Today I am challenged "to use your power of words to stir your reader" - I am to "write a letter or appeal, something that persuades your reader to join the cause, take sides with your movement, or simply try something new". I have decided to try to persuade readers of this blog to start their own blog - here goes!
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| Click to enlarge for full view. Image source: WPVirtuoso. |
According to the article "How many blogs are on the Internet", there are over 150,000,000 blogs in the world - that about one for every 50 people on our planet. Another interesting statistic is that a new blog is created somewhere in the world every half second. Many are business blogs, but most are private blogs like mine. So if you are one of the 49 out of 50 people who do not have a blog, why not try it out?
I have outlined previously why I like to blog - it's liberating and challenging. You can blog about almost anything. One of the first really successful blogs was by Julie Powell who started the Julie/Julia Project (the original blog can be found in an archive here). Each day for 365 days she recreated a recipe by the famous food writer Julia Childs - this was later turned into a book and also the 2009 movie Julie & Julia.
The 10 most popular blogs in the world are as follows:
- Huffington Post
- Boing Boing
- TMZ
- Business Insider
- Mashable
- Gawker
- The Daily Beast
- TechCrunch
- Perez Hilton
- Engadget
Perez Hilton is estimated to earn $450,000 per month (according to Income). Yep - that's over $5,000,000 per year from blogging! The top earner per month is the Huffington Post (which is really a news aggregator) at $,2330,000 per month. So you can make money from blogging, but only a tiny fraction of the world's 150,000,000 blogs make money. In 2015, my blog made me just €17.75 from the one ad that you see below this post.
So I will not be able to persuade you to blog if you want to make money. If you have a business you can set up a blog (for free) where you can tell stories about how you set up your company, customer experiences, less formal news announcements, and provide a personal link from you to your customers. Like Julie Powell you can blog about food - lots of cooks share their own recipes - our own Donal Skehan has an excellent blog called "Eat, Live, Go". Why not share that special recipe for bread or an apple tart that your grandmother gave you?
You can also tell stories - the excellent Squid McFinnegan (who won Short Story of the Year in 2015), writes great stories that started out with him just looking for an avenue for his writing. The great thing about this is that you can publish your own work without having to go through the tough grind of getting a publisher interested. You can write a story today and your readers can enjoy it tomorrow. Anyone interested in writing should do this - to get started I really recommend the 31-day Jeff Goins 500 Word Writing Challenge, which is what I am doing now (I'm on day 11).
You can also turn your blog into a book. Websites like Blog2Print can convert your blog into a printed book - they'll even help you to sell it online through Amazon.
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