Living the blogging dream

(Canterbury Today)

Richard MacManus has achieved what most bloggers only dream of. After three years of hard work on his daily web technology blog, it is now popular enough to generate Richard's full-time income.

With more than 50 million blogs on the Internet, many people are trying to make blogging a career, but few succeed.

Richard's blog, Read/WriteWeb now gets 600,000 page views each month, making it among the top 50 most popular blogs in the world. You could say it's one in a million.

Read/WriteWeb was started in 2003, when Richard was working as a web manager and used to write in the evenings and in his spare time. He says he started the blog because he is passionate about web technology. "I was web manager for a corporate company in New Zealand, and I didn't have any creative outlets for the thoughts I was having about web technology." So he started writing about the latest web technology, analysing the trends and products, and reporting on the daily web technology news.

"Someone recently described my blog as The Economist of the Web 2.0 blogs," he says.

By the end of 2005, Read/WriteWeb was making enough money from advertising that Richard was able to give up his day job and work on it full-time. It started to get popular in 2004, when readers were hearing about a trend called Web 2.0. Web 2.0 refers to web-based services that emphasise online collaboration and sharing among users. At that time, Read/WriteWeb was one of the only blogs talking about Web 2.0 on a regular basis and it managed to build up a good audience.

At this stage Read/WriteWeb still didn't have a revenue, but by 2005 Richard was approached by US company FM Publishing, who had picked up on the blog's popularity and wanted to sell some advertising on it.

Read/WriteWeb now advertises Web start-up companies, as well as big companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, and Richard sells most of the advertising himself.

He says he has always had good feedback from the readers - one thing he noticed as the blog became more popular, it would get more comments. "I started to notice that companies would email me their new products they wanted me to review," he says. "I probably do about 10 percent of the stuff that comes through because there is so much of it and I try to review web products that are quite innovative."

A few recent products he has reviewed on Read/WriteWeb include an online office suite called ThinkFree and the recently released Google Apps Premier Edition. Richard says Google Apps has generated a lot of interest among Read/WriteWeb readers as it looks as though Google may well become a competitor of Microsoft Office.

Now Richard is a professional blogger running Read/WriteWeb as a business. He says running a business is highly satisfying, especially in his field where thousands of people read and subscribe to what he is writing. One thing that is difficult is coping with all the administration, and even responding to emails takes up a lot of his working day.

Read/WriteWeb continues to grow at 15 percent or more each month, and Richard is currently in the process of extending the blog with other services, such as a job board. He already has about five other regular writers contributing to Read/WriteWeb, whose work Richard edits, and he says if the blog was going to expand any more he would take on a couple of full-time writers.

He also hopes to start a couple of related blogs that would leverage Read/WriteWeb, such as a mobile phone blog. "The good thing is the main blog has grown its own brand," he says.

He says this can be an advantage for any business with its own blog. Because they are a way of building up an online community, a business can use blogging to help its customers to understand the business' products and services, and to personalise and build up the brand. "The best corporate blogs are ones that don't sound corporate, there's a bit of personality to the writing," he says.

Business people can also find benefit in reading blogs, as the best ones are very topic focused. "No matter what business you're in there are bound to be blogs out there writing about what you're doing," Richard says. "The best ones are written by people who are passionate about their topic, they keep up with the daily news. It's kind of like a narrowly focused news channel for a business."