Your Blog Could Be A Goldmine and You Don't Know

You know, I was surprised recently to discover that the blogosphere was such MASSIVE online community. I was fascinated to find out that 57 million American adults, or 39% of the online population, are active blog readers, according to Pew Internet.

Now look at what Edelman found out about the reading pattern of these blog readers:

A staggering 27% or 15 million of American readers read blogs at least once per week, compared with 74% of Japanese readers, 43% in South Korea, 23% in the UK and 22% in France. Then I turned to Internet World Stat for a helping hand to determine how many persons these percentages reflect and came up with a mind boggling 110 million blog readers per week!

That's huge!

I get pretty excited when looking at survey data like these because it's like navigating the globe in minutes via something like Google Earth.

As I scrutinized the Pew survey more carefully, I noticed that the number one reason why 76% of bloggers blogged was to share their life experiences. But while this is so, only 7% blog to make money online while 28% blog to entertain their readers and this I find a bit disturbing. Why? Because according to Jupiter Research/Ipsos-Insight Entertainment and Media, there is an enormous appetite for content by video-on-demand users.

Here's what their stats reveal. 39% of VoD (Video-on-Demand) users said they were interested in watching video online, to which 28% of movie-goers and 26% of in-store video renters agreed. Let's do a close analysis of these data. As I said in previous paragraph, only 28% of bloggers present entertainment content and 7% blog to make money, making the total 35%, right?

Ok, now when we add the percentages of those who are interested to watch online video, we get 93% and if my basic business knowledge is right, that means demand exceeds supply and that for me spells opportunity.

Battlestar Gallactica Blog, authored by George Christodoulou, provides a cool TV guide for his readership seeking to access TV episodes in a structured and funny manner. Battlestar Gallactica seems to be the favourite of many.

No kidding, bloggers spend a lot of money online too. You'll be surprised to know that of the 17,159 blog readers surveyed by Blogads, 50% spend more than $50 on ebooks; 67% clicked on a blog ad; 47% spent more than $500 online for plane tickets; 50% have contributed more than $50 to a cause or candidate online and 22.3% indicated that they purchased a product or service.

My final thoughts on the subject is that the blogosphere is a minefield with the potential to impact the entertainment, political, journalistic and business landscapes after only coming into mainstream a couple years ago. It is pretty young as well in terms of the age of bloggers as 54% are under 30 years (Pew) and the statistical parity between men and women is 54/46% respectively.

These bloggers are high income earners too, because according to Blogads, 40% have an annual household income of $90,000 or higher, while 75% earn over $45,000, and as I said earlier, 47% of bloggers spend over $500.

I'm sure that looking at the above stats, especially the aspect that shows just how willing bloggers and blog readers are to spend money online, you might be asking how you could capitalize on this enormous opportunity.

I would recommend that you take a close look at Blogging For Dollars put together by Derek Gehl and the Internet Market Center. The easy-to-follow guide will show you just how you can get free traffic hits and generate lots of traffic using your blog.

Until next time,

Chao