Be Your Own Boss

I’ve spoken a few times about how writing online can be a reasonable way to drive towards being your own boss, but it is also one of those businesses with a very high failure rate. How many bands do you know of that play for years and never make a dime, but have the dreams of it? Writing for web content can be just as competitive, if not more so.

While the key to being a successful online writer ends up being traffic and more traffic coming to your site(s), getting that traffic comes out of quality, quantity and real knowledge on the subject. Yet even if you’re the most knowledgeable person on a given subject, attracting the attention of the millions out there is not easy, especially if there are millions of people trying to write about your very subject.

I recently found, and was added to, an interesting venture that I think might help those involved with it — BlogBurst. BlogBurst is a company that is taking blogs (that they’ve accepted) and distributing them to large and well known media companies online. You write, they publish your writing on some very large companies:

SF Gate
Washington Post
Houston Chronicle
San Antonio Express-News
Austin American-Statements
Gannett

These are not tiny little papers with a few dozen readers, these are papers that carry quite a bit of traffic. While it isn’t necessarily financially profitable for you to be carried by these papers (they take your words, use their ads around them, and you don’t get a share yet), it is a great way to drive traffic in the long run to your site.

Remember, building a reputation as a consistent and knowledgeable writer doesn’t happen overnight. It may not even happy over a period of time: it just happens one day. As your readers tell others about your site, you gain a little bit of respect and establish yourself a little bit more as someone to be trusted. Gaining the distribution into a major newspaper might not bring you a lot of attention right away, but it is something worth trading some ad income for. The newspaper gains a unique opinion, you gain some credibility, and in the long run you’ll gain more from it than they will. Keep writing, keep getting picked up, and the writing opportunities are endless.

The newspapers who are part of the BlogBurst program are doing a very smart thing — many papers are having problems attracting the younger crowd. What better way to gain visitors than an amateur writer telling friends and family about the paper that is publishing their article? This two-way street should work very well for the mainstream media, and by accepting the sidestream media, we should see some very good traffic sharing.

If you aren’t writing yet, jump on it. Grab an account at any of the free hosting companies, and start writing. If you feel like you can stick to it for 6 months, go ahead and register a domain name at a cheap host, download Wordpress, and get to work!

BlogBurst, like most blog distribution networks, requires that you’ve been writing a while, and consistently. I believe they’re looking for 3-6 months of history with high quality grammar and spelling and a unique opinion. There is no time like the present to dig in, build yourself a history of articles (even if no one is reading them yet), and see where journalism can take you.

Discuss this article at the be your own boss forum.