person fabricates the stories or is generally a funny and interesting person (attributes I'm sadly not blessed with!)

 

Unless you have something very interesting to say people generally arent interested in personal blogs. Google does like it when you link your sites together though.

Overall its worth a shot, you arent wasting anything but time and if you have nothing better to do, why not? Ive seen some blogs take off and actually make some decent money and have enough rank to effectively market one of your sites.

 

LOL Crimsonc, luckily my life isn't all that "raunchy", so I wouldnt' expect that to be a problem.

I probably wasn't clear enough. When I said personal blog I didn't really mean a journal of day to day life. Instead, I meant a personal take on a professional blog (where I'd talk a little bit about my life, but mostly about my writing, other work, etc... just with a more casual tone and relaxed kind of atmosphere). Some of them seem to do really well, and I'm hoping it will be good for branding as opposed to my old domain, especially because I do business under my own name. So instead of a sort of company-style blog, it would be a bit more "raw" with me just being me.

What do you think of that style in general? I know it's worked really well for some, especially dealing with the writing and marketing areas, both of which I'd be covering. But it also makes me wonder how many are started like this that we never hear about....

 

Ah well if you mean writing in a casual fashion about subjects others will find interesting, I'd say thats more likely to yield results than writing in a formal tone. No one enjoys formal tones, it's just a method to avoid offending people (in my eyes) and make yourself seem like a pro.

People appreciate honesty and opinions without the formal crap generally used to sell something to someone.

 

lol That's my "specialty" in most of my blogs... cutting through the BS and being blatantly honest (whether people like it or not sometimes). So that's kind of what I wanted to go with here, just with it completely branded under my name. And actually... you just inspired a post. lol

 

Always glad to help!

 

I dunno, my personal blog has been a pretty good success recently.

I have over 60 subscribers and a lot of nice comments on my blog and via email.

My blog tells a story though, a story how I became successful and then also has a personal section on it.

So, I guess I agree with the statement you need to talk interests.

 

I checked out your site. While it seems cool and worth a read, I can't help but wonder how honest you're being?

I mean no offense, you could be 100% honest but so many people claim to have made millions and write a blog or sell Ebooks 'selling their story' when in fact they've made nothing. I mean you're literally telling a story, the cold hard facts don't seem apparent. It could be a work of fiction for all we know.


I just hold a little bit of skepticism with such things I guess.

 

I see your point, and understand what you are getting at...

Please note that first off the stories are all real, except character names are a bit different. I do have a "Business" section which discusses what I'm currently doing in business, where people can see what I'm doing with my income.

Also, I'm not talking about millions in a day, we are talking about millions after three-four years of online business/offline business, and as you read the story you can see where I begin to start earning money..

However, i understand your skeptisim, as it is very human natured, but I'm not selling a product on that website at ALL, so... what would be the point of lying.

 

If you enjoy writting on a personal blog or live an extraordinary life (most of us don't), then yes I would recommend doing it but if you are just looking for a medium to get back links for your site than their are much easier ways to do that.

 

No, I'm definitely not interested in it just for backlinks (didn't even think about that actually). I do well enough with getting good PR and such for my sites without doing your typical link-building kinds of things, so that's not really a motivation for me. It's more of a way to express myself a bit more freely or personally, while still talking about the things I love in life and work (writing, marketing, PR, and various projects I have going on). .... that's good advice though. I can't imagine starting a blog only for backlinks.

 

I did for a bit, but I stopped. I still do off and on. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time teaching and helping others to make money online. And yes, I actually made the money I was talking to others about making.

Today, I don't, because I have better things to do. I rather enjoy taking my free time to practice the guitar, read, watch a movie and enjoy life.

I know many do what you are talking about as a marketing tool. And it can work. I don't need it, so I don't really do it. I do some stuff over at InternetBusinessEntrepreneur.com, but that's the limit of my teaching or talking about business.

I'm definitely not one of these people that lists their financial info online. I've always found discussing money in this manner to be lower class and poor form.

The thing I hate the most are people who tell you that you can make $100,000 a year or whatever, but haven't done it on their own yet. How can you tell someone else how to do something you haven't done yourself yet?

My favorite people are the newbs that make like $300 a month on AdSense and then go out and tell people that they can make $100,000 by doing the same thing, just X times more. This is always a dead giveaway of someone who hasn't made much--like the guy that tells someone else to just build 100 sites that make $1 a day.

Geez, I better get back on topic.

If you're someone that wants to build rep in an industry, having a blog about that industry helps--provided you're not just some info rehash newbster.

 

Yeah... I'll talk about some things, like writing income, b/c that's just part-time for me, and talking about it is a part of the public challenge I put myself to (which I've so totally blown off in so many ways... whoops!... oh well... I'll still earn a low full-time income for that part-time work on top of my consulting work which is actually full-time.... so even though I won't hit that goal this year from just the writing side, I'm pretty happy with the results and what they show so far).

But I definitely don't like getting into financial details on things like my consulting work, where I earn the bulk of my income... something has to be private when so much of my life is already "out there."

Practicing the guitar.... now there's something I haven't done in ages. I've seriously neglected music in favor of business....

Jason, are you updating that blog more often again? I know it was sitting for a while, so I hadn't been checking it.

 

I've got an electric and acoustic guitar. Actually, I got some new picks and strings today. I try to get 15 minutes a day to play.

Oh, and I try to get some time for Guitar Hero 1 and 2. Can't wait for the 80s pack to come out.

As to the blog, I've started putting some stuff on it. I'll probably do more now. I started a site challenge and I should probably do it.

 

I used to have an electric-acoustic ('58 gretsch that I loved), then an electric, and now just an acoustic. I can't play to save my life anymore b/c I lapsed so badly. Spent too much time working with musicians and not enough time working on my own music. Haven't written anything in about 5 years in that sense.... someday... and now that I'm thinking about it, that's something I should work back into my schedule. Look at me here reminiscing. lol Music is sanity. I avoid video games like the plague, so I haven't actually tried guitar hero yet. lol

LOL those challenges are pesky aren't they? Damn commitments! j/k I'll have to check it out in the morning.

 

A lil bit off topic here. How much did you manage to sell your writing-online.com domain? How long have you been working on it before you able to sell it? I'm working on a personal blog too but some people create a blog just to sell it after a while and others will keep it for the rest of their live.. Care to share?

 

That one just went for $50, although I'm still waiting for it to be finalized. That was a PR4 domain when I sold it, but I didn't sell the content with it. That domain had probably been registered to me for just about 2 years, but it wasn't always used. I was going to create a writing-related site originally, but found a better domain. So I used it as a test for formatting another site and let it sit like that for months (it got PR that way originally - like 2, with me completely forgetting about it). Then I wanted a personal writing blog and figured I'd use the domain I already had... I didn't put much "work" into it... just personal ramblings about my writing for a few months. It went to PR4 once I started actually using it, b/c I linked to it from a few of my higher-ranked writing-related sites and then some others more naturally.... no special seo work, link-building, or any of that to take up time. I didn't plan on selling it originally, but lately I've been trying to purge a bunch of my sites and unused domains that I just won't have time for so I can focus on other things. I never liked the domain for what I was using it for, and still have several other writing-related domains I like better, so there just wasn't a reason to keep it anymore.

I'm actually considering building and flipping another blog I'm in the process of setting up on business finance. I don't expect that I'll ever do that regularly. But I never liked the idea, and frankly it's no fun to bitch about it if I haven't done it myself. And I'm actually using some of my PLR sets to build this one before selling it, so I'm seeing if the idea would work to sell sets of my PLR content as full sites / blogs as opposed to just the articles alone... we'll see. Everything's worth a shot once, right? So I'll do it, give it an honest go, and see if it's something worth pursuing or not.... but generally when I launch a site the intention is to keep it going and turn it into an authority site over time.

 

I just snapped a string on my electric tonight. You must be bad luck.

And yeah, stupid me for making a challenge. The problem for me is I don't need to do it and I don't need a personal blog. It's an old habit that I can't seem to break.

I'm going to work on the challenge this week though. If someone is reading, I'd hate to leave them hanging.

I thought of setting up an investment blog since I have a lot of successful experience in REI and the market. But, I'm always left asking myself why I should bother.

Take writing. I could fill up a blog on ways to do it right, make money from it and so forth, but why?

Actually, for most of the "writers" I see, my advice would simply be:

1. Go to college and get a degree OR
2. Read 5-10 books on writing and go out and practice.

Oh heck, I'm off topic again. Stop talking to me.

 

My name ( trying to brand it ) is business and my blog is one of my life lines. I am a online marketing and my personal blog has been very good to me. I just redesigned and took a lot of useless junk out but many subscribers that are in my programs come through from my blog and many have emailed me and told me that their joined my programs because of some of the topics discussed on my blog.

I think if your personal blog is related to your niche or business than it can be very useful in many ways.

Stan