To Blog Or Not To Blog

There are many people who use their blog as parnassa, and one that I know of that go picked up by one of the jewish mags.

Whatever you do, best of luck.

To get parnassa from a blog, one would have to garner readers, Web traffic. Sometimes this can be done by filling a niche, providing valuable information or ideas to the community. Sometimes, however, a blogger might try to drum up Web traffic through controversy, shock, or gossip. Another issue is privacy. A public blog can be viewed by anyone.

As far as pros, it’s a quick, easy, and free way to publish one’s writings!

I have been a blogger for over five years.

I suppose the first question that needs to be answered is — why do you want to blog? Do you have a particular interest that you want to blog about? Do you have viewpoints that you want to express? Do you want to blog anonymously or under your real name?

Once you determine what your goals are, you should be able to determine whether or not you should blog.

You have to determine the reason that you want to blog. What type of blog do you want to have?

As for making money — yes, it’s possible to make money off of a blog — but you have to put a LOT of work into it. The amount of money I make off of my blog is less than $100 a year — but then again, I’m not blogging for the money — and therefore, I don’t put as much effort into my blog as others put into theirs. For me, it’s almost an afterthought and if Google closed down Adsense tomorrow, I’d still continue to blog.

If you have specific questions, I’d be happy to answer them here or via email.

The Wolf

Let’s focus on a blog for parnasa.

You have to deal with the lack of privacy. There’s an interesting book, My Oprah Year, about a woman who I guess you could call a stunt journalist (check out A. J. Jacobs for more of the genre) who tried to stay anonymous and it reached a point where that was impossible.

Do you have a skill?

Do you have a funny idea? I saw a few books this year, Awkward Family Photos, and Cake Wrecks, that started out as a blog someone posted, more people sent in their own pictures, and soon it snowballed into a book. I have no idea how much these people have made off the books. (I saw a cute thing in Reader’s Digest, one of these little fillers, this one about misused quotation marks. Sure enough, it came from a book about quotation marks. )

Do you think you’re the next Erma Bombeck, or human interest columnist? I would tread carefully. Leaving aside the frum stuff, like lashon hara, it’s really hard not to draw on your personal life in personal, obvious ways, and not only do you not want to lose your privacy, but you don’t want to alienate people.

And hey, I’ll bet there’s a blog out there about blog start-ups.