WebPublishing.me

This is a guest post by blogger and roller derby girl, Lauren Morrill-Ragusea who founded Higher Ed Underground.

My blog, Higher Ed Underground, was conceived after a particularly rough week at my day job. I was tired, frustrated, overworked, underpaid, and just generally burnt-out. I needed to do something in my line of work that was fun, if for no other reason than to remind myself that such a thing existed.

After several years spent working in and around college campuses, plus an advanced degree in higher education administration, I started to have faith in my ability as an expert. Yes, there are people with more experience and more education, but those people tend to be older and boring. They also tend to be people than can barely text message, much less blog. Thus, Higher Ed Underground was born.

It hasn’t been all daisies and roses since I started the site. I’ve made quite a few mistakes along the way (and am probably still making mistakes as we speak), and I’ve decided to share them with you in hopes that your website dreams don’t come crashing down around you.

Starting my blog for the wrong reasons

As I mentioned, Higher Ed Underground grew out of a particularly tough workweek. As a result, my initial motivation was to grow a web presence large enough to rake in the cash, quit my day job, and love life.

Yeah … fantasy.

You see, launching a site thinking you’re going to make a good living off it is the same as sitting down to write your first novel and thinking you’re the next John Grisham. Making money off your site is HARD. So hard, in fact, that if money is your only motivation, it’s going to be damn near impossible to put in the effort required to see a single red cent.

I’ve been blogging for a while on my person blog, Derby Girl, about my life playing roller derby. It’s been easy to keep up with it, because I do it just for myself. I do it because I genuinely enjoy hitting the “post” button each day. That blog has just over 2,000 pageviews a month, which isn’t too shabby, and that was with zero effort or promotion of any kind.

What’s the difference between Derby Girl and Higher Ed Underground? I started Derby Girl because I loved derby and felt like sharing it. I started Higher Ed Underground to make money. Which one do you think is more fun to maintain?

Thankfully, not long after I began working on Higher Ed Underground, this realization smacked me in the face. I threw out the serious, boring, advice-driven content and got back to what I like best: snarky commentary. The content was easier to come by, the daily posting was easier to maintain, and my pageviews jumped considerably. I also abandoned the sheer desire to monetize the site, and am having way more fun with it. It was right about that time that I made my first ten cents from AdSense.

The moral of that story? Find your voice, then blog.

Researching too quickly

If you’re really serious about growing a small business from your blog, you need to do the legwork up front. Research the market. Find out what sites already exist in your niche. Figure out how you’ll be different than the existing market, and if you’re the same, how you can do it better. Figure out what keywords are leading people to sites like yours, and see if you can maximize those keywords to drive traffic. I did all this, but I did it over the course of about three days. This probably wasn’t enough research, especially since I keep stumbling across sites in my niche.

Launching too soon

I still have my day job, and my day job is fairly demanding. There’s not much time to sit around surfing the internet during work hours, much less create meaningful, valuable content. When a site is new, it’s important for it to have strong content that updates frequently. I should have aggregated several weeks worth of posts (at a minimum) before I kicked off, so that when my paying job got crazy, I had content to fall back on. Nothing loses readers faster than infrequent posting or throwaway content.

Buying a theme

Let me be clear: I absolutely love Thesis Theme. It’s easy, customizable, and professional. But the truth is, I could have gotten by for at least the first six months on a standard WordPress theme. WordPress has some great skeleton templates that I could have taught myself to customize over time, and it would have saved me $89 during the whole site setup. This is another example of me diving in to the deep end before I quite knew how to swim.

There’s no need to spend money on your site (other than the domain name and hosting) until you’ve started to see a little bit coming in. Sure, you want your site to look professional, but until you’ve got a readership that demands professional, there’s no reason to put out any money to get there. The look of your site, though important, is not what will keep readers coming back. Invest your effort in producing quality content, and the rest comes later.

Monetizing too much, too early

Don’t clutter your page with ads. Yes, it’s hideous and distracting, but it also makes you look like you care more about money than content. Once you have a dedicated readership, they’ll understand why you put ads on your site. They won’t mind, because they’ll be conditioned to pay attention to your kick ass content. But if the only thing readers see when they visit your site for the first time is an AdSense banner, affiliate links, and those stupid in-text links, you’re pretty asking them to click away. You look like you’ve created your site to steal their money, and they won’t stay, much less come back.

So there you have it. Feel free to let me know of other mistakes I’m making. One thing I’ve learned from entering into the world of blogging is you have to have a thick skin. You’re going to post silly things, make typos, or simply draw the ire of a reader or two. And guess what? Someone will probably send you a nasty email. It happens to the most well-intentioned blogger. So if you don’t think you could put all your mistakes out there like I did … well, then blogging just isn’t for you.

Lauren Morrill-Ragusea is the guru (ha!) over at Higher Ed Underground, where she blogs about college life, admissions, news, and academic success. She also blogs at Derby Girl Blog and is a roller derby blogger for Skirt! Please hire her so that she can quit her job, write, and play roller derby for a living.