Blogging for fun and (maybe) profit

This weekend we migrated Broadstuff over to its very own server owing to the traffic it now gets, unfortunately we lost the link to the last post so its now reconstituted below but with a new page ID.

While we were doing this I read a post by Steven Hodson about type of Bloggers - in short, he defines 4 main types, in ascending order of monetisation:

- Do it for fun
- Do it for offset profit eg consulting etc
- Single/small teams doing it to earn income
- The Big Blogs (are these really blogs, or just online media - they don't really behave like blogs any more)

Its a good article, and two areas I thought I'd like to comment on:

Many bloggers who buy their own domain will then need somewhere to host it and this is where they often make their first mistake (I’m still living with this one). They will more than often go with the cheapest hosting package they can which is generally something called Shared Hosting. Well, when you see that run far far away from it because if you go that route that decision will come back to bite you right on the ass. Don’t go for the most expensive hosting package of course, but make sure that you have a good solid upgrade path that can be done with the flip of a cyber switch.

Our experience is that the last sentence is key - as our blog has grown, we have moved from very shared, to flexible capacity, and now to its won server - being able to do it remotely, on the same hoster, has made things much easier. The other thing we'd say is backup, backup, backup.

The other point I'd like to comment on is value creation - Steven makes these points:

....so if you are the type of person who likes his or her technology with a splash of reality be prepared to find the road forward a tad on the difficult side.

and

any smart business minded blogger would realize that by concentrating on make their blog an authoritative voice in any space could potentially make them an attractive purchase.

While we've found the same as Steven, ie that a blog that tries to inject some reality into what can be an overhyped space (like this blog as well as Steven's) is less attractive to PR / Marketing types who want to promote stuff today, we do believe in the longer term it will create value by being more trusted, and that in our view will have its own value as we believe it will attract higher value customers, and (maybe one day) higher value Ads.