Is it worthwhile writing a blog?
January 28th, 2007 | 
Author: People seem to come to the world of blogs from two basic angles: 1) a personal diary of sorts and 2) a business diary. Of course, in many cases there’s a lot of cross-over between the two.
Whatever way they get there, sooner or later you start to see adverts on the sites. Do they make money though?
Our own relatively low-key efforts have made us around $10 and I suspect that’s a reasonably typical income for most blogs. After all, few will get the high level of traffic that’s required to pull in the advertising income but then that’s the case for a lot of ordinary websites.
On the other hand, if the blog attracts a particular audience things can change. For instance, you’ll see a fairly small advert on the relatively high profile site Petite Anglaise for clothing which I suspect works quite well as it fits in very well with the overall theme of the blog. Others make the blog one of the main planks of their Internet promotion such as Europe A La Carte. We sometimes seem to have the market cornered on French toilets and French septic tanks, neither of which are in our main line of business but both have attracted people to the blog and have moved us significantly up the blog rankings as a result.
As personal blogs meld into business ones, there’s money to be made through mentioning your business in the blog. I don’t think you can realistically do this by “in your face” advertising and so we’ve adopted a very low-key approach through telling people what it’s like here at various times of year and via our series on buying a house in France. However, whilst both may attract people to the region, they might not stay with us.
What about the “in your face” approach though? Would that work? Actually, I suspect that it would work in that google shoots blog postings right into the top 10 within a day or two. Snag is that they don’t stay there for long. For instance, we were briefly the world expert on French septic tanks when we posted on that topic and by mentioning French septic tanks several times in this piece should be the top site once again, if only for a few days. It’s even possible to stay in the top 10 if you choose your key words properly. For instance, the top entry for google on “French military victories” has remained there for several years and indeed we still get a regular trickle of hits on our septic tank page.
Where this “in your face” approach falls down is that it’s a one-shot deal and doesn’t use the power of blogs which is to attract a regular readership.
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I don’t know if it’s much to boast about being associated with French toilets, the danger would be if that were mistaken for our core business! However I do think the whole issue of public toilets should be moved up the agenda.
Your post touches on so many interesting topics. Is writing a blog worthwhile? I thought about this recently as my blog has brought more visitors to my site but not a proportionate increase in the number of enquiries and bookings. If my blog is primarily to promote my business I need bookers not just browsers. However in the long term it may bring more business through higher page ranking and regular readers becoming customers.
The blurry distinction between business and personal blogs is something I’ve blogged about recently
http://www.europealacarte.co.uk/blog/?p=154
I am sure it is short sighted to adopt the “in your face” approach. No doubt it is a long haul requiring a steady flow of interesting posts to realise the full potential of a blog.
For us it has been nearly impossible to tie specific website hits with specific bookings but, very roughly, when we double the number of hits on the property site (www.mascamps.com), we double the number of bookings made directly through that site.
The Foreign Perspectives blog has a very indirect relationship with the property in the line of attracting bookings. With FP, we can hit short lead-time bookings (in theory) as blogs can easily go to a top-10 listing in google within a few days whereas doing the same with a normal website can take years. Granted, it’s a temporary top-10 slot, but very useful all the same.
We’ve also started our “buying a house in France” series via the blog as a means of trying to hit that top-10 slot on house buying keywords on a more regular basis and at the same time build up the corresponding section of the website which should pull in longer term better rankings. For us, house buyers are a very profitable sideline as they tend to stay longer and come back too, at least until they’ve bought their own place. Even then, we pick up the “excess friends & family” who tend to start turning up once you’ve bought a place in the south of France.