Starting out - support appreciated

[FreeSwagSites]

I blog about just about anything and it works well for me

But you are a social media ninja!

 

[katykicker]

But you are a social media ninja!

I am indeed - I'm bloody everywhere these days haha

 

[katykicker]

Honestly though, I think blogging about what you love can be a great 'niche'.

 

[sara-j_]

With both of those ideas you need to decide whether you are going to find your audience using social media methods or primarily organic traffic via search engines.

With the former approach you can afford to be a little less focussed, but a general cooking or computing blog will get swallowed up in the search engines as very competitive.

What will you be promoting? Where will your profits come from? Product promotion or something else?

Would it be more viable to start on a predefined platform like instagram, then move to a website if I obtained a following? After that could I obtain product affiliations (amazon or razer etc) or offer services like coding tuition or app development etc?

 

[The Reverend]

Would it be more viable to start on a predefined platform like instagram, then move to a website if I obtained a following? After that could I obtain product affiliations (amazon or razer etc) or offer services like coding tuition or app development etc?

My recommendation is think about what you want. A lot of the bloggers on here use a self-hosted version of wordpress so that we can 'own' all the content and the advertising revenue. They may have a related twitter/facebook/insta account but the main body of 'stuff' is the blog. Instagram works well if you are a fitness 'person' and you post pics of you in b&w, with water sprayed over you and posing in your underwear. You'll get 100k followers before you know.

The big Blogging goal is to have engagement with your readers. You could buy 10k twitter followers for peanuts and you might look very popular but none of them will read your blog and none of them will click through to sites you link to. Its better to have 100 followers with 3% clicking through than 10000 followers and 0% engagement.

Like Katy, I blog what I want. It costs me about £20 a year for the hosting, the web address and thats about it. Build the content, make sure it is SEO friendly, and then the hits will come. You will also benefit from engaging other bloggers (reading/commenting) but a bit of cross posting/guest blogging on another blog will also do wonders.

 

[FreeSwagSites]

Would it be more viable to start on a predefined platform like instagram, then move to a website if I obtained a following? After that could I obtain product affiliations (amazon or razer etc) or offer services like coding tuition or app development etc?

I would start with a website and use social
media accounts to complement it rather than replace it.

Regarding coding affiliates, Amazon do books etc, udemy, Lynda and Team Treehouse run excellent affiliate programs with approx 50% commissions. You will need a website to get accepted on most affiliate programs, but these sorts of educational products sell better than physical products from social media platforms too.

Actually offering the coding tuition yourself might be a bit more tricky to organise if you mean on a one-to-one basis.

If you do get started, I have some other affiliate programs that might fit in well too.

The reason I know about these affiliates in the coding niche is that I have a (neglected) site that was about my own amateur efforts to learn iOS development.

 

[FreeSwagSites]

Remember that the main reason organic traffic is valued so highly is that it converts so well.

Someone who Googles "Best Swift Programming Course" is looking to potentially buy one. Someone who casually clicks your affiliate link on their Facebook or Twitter feed is much much less likely to be a buyer of that product.