Not all blog topics are created equal. Likewise, different blogs will do better with different types of content. If you’re in it to make money, it’s worth taking a look at what type of content will earn your particular blog the most money–the Dao of Your Blog Content.
There are a million different aspects of content, and they vary across industries. But here are 3 of the most common tradeoffs I face:
- Quality vs Quantity of Posting
- Being creative vs. paraphrasing existing knowledge (easier)
- Original ideas vs. ‘reposting’ (easier)
At my own blog network we’ve fought with these issues, and decided to prioritize accordingly:
- Quantity over quality (not that we ignore quality — but get up archives at all costs!)
- Paraphrasing existing knowledge over being creative (after all, it’s much harder to be creative if you’re defining what a fixed-rate mortgage is)
- Reposting over original ideas (it’s much faster–efficient–gets a lot of news out there for readers and helps us with search engines too)
This isn’t to say our methodology will work for everyone–it won’t. If you’re looking for your blog to land you consulting gigs, rather than just get you search engine referrals, you may want to learn towards quality over quantity, for instance. But if monetization through ads is your primary goal, you may go for quantity. With Adsense or Chitika, ‘transparent visitors’ (those from search engines) will usually be easier to monetize.
The point is, though, you should plan your content. Over the course of a year or two you will be writing a lot of it, so make sure it will achieve your business goals. Find your Dao.