Are Bloggers Entrepreneurs – A Look At The Blogging Business Model
Bloggers are a funny breed of business owner and a question we commonly get is whether bloggers are ‘REAL’ Entrepreneurs and whether it is a career worth taking on.
The fact of the matter is that the Internet has changed business forever and you can now reach people on a grand scale with relative ease like never before. This has opened the door for new types of Entrepreneurship that may have seemed ‘Too Easy’ to be classed as real businesses in the past. Bloggers certainly create businesses because they can earn huge sums from affiliates, ad networks and other deals. They also invest their time and often money into building their blog that they could have used elsewhere. The internet has removed a lot of friction and allowed bloggers to make money from their business in an opportunity the likes of which had never been seen before.
Having said all that, Blogging is not just a walk in the park where you will write some random articles and all of sudden become rich and famous overnight.
It requires many of the same traits of entrepreneurship that any business will require like hard work, smart work along with plenty of consistency and persistence to make it happen.
What Is An Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is defined as: “the activity of setting up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.”
Entrepreneurs are people who have a vision and take the necessary action to bring their vision into reality. Entrepreneurs often make great sacrifices to get their businesses off the ground with the hope of being rewarded more handsomely then with any other way they could have spent their time.
Entrepreneurs are said to be risk takers because they forgo easier alternatives like employment to become their own bosses and leaders of their own destiny.
Entrepreneurs are required to take full responsibility for anything that happens to them or their business because there is simply nobody else to blame if things don’t work out.
Entrepreneurs can often work for years, barely making enough money to survive before flourishing in later years and generating wealth for themselves and their families.
Entrepreneurs know that the better they perform, the better chance they will have of success and they often get into personal development to strengthen the areas where they may have been weak before .
In the past, phrases like: “Your network is your net worth” would have been universal truths but the Internet has changed the way people interact with businesses. You can create multimillion dollar businesses on your own with just online partners nowadays and develop the only network you need through the Internet.
Why Bloggers Are Entrepreneurs
Having set up a ‘Real’ business in a Digital Marketing Agency before getting into blogging, I can understand where the scepticism comes from. It doesn’t feel like a real business because they are not selling anything, they are just giving away information for free.
When I looked at my friend as a blogger for many years, I always just assumed he wasn’t making any money and I kind of just blocked out how he was making money to survive.
It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered that Blogging is an incredible way to generate passive income and dived head first into the market.
Characteristics Of Entrepreneurship That Are Involved In Blogging
Having A Strong Vision
All Entrepreneurs are visionaries, they see an opportunity as something they can create when others are happy to go along as employees and continually think inside the box.
They then set out and take the necessary actions to start moving towards those goals like creating a website, writing their first article or doing the research required on what articles will generate interest.
It is Important to note that the blogging game is more competitive than ever and it is really important to that you are taking the right steps to succeed in blogging in 2020.
Never Giving Up
It is going to take Google at least 3 months to give your website any rankings and traffic to your website so you need to be patient while you wait for your articles to get ranked and bloggers need to take advantage of the early days to write as much quality content as they can to get the blog moving forward.
Becoming Experts In Their Fields
Most business rely on self development and experience to become entrepreneurs and bloggers are no different. You may already be an expert in the topic your are blogging about or you may just have an interest in it and want to become an expert.
With Google becoming better and better at establishing authority, it is even more crucial that bloggers are genuine experts AND they also need to be experts in blogging, content creation and copywriting.
Investing Time, Money And Effort
It can be great to write all of the articles yourself at the start but there is a trade off between your time and money as you start to see success and some dollars rolling in.
Writing can be one of the first things you will want to outsource in Blogging and using quality writer templates and freelance platforms like Upwork and iWriter, you can find excellent writers that are experts in your field and can write some articles for you, usually at a competitive price so you can focus on other areas of expanding you blog.
A blog is just like a regular business with the amount of time, money and effort it take to scale a successful operation.
The Changing World Of Blogging With Youtube
Even 5 years ago, you could start a blog on any topic and generate 4 figures within 6 months on any topic but Google has since established EAT which makes it a lot harder to break into health related niches and requires you to demonstrate you expertise a lot more and this looks set to continue well into the future.
Now, more than ever, you need to know what you are doing with blogging and following our 5 prong approach to blogging success is an excellent way to get the ball rolling.
Youtube is probably the greatest opportunity on the internet right now as it allows you to interact with stadiums full of people everyday from the comfort of your own home and it also possess very attractive monetization opportunities.
With Google placing more and more of an emphasis on Youtube and the possibilities to reach large audiences, Bloggers would be well advised to also look at couple their blog posts with Youtube videos to establish authority and increase their earning potential.
Blogging is a game that is constantly changing and to stay on top, we need to adapt to the times or risk being left behind.
Advantages Of Blogging
Blogging is a business model that enjoys a lot of distinct advantages over traditional models and that is one reason why blogs make for such excellent investment opportunities.
Passive Income
Passive income is the holy grail of any business and when you experience passive income you will know that you have made it to a new level in your business.
Passive income is the money that you can earn while you sleep and it doesn’t require any additional work on your part to keep receive it.
You do the work once and you continually get paid for it like digital products, money from Ad Networks and Affiliate sales.
The blogging business model is set up inherently for passive income where all the work is up front and you enjoy the benefits long into the future.
Tremendous Earning Potential
The sky is genuinely the limit with it comes to the earnings potential of blogs. Once you pick a broad enough topic where the visitors and passionate and are willing to spend money, you will be able to earn increasing amounts of money as your site grows.
Companies will pay you for referrals and Ad Networks will give you a living wage as soon as you hit a certain amount of traffic per day.
There are tons and tons of articles that you can continue to write to increase the earnings of your blog to $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 or even $50,000 plus.
It all depends on how much work you are willing to put in.
Become And Expert And An Influencer
As you grow in authority from Blogging and Youtube, you will become a genuine expert and people will look to you for help promoting their companies and for advice in the form of digital products.
Becoming an influencer in a space can lead to huge financial benefits and you may get to work hand it hand with stars of the industry to promote different products and services.
When people come to you for advice, you can easily give it in the form of digital products or even consultations that can get you PAID.
When you review products and services on your site, people will listen and it will open the door for you to sell them affiliate products where you can receive handsome commissions.
Avoid The 9-5
I HATED working a 9-5 with a passion, so much so that I quit an started a digital marketing agency before I discovered blogging.
With Blogging, you can start in your spare time while still working a full time job and you can get wait until you start to get paid before quitting and jumping in full time.
If I had my time over I would have started blogging a lot earlier as it is one one of the best ways even still in 2020 to make money a quit the soul destroying job that you hate.
Huge Resale Value
When you get a blog to a certain income level, it will make for a highly attractive investment opportunity for someone who wants to turn their cash into passive income.
You can around 24 times monthly earnings when you sell your site and this can quickly add upso if you are doing $3,000 per month, you can get over $70,000 for an upfront sale.
Traditional business have to work extremely hard to put all the necessary systems in place to even be considered for getting a sale and this is a big advantage of blogging.
Location independence
Most jobs and businesses require you to be in one location all the time and is usually a busy city where you would prefer not to be.
Once you start making a good income from blogging you can travel around the world and get to spend some time in all the countries that you have wanted to visit.
Blogging is a great way to travel while you work and knock the worlds most beautiful countries off of your to do list while you earn.
Challenges Of Blogging
Blogging is a very attractive business model but it does come with it’s own set of challenges, similar to many other business models.
It Wont Happen Overnight
You need to build trust with Google before it will send a lot of traffic to your site and this can be a slow process. We find that it takes about 3 months to start getting any sort of traffic, 6 months to get 100’s of visitors per day and about 9/12 months before you can hit thousands of visitors per day and start earning a more substantial income.
Blogging requires a lot of work up front for large payments down the line and this is why so many people give up with seeing any real success.
It’s Getting More Competitive
The old ways of blogging where people would write about random stuff happening in their lives is gone. The Blogosphere is a lot more competitive now and we need to know what we are doing to come out on top.
We recommend using Google and Youtubes autocomplete feature to get your target blog titles, weighing up the competition and creating a better blog post than them and you should always aim for the number 1 spot but hitting number 2 is not going to be the end of the world either.
We recommend a 5 pronged approach to blogging which aims to maximise your revenue and your traffic while some many blogger focus more extensively on one or the other.
The 5 Prongs are: Authority Articles, Product Reviews, Best Lists, Vs Posts and Question Answer Posts.
Look out for more info on our new Blog Course Page here.
