Instigator Blog

Most people ask, “How much money do you make from your blog, and how do you do it?”

But Jonathan at SmartWealthyRich.com is asking a different question: What are your blogging expenses?

Good question.

He’s hoping to generate a lot of feedback and discussion, and I hope he does.

I spend approximately $20/month in hosting and that’s it. I’ve thought about having a professional do my blog design but haven’t bit yet. I strongly advocate having a top-notch blog design though, so if you’re going to spend any money, spend it on that.

I’ve also heard positive feedback on paying for clickthroughs from StumbleUpon.

If we associated a cost to the time we blog, our blogging expenses would be astronomical. Unless you value your time at $0.5/hour…But beyond that, what else do you spend money on? Do you buy advertising? Text link ads elsewhere? Every use any professional help to solve a problem or add special code?

Go check out the feedback Jonathan’s receiving and leave a comment for him with your blogging expenses.

When starting a business, you’re going to make mistakes. Even if you’ve done it a handful of times (successfully or not), mistakes are common. Of course, you will learn a ton from the mistakes you make; but there are plenty of new mistakes left to make.

Luckily, it’s not all doom and gloom. Far from it.

There are plenty of reasons to create a startup, and few mistakes are really death knells. Plus, there are tons of great resources online where you can learn from the mistakes (and successes!) of others. Granted, learning from reading isn’t the same as learning from experience, but it doesn’t hurt.

Simon Tennant writes a wonderfully titled post, 10 Habits of Highly Effective Founding, where he relies on his own experience to provide ten tips on how to better found a startup.

I agree with the bulk of what Simon says, but wanted to extend the conversation just a bit…

Who are your customers?

“Confirm your customer constituency before you start. Developing your idea for an imaginary group of people will never work. Make sure you have a customer base. Confirm that your idea solves a problem of one of your close personal friends, or someone you know, before you even start.”

Close, personal friends are tricky sources of information - they’re often “yes” people; saying “yes” to almost anything because they’re friends. Family tends to be the same. So be cautious of that when approaching friends for insight into your business idea.

There are other ways of assessing the market.

Make a list of potential key clients, industry experts and potential partners. Network your way into relationships with these groups, casually, and see if you can’t get some feedback on your idea. With Standout Jobs, I’ve been speaking to HR people, HR experts and others to get interesting input back.

A product with no market is useless. But one thing you’ll likely discover is that your original idea changes several times before you launch. Simon makes reference to this but only in terms of strategy. For a lot of startups, their core product ideas change. So focusing too heavily on potential customers only to shift your product significantly a few months in could be wasted effort.

Looking over your shoulder at the competition

Next, Simon tackles the important issue of competition:

“Assume competition is already out there
Since ideas are cheap and easy to come by, assume there are at least five competitors already working on yours. And assume they have a 6 month start on you. Depressing eh? Sure, but preparing yourself this way will help you.”

At the very early stages of a company, it’s best to just ignore your competition.

If you focus on competition, two things will happen:

1. You’ll constantly have the holy crap reaction to competition which instills fear and panic; and,
2. You’ll start copying your competitors, playing the “me too” game.

It may be impossible to ignore competition completely. And you can gain some valuable insights by paying attention, just don’t overdo it.

Don’t Just Mimic, Get Help

Simon has a good piece of advice when it comes to finding help:

“Mimic people you admire. Sometimes you won’t know how to best use your time; what task to prioritize over all the others at a given time. Here’s a trick I use when I’m struggling: Think of someone in your industry whose work you admire – how would they be using their time? Mimic them.”

Take that a step further: get a mentor.

There are too many stumbling blocks, pot holes and pitfalls starting a business to not bring on board a mentor. No mentor is perfect, but find someone who’s “been there, done that” and can help guide you through the startup minefield and open doors to key relationships and clients.

When it moves your blog toward its ultimate goal.

You do have a goal for your blog, right?

(Thanks to Lorelle for asking the question: How do you determine the success of a blog post?)

Bloggers write a lot. We have to. It’s the nature of the blogging beast. Produce content. Do it. Write, write and write some more.

For all the debate over how often you need to be posting to maintain and grow your audience, the fact remains that many of us write a lot of blog content; perhaps 3 times a week, maybe even daily (and some of us post more than once per day!)

But do we always follow our own advice?

The old adage, “Do as I say, not as I do,” comes to mind, and I suspect it applies to many of us. An idea pops in our head, we write about it stating ideas and truths we believe in (I’m not claiming any of us are lying!) and then we’re off to the next blog post. We have to be: there’s four more to write this week!

That killer post you wrote with the great ideas, practical tips and important lessons learned, receives positive feedback, generates some comments, but ultimately disappears into your archive. There are ways of extending the life of a blog post but typically after a few days or a week, a blog post is gone.

Does the nature of blogging lead us to blog for the sake of blogging?

I’ve written a lot of content. I don’t remember everything I’ve written; every idea and suggestion. Recently, I’ve started asking myself, “What did I say on that topic again?”

I don’t want to speak for the sake of speaking.

Part of what makes blogging interesting is the sudden nature of it - publishing content quickly, connecting with people easily - but it’s also easy to post and post and post and not follow through.

Walk the walk. Don’t just talk the talk.

I’ve started using my own blog as a reminder service, a personal archive of what I should be doing. I know I won’t always follow my own advice (let alone remember it all!) but at least it’s there for me to fall back on. When I’m struggling with leadership questions, I can go back and read 10 Essential Business Leadership Skills. If I’m feeling worn down and need a pick me up, I might read Even Superheroes Have Limitations or 5 Inspirational To-Dos You Can Do Every Day. And it’s not just my own thoughts that I reference. Each post has plenty valuable comments: so my reminder service and resource library expands continuously.

Do you follow your own blogging advice?

The Carnival of Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs was initiated by Raj Dash. Anything that helps aggregate quality content related to entrepreneurship and bootstrapping is a good idea in my books.

One of my articles made it in — Is Guy Kawasaki’s Backhand Better Than His Server? which was a quick look at his new startup Truemors and the lessons learned in building it on the cheap.

For those of you not familiar with Blog Carnivals you’re missing out on a great opportunity to generate buzz for your blog and network.

I ran the Carnival of Entrepreneurs for awhile at Startup Spark and I’m very happy to see it living and breathing successfully.

The key to success for blog carnivals is to have great people running them, and new people submitting all the time. If it’s the same people over and over, the carnivals grow stale. So go find a blog carnival that suits your blog and start participating today. And if you don’t find one that works, start your own!