Starting a blog is like buying land – what are the three rules of real estate? Location, location, location. Launching a blog on the …
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if you’re thinking of starting a blog you should think very carefully about where you’re going to put it on the internet because it can make a huge difference of how successful you end up being hi i’m jesse i usually focus on helping scientists and researchers to communicate their science more effectively through lessons in science writing and science marketing but today i’m going to be talking about blogging in general for anybody who wants to get into blogging and thinking about how to align your blog strategy with the blog platform that you end up choosing and we’re talking about some of the most popular option styles and archetypes and some of the advantages and disadvantages of each but first i’m going to talk about why you should care about this at all if you’re picking a place for your content on the internet it’s a little bit like choosing a location for a store what are the three rules of real estate location location location when it comes to online content where you position it on the internet will make a really big difference of what kind of people you attract how rapidly you attract them and the kinds of transactions that you can do with them while they’re there so you need to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each type of position in order to maximize your impact for bloggers there are three main subjects that i would focus on the first is how easy it is to get set up and actually manage the content the second one is how easy it is to build an audience and the third is how easy is it to monetize now i go into all of these for all of the platforms i talk about in this video in a blog post that is attached to this you can find that in the comments but for now i’m gonna be focusing on the main advantages and disadvantages of each of three different archetypes of uh platforms so the three main blogging platform options that are available to you are blogging networks so i think that’s religious medium that’s what i’m talking about there the second one is newsletters which uh there’s actually a lot of options in that case and then there are personal websites and there’s tons of options there so those are the three main strategies we’re gonna be talking about in terms of their advantages and disadvantages so the first is the blogging network medium you’ve probably heard about this before if you’re on the internet you know frequently but you might not know how it works so people sign up to this website you can sign up for free to write there or to read on the website um you’re limited to how much you can read on the website if you’re only signed up for free you have to pay five dollars a month i think it is as of right now um what in order to read an infinite number of articles but anyway there’s a whole monetization thing there that the um writers can get some money if they are also paid in but the important part is that this is a network that anybody can write on and that it does reward those writers with some monetization compensation the reason that i’m kind of specifying this as you know the only one in this strategy this is really the only viable uh blogging network that i’m aware of um there have been some previous ones iterations that have existed in previous iterations of the internet um but this is really the only one that i think of as being viable as of right now to actually build a following and to monetize effectively um it’s very popular um but it does have some own hiccups and idiosyncrasies that make it kind of weird to use in some capacities and it’s definitely not perfect for everybody who this platform is actually best for are beginning writers the reason why is that if you write something that’s relatively good uh medium will you select it for distribution is what it’s called there and they will push it out to members who are interested in that kind of content that they’ll analyze the content and say like okay well what kind of content is this and then they’ll share it with the people who um you know are express a relevant uh interest in that area and uh that’s a really good thing for somebody who’s starting out that you’re gonna get some number of eyeballs on your writing and it does encourage you to you know learn things about your proper structuring and um making sure that you’re editing well so these are all important considerations when you’re starting out and it’s also just really easy to use it’s a really easy site to get started on the platform does have issues though particularly for more experienced writers i think you’re going to feel a little bit boxed in by the distribution system that it really rewards very particular types of content it also restricts you of the kinds of monetization you can do there are a lot of monetization strategies on the internet these days that you can do of influencer marketing and creator coins and you know all sorts of things but medium really doesn’t allow you to do a lot of that um while still getting distributed it’ll allow you to write stuff in that has your promotional materials or other you know monetization features that are enabled in some ways but it’s going to penalize you at the distribution side of things so if you are interested in making money off the platform you really have to do it through their distribution system and that requires a ton of readership within the actual platform itself so unless you are you’re playing by the rules of the system writing the kind of content that people on that platform already like it’s going to be really hard to make much headway there um so if you want to have that freedom medium really isn’t the place for you to to be at least from the distribution side you can write whatever you want there if you you just want a place to write that’s simple to to use and i think that’s part of the reason why i suggest it for first-time writers just show up there try to get distributed you know see what you can go do and if that is effective for you then you can maybe you know go go deeper into it or you can transition off to another platform once you feel like you get the hang of things speaking of other platforms let’s transition to the next one and that’s newsletters so newsletters aren’t exactly blogs but they’re also not exactly not blogs if you look at things like substack which is the probably the most popular one or the most well-known one on the internet right now um this is a way to share your you know basically blogging content through an email video circulation um you also do have a web page functionally uh through the subsac site the big advantage of a place like substance is that it has really rich monetization features that are really easy to use so you can um turn on a subscription-based model of your newsletter in order to you know make money off of it and just write into the newsletter format it has those pages as well that could technically rank in google as well as a way to attract users but that does have some downsides too that we’ll get to in a moment now sumstack isn’t the only one that has this option like unlike mule medium which is basically the only blogging network there are a lot of different um systems that you can use for writing your newsletters and to get paid from them as well so one of the reasons that substance is the most popular is because it really pioneered this and made it much more popular to have that monetized uh newsletter uh system but if you wanted to use another one for some other reason that you maybe you haven’t already or you just don’t like subset for whatever reason you can go off and do that so what’s the downside of newsletters it’s actually really about getting an audience it’s really tough to attract people to sign up for your newsletter like who’s going onto the internet you know in the morning and said huh i really need more email you know that’s the way i really want you know today is to just flood my inbox with more stuff you know that’s that’s not it in order to convince people to sign up to your uh newsletter you really have to be offering them a really premium you know value especially if you’re going to ask them to pay for it two down the road the people who have actually been most successful in writing newsletters are people who are kind of famous already particularly internet famous people if you look at the pages on sub stack for most popular writers a lot of them are people who already had an internet following before some stack came around and that means that for people who are not already internet famous um it’s going to be a little bit tough to really you know make it and rise up the ranks of that not that it’s impossible there are people who’ve done it um but you probably want a at least a small online following before jumping into sub stack because i think that you’re going to find it um difficult to really make it there if you’re not somebody who already has at least some degree of recognition it should also be noted that the visibility of substance content in search engines is a little bit fuzzy uh it’s not really very effective at picking up google your traffic so that means that if you want to be growing your blog through organic traffic uh newsletters are gonna have a really tough time to get it into that area so the last platform is a personal website blog so you start a website and you put a blog on it um that has a lot of advantages because you have a lot more power and a lot more freedom and a lot more ability to do kind of whatever you want there it’s a really you have a flexible space with tons of options and it can kind of look like anything that you want uh the downside is obviously that is a lot more complicated than doing a newsletter or a medium page running a website is easier than most people think that it is in terms of complexity but it is a reasonable amount of work that you have just takes more effort to set up your blog posts to manage the website like it just requires there’s a lot of busy work um on that back end so you’re gonna have to get used to that and adjust to that but it’s still a very useful tool to have access to for other reasons some of them include monetization choices so you can do any kind of monetization that you want you can do subscription bases you can do um the influencer marketing you can run ads on it if that’s what you want to go with so anything along those lines it’s all free uh for you to use it just requires the work you just honestly have to be putting in the work in order to make any of this work um distribution it is harder than medium in the sense that you’re not going to get quite as much uh free distribution as like a platform that’s pushing people to your blogs if they’re they’re good in that way though you have the advantage of search engine optimization um if you have search engines that are looking at your website you’re producing good content you can attract people to your website just through search traffic through google traffic um search engine optimization is a whole other uh topic that has a lot to it um but you are definitely going to have to you know think about you know that as a way to attract you know people to your website which has some of the same features as uh the kind of discipline that is given by medium in terms of their distribution but it’s a little bit less strict um in in many ways so anyway that is the um credit the idea behind running a personal website more complicated but more flexibility and really powerful monetization tools if that’s what you want to have access to overall i would say that if you’re new to writing on the internet i would start with medium it’s a very easy place to get going and to learn the basics of writing on the internet and how it sort of works and what people are looking for the next is that if you already have a following on the internet i would start with a newsletter because it’s the easiest way to sort of monetize that following and to turn it into both a you know better reputation but also you can you know get subscriber money too which is also cool and then if you already have some experience of running on the internet and you want to kind of take that up to the next level you’ll go out and start a website and you can learn it i i trust that you can learn if you already have some experience of writing on the internet so like anybody can really do it i do want to give a couple of quick hints here if you are a science blogger interested in starting a science blog there’s a lot more about that in my article but just a couple of quick comments medium is okay if you’re in particular areas particular uh content areas because there’s some that are more important and more popular than others so things like more technology or more environmental focus uh there’s a lot more going on there as opposed to more like the natural sciences like hard science theoretical stuff there are a lot fewer people on that platform reading that kind of content so if you really want to go in a much more theoretical um hardcore direction you’re going to have a hard time on medium i think um but if you are able to get more of the popular side of of science i think that it’s not a bad place to to be for newsletters i don’t think it’s a very natural fit for most science bloggers i think that the search engine traffic that you can generate from your niche content is a really big advantage that you can have as a science blogger who’s an expert in a given topic um you can of course write a newsletter if it fits for what you’re doing like you want to do news roundups or something like this it can definitely fit there um but for the average science blogger newsletters are probably not the place where i would start i do think that websites are actually particularly good for science bloggers because you can develop certain expertise on a given area and you develop it out over a course of articles and you your website becomes a hub for a particular type of niche content and well you’re not going to bring in like you know millions of visitors per week i would expect but you’re going to probably be able to corner a particular niche if you’re an expert in a sophisticated technical area and it’s great for people who want a business in something like consulting but that’ll be it for me today thank you so much for hanging out with me hopefully this was useful if it was be sure to like and subscribe and also check out that blog post there’s a lot more detail in there um but yeah that’ll be it for me thank you so much take care everybody
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