If you run an IM/MMO blog: Why?

A blog is a great place to send your email subscribers to
each time you have something to say. Helps to program
your list into clicking email links of yours..

Also helps with the branding of you personally and people
want to know who they are buying from in this business
so will they will google you and read your blog.

It build your reputation with the industry and when your posts are interesting and informational, people will contact you for more opportunities. From my own stand point, as an affiliate manager, someone with a blog is more likely to get better offers and accepted into top networks.

Just my .02

Because it's a different audience.

I have an audience that attends my live video broadcasts on TalkMarketingNow.com, another that is on my AWeber mailing lists, another that follows me on Twitter, another that friends me on Facebook, another that sends contact requests on Skype, another that reads my posts on this forum and/or others, and another that reads my blog.

Each of these audiences is composed of different people who respond to different kinds of promotions and messages.

Eggs. Baskets. You know the saying.

I recently decided to start my own. As to whether it'll be worth the time spent relative to the money I could make building out my other niche sites, I'm not exactly sure it will...but I've decided to do it for a few reasons.

1. Planting a seed in the event that I see a more obvious path with it down the line.

2. A good means of keeping things fresh; I find that it's easy for me to get so one tracked with my normal routine that I become more out of touch than I should with the state of the industry. In keeping up with relevant issues that people care about, it'll sharpen my mind and ensure that I'm in touch with the latest happenings in the IM world.

3. I learned a ton from blogs when I was first starting out. There's something to be said about paying it forward.

4. An interesting SEO experiment. My two posts so far have been extremely long (3000+ words). I'm interested to see what kinds of longtail searches these posts (and subsequent ones) attract relative to 300-1000 word articles, and what kinds of natural backlinks "great blog posts" will get on their own.

5. It does happen to be a very lucrative niche if you do develop a following. JV opportunities and plenty of great contacts can come out of having a presence.

Money wise, it's a waste of time. You'd be better off packaging all that info as a stand alone product, or as a membership site, or as a list building funnel, etc.

Just my opinion... I personally think blogs are good from a hobbyist point of view, but not from a monetization point of view.

I have blogs for 2 reasons:

1 - they're a great auto-pilot source of revenue for the material I create for specific people/groups.

My blogs have brought tens of thousands of dollars on auto-pilot over the years and I rarely write anything 'just' for the blogs, so they're a great way to give access to specialised information to people who may not have found it in the place I originally intended it (like the general public finding information I wrote because it was useful for warriors)

2 - I do so much writing and create so many products that it's nice to have more ways to use them and get the information in them to a larger audience.

I don't spend much time on seo these days because I know what works but getting decent search rankings for hundreds of different search terms brings a constant stream of traffic and sales that means I'll still be making money years from now if I just stopped and never looked at the internet again.

I wouldn't advise anyone to start a blog just to try and make commissions and sales unless they're really bored and have a lot of spare time, but if you're already busily creating a lot of collatoral for your business in the form of information and products then blogs are a great extra way to get that in front of people.

Andy

We traditionally have run an outsourcing company, TryBPO.com Our internet marketing side of things is much different than our more traditional business and it's weird to brand them both the same.

In that vein, we've just started our new branding (this week) for IM called AdSenseFlippers. (Link in the sig) We've give away our income reports, tips and tricks, and the exact process we've used to become successful. We don't sell anything on the site, but do use affiliate links to products we use and recommend.

Blogs are good, but they should never be the first strategy you use to make money online. Once you have an audience it's much easier to persuade people to do things on your blog - like retweet stuff and like you on FB, etc.

They're also more likely to link to you rather than just cold organic traffic.


Dean

I do not blog to make money or market things, but of course making money is a bonus

In all honesty I first started my blog for me and me only.

Then when I got readers it became about making friends, sharing our journeys, learning things from each other and keeping each other accountable.