On Choices and Sustainability of Your Blog

If you read this blog or follow me on Twitter recently, you should notice that I mentioned about Web trends in the country I live in, Indonesia. Recently I did start a company targeting local markets. There are huge opportunities to make a difference and definitely monetize on the effort later.

I don’t want to sound discouraging but the Web technologies and applications in local language (Bahasa Indonesia) are a few years behind. Most of the time when I search for something in Google, it still returns crap.

I mean, you can get to the top of the listing just by having an exact domain name as the keyword, even if the domain has no content whatsoever. Reminds you of certain time early in this decade?

Many people now begin to use blogs to publish content, which should be a move in the positive direction. But alas, it’s not.

In most blogs that I stumbled upon, I see at least 5-10 blocks of ads with two to three paragraphs of content. My head aches to see animated banners swinging around. It’s more like a circus than a blog.

I really am not dramatizing. In fact, above is just a bit of what I see regularly. And that saddens me because most bloggers don’t see their blogs as a way to contribute and make the Internet better.

Blame those ebooks. They teach how to profit from a blog, but make it sound too easy. Just put up some content (or scrap them) and insert ads. Repeat the process 100 times. Small stream of revenue adds up really fast.

Yeah, and polluting the well we are all drinking from.

The good news is, people have choices. They could choose to contribute and make a difference, and then later reap the benefit and profit from it, or they could pollute the well and make quick bucks perhaps for a few short years.

If you choose the latter, you build no value and business asset. People will come and quickly find a way to exit. Either it is the back button in the browser or one of the links, which they hope could be the ads.

People in developing countries may have bigger opportunities. Having decent knowledge and then apply it to mostly uncompetitive market is an unfair advantage. But still, challenges lure all over the place.

They either don’t know how to do it right or they focus on the wrong things as they start to get traffic.

Bloggers who are lucky to have learned from experience or other blogs early in the process have a choice. Unfortunately, some bloggers are still going to take the instant gratification pill instead of building something that sustain.

Talking about opportunities, even if you are not in developing countries, you still have them. I should know because I also build a few blogs targeting audience from developed countries.

You have more information to learn from so the chance to get it right is higher. Also, as technology gets better, usually there are more opportunities in the newly invented market. All you need is just open your eyes and watch carefully.

In developing countries, bloggers may not be able to zero in on a very targeted niche. The number of Internet users are still growing steadily and there are not enough demand for such information (yet).

So it’s actually a disadvantage too, depends on which angle you see it.

In building a blog, you always have a choice. But my preference is always to work hard and build something valuable.

Forget about ads. Forget monetization. Not to dissuade you from making money from your site but more about minimizing the distractions so you can focus on the right things.

You should have a plan to profit from your blog, but if you put up ads while you are just getting started, people will avoid your blog like a plague.

It is now an interesting time to build a blog business but do it in such a way that it is sustainable. A blog is not a fad. As long as people still look for information, a blog can help the publishing process. Use it wisely to your own benefit.

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