I got to admit this. When I initially started my main blog, I said “I’ll be true to myself, I’m going to do this to make money, no questions asked!” And being true to my word, I remembered that the first thing I did after purchasing a premium theme was to line up banners related to the niche with my affiliate links. That was even before any single content was published.
Long story short, I hardly make any money. If I did, it was by sheer luck or maybe some random idiot buying through my affiliate link or whatsoever. But then since I have somehow a nice experience with internet marketing and blogging (I had a sports blog 3 years back), I just kept writing on the blog within that subject. Sometimes I write those sappy posts, sometimes I express my thoughts and sometimes I write posts that help people a bit.
I was always like “I don’t care, this is my blog anyway”. I mean I’ve always admired bloggers like Shoe and Chow for just literally writing anything and still be completely in front of so many readers. I thought there’s no harm in imitating that.
And then because of the nature of the make money online niche, the blog started growing well. I started getting 15 comments per post and the best thing (at least for me) was it started making good money through direct ad sales and affiliate marketing. I thought it was really the coolest thing ever.
In latter parts of last year, I started developing this disease. I noticed that the articles on my blog started to grow. The once 150-word posts became a 400-500 word ones and the funny thing was that as I was writing longer posts, I feel it’s more enjoyable than writing a short paragraph on random things.
By the time, I discovered the disease and I called it “Caring for readers” syndrome. I looked back and realized that I myself got started because of the help of other people. Because they shared to me those superb tips for free and more importantly because they ‘cared’ for me, for their readers.
That was like the turning point. Although before I also post good stuffs, the mentality behind that is more about ‘I want to brag’ more than I’d want to help. I remembered a post I wrote about how lucrative affiliate marketing is wherein all content of that posts are just pics of the check that I got from several companies.
It just all started getting down into the right mindset for me. The blog Viperchill came back to life and I basically observed it. It was one of the best blogs in this subject ever in the sense that if you’re a noob you can just go out there, read his stuffs, and not worry about information overload. Then I thought, I can do that. Instead of 7 articles in 7 days, why not write like 3 long posts so that readers would really benefit. They no longer need to get annoyed for reading half-baked stuffs. And that’s how I’m doing things now
It was quite a long journey for me before I discovered that ‘hey caring for my readers is fun’. Its not as hard as being a college professor, in fact it’s not hard at all. If you’re passionate on that subject of yours it is surprising how it really is easy.
Since then I got more involved in the local forums here in the country. Walking through people, helping them out with the basic stuffs. After all this is how I got started. My hand was held too! And in my blog, I started putting out the best content I ever could to my readers. It’s a win-win situation because they benefit a lot from the content and me getting fulfilled for helping them out.
I’m sure as you are reading this, you’re reflecting. Am I really helping my readers? Do I add value to the blogosphere? Do I really need to be helpful? These are all questions that aren’t easy to answer. Just at look at my case, I started realizing it after a year, after I was making all these good money almost without any effort at all in producing compelling content.
Blogging, helping people out and caring for them is really fun. It’s just a matter of realizing whether you’re really passionate into what you’re talking and if you really are, you’d be surprised that you are starting to develop that disease.
This article is written by Melvin Dichoso who blogs at MelvinBlog Dot Com. He is currently running a $2000 contest which is all about blog marketing. It’s a very easy contest so make sure to join now.