Chess blogging for money

Posted by GilaChess

November 8, 2008

I mentioned in the Malay Mail interview that Malaysia is quite active when it came to blogging about chess. I would like to encourage more local chess enthusiast to start up a chess blog.

In past, blogging was for personal use such as recording daily events making it more of an online diary. Of course today, this has changed significantly. Blogs are used to market products and promote events and sales.

With the explosion in online advertising, individual bloggers started to live off the revenues of advertising companies. To make money from a blog is really quite simple.

The steps:-

Choose a blog from a blogging platform and then
‘prettify’ it with your favourite theme and color combinations (the fun part), and
start posting about your experiences or promote some event or review some product.

Step 3 is the most difficult as I see many new bloggers start of enthusiastically but after a few months there are few updates. You have to be discplined and consistent in posting. There is no fixed number of posts you should make. Some bloggers try to post daily. Basically I try to make 2-3 posts per week. Whatever the frequency, just try to be consistent.

There are so many blogging platforms available to day such as Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, MoveableType. It’s so flexible that you can choose a paid platform or go for free hosting services.

If you go the paid route, I can tell you personally that it will pay for itself. From my experience, even my insignificant blogs pay for themselves in terms of website hosting if I can get just a little bit of traffic. Of course do not hope to earn megabucks with a new blog. As long as you can have a decent traffic (between 50-100 daily visitors) you can earn enough to cover hosting costs (usually from RM 200-500 per year). You can sign up for Google Adsense, Nuffnang, LinkXL, Text Link Ads and many other advertising services that pay you to have their ad inserted into your blog.

So if you are a consistent chess blogger, the cost of setting up a blog is negligible. You may even turn a tidy profit if your blog is popular. For example, if I could have traffic such as Susan Polgar’s blog, that would easily cover my full time monthly salary when I was a programmer.

With the icy winds of recession starting to hit us, any additional income is most welcomed!

GilaChess Thoughts

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