Last night, my colleague Jason Falls gave a presentation on the importance of maintaining your personal brand online. Among his key points of advice was owning your own domain name. Unfortunately, most of the valuable versions of my name as a domain have been on backorder for months or years (stupid GoDaddy auto-renew).
Rather serendipitously, JayGarmon.net finally came through this morning. As such, the Written Weird is no more -- or won't be by this weekend, when the DNS propagation is complete. (For the record, JayGarmon.com is owned by a State Farm agent in Russell Springs, KY -- no relation -- and I don't expect I'll ever get that URL.) Going forward, this site will be known as Jay Garmon [dot] Net. Yes, I totally cribbed the title styling from Wil Wheaton. The change is largely cosmetic, intended mostly for SEO and branding purposes. Blogger will auto-redirect all the old link equity, and since Google owns Blogger, I'm told that little to any PageRank damage will be incurred. We'll see.
In any case, the content of this site will remain the same. Moreover, the fact that my URL came through just before I relaunched my personal trivia column is a tasty piece of happy. With any luck, I'll have the new DNS situation squared before I appear on TechTalk radio this weekend. Sometimes, things just go right.
According to 2008's State of the Blogosphere, the most successful blogs are the ones that post at least five times per day. Success, in this case, being the highest Technorati Authority rankings. These rankings, by turn, are based on the number of other bloggers that link to your stuff and the authority of those bloggers.
This seems to paint a picture of a small cudgel of high-volume bloggers massively cross-linking each other, possibly because compulsive five-times-daily bloggers would theoretically always be in search of new material, and seeing what everyone else is doing (and reacting to it) is a fertile ground for blog fodder. This is mere cynical supposition, mind you, but I'd lay some money on it being at least partially true.
Whether Technorati rank translates to actual fiscal success is a muddier cause-and-effect to fathom. The majority of bloggers don't make any money at their blogs, but the average household income of most bloggers is over $75,000 a year. (Granted, this is only the subset of bloggers that have listed themselves in Technorati, but that would likely include anybody who either gets paid for blogging and/or does it at least five times daily.) This suggests most blogging is a hobby for college-educated middle-class folks, not a serious money-making venture.
What I'd really like to see is a breakdown of the Top 100, Top 1000, and Top 10,000 bloggers by authority as applies to income. Simply, does Authority convert to money? My guess is at the very high end, it might correlate, but that the correlation declines sharply and disproportionately as you drop out of the Top 100. I'm also betting the volume of posting declines as you decline the list, too. I don't have the means or the werewithal to post 25-30 blog entries per week--not without quitting my day job--and I never will.
Blogging is a hobby. Some folks can be professionalhobbyists--I mean, there are guys that make their living trading baseball cards, after all--but they are rare. And most people who play the guitar never make a dime off of it. Dreaming of being a pro blogger is a lot like dreaming of being a pro musician or pro athlete--most of us just aren't going to make it. Don't stop playing, just stop expecting to get paid.
My buddy Rob pointed me to this great blog post about how hard it is to earn money from blogging. There are a lot of really great economic analyses at work here, but what it really comes down to is this: Too many people are chasing too few dollars for anyone to make a living.
The whole point of blogging is to democratize Web publishing. The barrier to entry is so low that almost anybody can blog, so almost everybody (seemingly) does. Ironically, there's a whole universe of people auditioning to be the next Robert Scoble when Scoble himself (according to the article) is having trouble making money at what he does.
Doubly ironic, as a guy who makes part of his living blogging, I'm happy about this. Here's why.
There are four areas of competition for any product or service in a capitalist system: Product (quality), Price (cost), Promotion (awareness), Placement (convenience). Do I know something exists, is it worth buying, at what price, and where can I get it?
On the Internet, there are really only 1.5 avenues of competition.
Placement online is nonexistent, as anything on the Internet is available everywhere on the Internet, barring some national censorship or workplace ISP filters. The price for content is free, as anyone who tries to charge for content has more or less failed. So that leaves Product and Promotion, and I think promotion is really only half an avenue of competition anymore.
Another buddy, Jason Falls, argues that promotion is where the next big fight is online. That's why everyone is nuts over Twitter and Facebook and, until recently, blogs--they're a new, untapped avenue for promotion. But they're promoting offline goods online. They're middlemen. So what promotes these social media goods and services? Search.
TechMeme and its brethren autoblogs has automated the process that Fark, Digg and BoingBoing do manually--selecting cool and popular stuff for a specific audience. Google News operates similarly. While I'll never concede that automated aggregation will be of higher quality than human-chosen aggregation, it's already good enough to compete and will only get better. Just as with SEO, I foresee an arms race of PR-trained techies out there trying to find new ways to game these automated systems, and engineers countering the gaming, such that wild swings or radical successes are rare. Filtering out the "good stuff" from the democratized Web will only get easier for content consumers, which is a good thing for readers and rough for promoters and bloggers.
So where does that leave us bloggers looking to make a dime? With no choice but to be the good stuff. The Web is inching towards forcing everyone, everywhere to compete on quality as applies to content. The good stuff will get aggregated. The good stuff will get consumed. The good stuff will get monetized. The people who consistently make the good stuff will get paid, which is good and bad.
Quality content requires quality content creators. In other words, talent. And here's the scary part: Talent doesn't scale.
You can't turn one good blogger into five good bloggers by throwing more servers at the problem. You have to go out and find, groom, and pay five good bloggers. And there's rarely a magic formula for finding them. They're a rare commodity, but those that can do the job can expect that in the near future they'll be paid their true worth for the service.
That said, it's not enough to be first anymore, because any blog worth doing is going to have hordes of amateur competitors out there doing it for the love, not the money, and occasionally doing it faster or better than you. The secret will be in consistency of quality--being good often enough to assure regular readership and regular monetization. Success will be hard. Success will be expensive. Success will be slow. But I'm betting the payoff will be worth it.
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