Mybeerbuzz.com – A Website Journey In Blogging

Mybeerbuzz.com and my blogging all started with a April Fools Day bet in 2008. As you may expect, my wife and I were enjoying a beer and the topic slipped into writing about beer and creating a website. What seemed like an innocent enough idea 13-years ago, quickly blossomed into a full-time hobby with some really interesting experiences.

As I dove into blogging, I decided up front I needed a plan, or at least an angle to approach the website from. After all, there were literally dozens of beer websites, and anyone with a keyboard and beer glass had already beer reviewing and writing about beers for years. My initial idea came out of my own necessity, because I wanted to find out what good beers my local pubs had on tap before picking our happy hour destination and no one at the time was publishing tap lists.

On the surface this seemed easy enough and valuable enough to write about every week, but boy was I wrong. Step one was convincing our local bar owners to participate. It seemed obvious that this list of what they had on tap would help drive customers to their bar stools, and customers buy beer and food. Unfortunately, and much to my surprise, most (not all) owners either assumed it was a money-making trick on my part, or were simply too busy (or lazy) to participate. Fortunately a few key bars jumped on board and many of the others followed.

With the “why” now out of the way, I thought I had the perfect start to blogging. If people stop by the site to see what’s on tap, maybe they’d read my ramblings about beer, and maybe if enough people stopped by, I might be able to sell advertising. Looking back now, I realize I was certainly naïve about how everything worked and just how hard it would be to gain traffic.

I get asked quite a bit for blogging advice, and I always start with the same few suggestions of things that I’ve learned:

1. Find a niche. Whether it is a hyper-local topic, an unusual topic or just something you know a lot about, the topic your blog covers can make or break your site’s performance. When you’re looking for your niche, do some research. Are there already well-established sites covering your niche? Are the sites that do cover your niche successful? Is there room for another site and what would differentiate your site from the others. Your mileage may vary, but if there are already good sites covering your niche, it may be best to find a new niche or dig deep to see why someone would want to visit your blog over the others.
2. Don’t expect instant fame. I always recommend to anyone starting a blog, that they prepare to write for only themselves for the first few years. Gaining traction and readers with so many other websites out there to choose from can make it an uphill climb to be successful, so plan to just enjoy the process without a lot of readers and without any advertising income. If you go in thinking you’ll be successful in the first year, you are likely in for a rude awakening.
3. Dig into the tech up-front and early in the process. I made a lot of mistakes starting out that were more and more difficult to correct down the road. Decide up front if you want to invest into the free options like Blogger or WordPress, or go your own way with a paid host like Amazon Web Services. I’ll admit the free hosting sites were great, but even today I struggle to gain mainstream acceptance with a blogspot.com address.

   Install analytics up front and monitor your traffic carefully. See why and from where people are finding your site AND more importantly, capitalize on that knowledge. If most people are coming to your site for your cookie recipes, write more cookie recipes.

4. Research, research, research… What I have learned about advertising over the last 10-years could fill a book. From commission-based advertising, to affiliate advertising, eCpm, dofollow links, sponsored posts, in link advertising and the hundreds of other concepts out there for advertising, there is a lot to learn. My first early  (and hard) lesson was that most advertisers are not your friend. Unless a local establishment is paying you for advertising, most of what you’ll run into is affiliate advertising, and affiliate advertising is a big business and definitely not geared toward generating profit for YOU. I’ve encountered everything from full-on scams designed to take your profits and capitalize on your hard work to commission-based advertising that only pays you if someone buys a product through your site. These were hard lessons to learn, but if you are planning to monetize your site, do your research early and figure out what works for you.
5. Understand how to work on your site. Find a good blogging tool to make your posting process easier. Know how to change colors, layout and fonts and know how to to perform the basics in HTML needed to just keep your site running. Make your site look professional and look like there is a team running the design rather than just one person sitting at home in bed with a laptop. Your friends may like your low-tech “rustic” site, but I promise you, advertisers want a professional site.
6. Don’t quit your day-job. You may have the million-dollar idea in your back pocket, but I promise you, even many successful blogs are not going to pay the bills. If your objective is to just have fun, then cool. But if your objective is to earn money or get free products sent your way for review, you will likely be blogging as a hobby for some amount of time before your site is financially viable.

Now with all of these things said, I can say that I still find writing about beer to be really enjoyable, and while it can be VERY hard work, the process is still very satisfying to me. The blog plan I started with 13-years ago has changed several times, and the demands of maintaining the site have grown; but in the end the results and the satisfaction of creating a successful site will outlast the early frustrations. Have a good plan and work hard at that plan, but always remember to stop and just enjoy the process of blogging.