Anne Truitt Zelenka

I don’t subscribe to the “define your niche and then stick with it” school of blogging. That works great for some blogs and some bloggers and not so well for others. If you hesitate over blogging because you think you must stick to a niche and work it to the tune of 500,000 pageviews a month, think again. You can make blogging rewarding and profitable without getting thousands of RSS subscribers or a Technorati rank in the top 1,000.

Make money because of your blog, not with your blog

You can make money with your blog by, for example, putting advertising onto it. Or you can make money because of your blog — by using your blog to connect with people, explore ideas, raise your visibility, and learn new things. In other words, your blog can be an investment rather than a profit center of its own.

I blog when I have energy or when I’m provoked or when I’m inspired. I blog about what I want to blog about: mindfulness, virtual teams, enterprise software, web technology, economics, the science of networks, programming, women in technology. That brings me into contact with people who are working on or interested in the same things I am. It also shows them who I am and what my talents are.

Through this blog, I’ve found a bunch of great paying work: a brief gig with RedMonk (loved being the RedNun, not so sure about the industry analyst thing), ongoing work with Web Worker Daily and GigaOM, a book contract with Wiley based on my WWD work, and contract work here and there to help companies and people work effectively on the social web.

The real reason to blog: connection

But the work is just a means to an end, or the means to two ends: to money and to deeper and more satisfying connections with other people. Like most people, I need ongoing income. Plus I really relish the chance to work collaboratively with other people.

If you decide not to build up readership for a specific niche blog so as to make money through advertising and affiliate income, you can measure the success of your blog in other ways:

• Does it bring you into connection with people that you respect and that you learn from and that you can collaborate with?
• Does it introduce you to new ways of extending yourself?
• Do you learn by creating and maintaining and publishing it?
• Do you feel more human when you blog? (I do.)

This goes with my philosophy of looking for lakes rather than climbing mountains. True, sometimes looking for lakes will get you to the top of some pretty tall mountains — for example my desultory blogging led to a job at GigaOM that gives me a lot more visibility than I had before. The mountains aren’t the goal, though, even when they give you an awesome view of the landscape spreading before you.

It’s okay to be a person online

The key to the social web is that you’re not just a consumer or a user or part of the audience. When you blog, you can do it as a three-dimensional human too. You don’t have to turn yourself into an online magazine. If you want to do that and that’s what you’re good at, go for it and prosper! I am thankful for those who do because I don’t want to.

If, on the other hand, you want a way to raise your professional profile while you connect with other people, bring your full self onto your blog when you feel so inspired.