For Newbs: How to Blog-Types and Topics

Blogging Motivations

As mentioned several times before, it is important to understand your motivations for blogging because those motivations will influence your decisions on how to best position your blog for success. Blogging for money requires a different strategy than using a blog as a medium for socializing.

Blogging for Money

Professional Blogging, or Problogging, is the act of blogging for money. This can be accomplished in one of two ways. The road most often taken by novice blog entrepreneurs is to start a blog on a particular topic and to make money by charging others to advertise on it. To me, this is the internet version of starting a magazine or radio show. The goal here is to get as many eyeballs visiting the blog so as to attract high paying advertisers.

An effective strategy for this type of blogging is to write on a topic that people will be interested in. The trick here is to find a topic that has an audience big enough to attract advertisers but not so crowded that the voice of your blog gets drowned out by the hundreds of other blogs on the same topic.

Another way to make money as a Problogger is as a freelance writer. One that only writes for blogs. In this way, you would hire yourself out to produce content for a blog and/or in some cases get hired by a corporation as the “Company” blogger.

The purpose here is to get potential clients looking at your site. Therefore a development strategy would be to write about topics that would appeal to those clients and get them on your site so you can sell to them.

Blogging for Customers

Independents, small businesses and corporations alike have found that a blog is a good way to find, connect with and retain their customers. Business owners uses their blogs to introduce the company to new customers, bump up the perceived value of their products and services as well as introduce new ones.

A great way to draw in loyal customers is to use the blog to teach customers how to make the most of the product or service they purchased from you. For example, the search engine giant Google has a blog for every product they own and uses them to educate people about available features, to discuss features in development and announce new ones. By doing this, you are showing your customers that you care about them and their success with your products. You are also soft selling to potential new clients by showing them how your product can help them solve a problem they may be having.

Blogging for a Cause

These blogs usually center around generating social awareness and/or support about a particular topic. For example, The Darfur Blog focuses on exposing the atrocities occurring in that region of Africa. Aids.gov is another social awareness blog run by the US government to educate the public about the AIDS epidemic. Both of these blogs also aims to connect people with resources.

With this type of blog, you should aim help people understand the issues, how those issues affect them personally and what they can do about it.

Blogging on the Soapbox

These blogs exist solely to put forth the opinion of the blogger. I think the majority of political blogs fall into this category. The primary purpose is to give the reader an earful and to encourage discussion of the issues. This sounds a lot more rational than it is. In reality, people get a little hot under the collar when it comes to putting forth or defending an opinion and these blogs often end up as breeding grounds for flame wars.

Developing this type of blog is both easy and difficult. People have opinions about everything so the topic can really be about anything. The challenge here is to write in a way that encourages feedback as well as moderate that feedback to discourage trolling and blog rioting.

Blogging for Fun

Personal blogs make up the majority of this category. People discuss their daily lives and generally only blog as a way to network with other people who share their interests.

People want to get to know you so, with a personal blog, it is more important to be yourself and to discuss topics of interest to you. Some bloggers separate their interests into multiple blogs such as a blog for crafts and a blog for books while others combine everything into just one blog. It really is just a matter of personal preference.

Money, money, money, money…MONEY!

One of the most frequent questions I see on blogging forums around the ‘net is some variation of “Can I make money blogging?” The simple answer is: Yes, you can make money blogging.

However, it’s not as easy as it was in the days of Darren Rowse of Problogger when blogging was still relatively new. Nowadays the market is filled with people trying to make a buck just like you. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t go for it. But understand that it will take some time, creativity and work (that’s right W-O-R-K) to make it happen. And the more money you want to generate with your blogging, the more time, creativity and work you’ll need to bring to the table.

Later in this series, we will go over, in more depth, the different ways you can generate income with your blog but for now just know that the ways income is generated from blogs is through advertising sponsorship, the selling of a product or service, donations or a combination of all three.

Types of blogs/blogging

There are an infinite number of things you can do with a blog but blogs are categorized either by media type or genre.

Media Type

Standard Blog- This is your basic text blog.

Vlog- This is a blog where the majority of the blog postings are video.

Podlog- This is a blog where the majority of the blop posting are audio recordings.

Moblog- The act of blogging by mobile phone. Also a blog specifically set up to be accessed by mobile devices.

Genre

Artlog- The blogger uses his/her blog as a show case for their artwork (other than photographs)

Photoblog- A blog consisting of mostly photos.

Edubog- Blogs about education or a particular educational instituition. Usually run by a student or someone in the field.

Newsblog- Blog that tracks upcoming stories in a specific industry or society at large.

Collaborative Blog- A blog that is run by more than one blogger.

Tumblelog- A blog consisting of short succinct posts.

Fictionlog- A blog that consists of fiction writing and/or is run by a fictional character.

Flog- A fake blog. Different from a fictionlog in that the blogger is posing as a real person but everything in the blog is fake.

Subject Matter

There is a blog for every topic that a human being can conceive of discussing. But here are some of the most popular ones.

Beauty/Fashion
Politics/Government
Relationships
Sex (as in Entertainment)
Self Help
Current Events
Financial Advice
Parenting
Entrepreneurship
Business
Gender Based Issues
Religion

In the next article For Newbs: How to Blog-Tools, we will go over some things that will help make life easier in your blogging career.