Webupon

I’ve been blogging since May, 2009 and using Triond since November, 2009. I enjoy them both (and benefit from both) so I’m not going to suggest you use only one of them. To the contrary, I’ll prove why you should do both.

1)      Topics:

Triond: offers a vast variety of sites that you can submit your site to. This makes sure your writing finds the right potential audience. I am saying potential, because obviously putting your content out there doesn’t automatically mean it will be read.

Blog: It is yours so you can write about whatever you want. You can pick the name of any category you want. Or if you want different blogs for different topics, create as many as you like, it is free (as long as you don’t want to put advertisements-back to that later).

2)      Traffic

Triond: The advantage of Triond is obvious. It sends your stuff to sites with audience. Of course how much you will be read depends on many factors but it is simpler to reach readers where readers are already waiting.

Blog: With blogging, you start from scratch. No matter how good your posts are, or how well you market the blog, you start from 0. Depending on how much quality time and effort you spend on it, it is possible to reach thousands (and if you get really good and popular, millions) of readers. There is nothing like the feeling you get when you check your readership stats and see a substantial increase.

3)      Money

Triond: Earning with Triond is much easier. You need to reach 0.50 cents to be paid. Obviously, even 0.50 means that you received a good deal of traffic to your articles and you need many, many more views to make much more than that. However, Triond has a very friendly and supportive community of writers who know it is a win-win situation to read and support each other’s work. It takes time to write, improve, promote and support. But the money you earn is quite tangible (meaning it is in your paypal account as soon as you hit 0.50). Readership and advertising revenue are all it takes. Triond recently also allowed us to integrate our Triond with Google Adsense.

Blog: The good thing about blogging is that, there are multiple ways of making an income. And when done right, there is the possibility that you can make much more with your own blog than you do on Triond. However, monetizing a blog is very tricky. Because there are many different types of blogs, a lot of competition and a lot of monetizing strategies available, researching alone takes a very long time. After you gather your data, you need to spend some time experimenting to see what works best.  Obviously, most bloggers (I am no exception) start with adsense. Now, if you have insane amount of traffic or some decent traffic consisting of people who click on the ads, you can and will make some money with Adsense. But it takes a long time to reach Adsense’s minİmum paying amount. Just like Adsense, there are tons of other advertising networks. Then there is selling your products/services through your blog, affiliate marketing, joint ventures and many other strategies. Listing and describing those is the topic of another article. But you should keep in mind that each strategy comes in with different results and properties. For example, some pay through paypal, some sends checks, some does both. But would you really want to work with a network that pays only after you reach $100 in advertising revenue? Or would you rather work with one that keeps its minimum at $5? With the freedom the blogging brings, you also have a lot to consider. Also keep in mind that Wordpress (one of the most popular blogging platforms, also my choice for my blog) doesn’t let you advertise if you have a free account. You might choose to pay for a webhost that supports Wordpress. Webhosts come at different prices and even though mine costs $3.95/month, it means I started paying before I made money. But it also gave me complete freedom from free Wordpress acount restrictions. It is your call. And of course just about anything web-related comes with an affiliate marketing offer. So you might pay for your host, and then promote it and make the money you paid and even a lot of profit. Choices are endless.Just make a good plan and try not to get lost.

You can check out Justhost: http://stats.justhost.com/track?c71f15a811923ac4a3a4c37dfa56f4645

You can just layback and wait for my review on Justhost.

I have been using them for 5 months and I’m renewing my account as soon as my last month is over. I picked them because they offered the cheapest hosting option with the best offerings (like storage and other stuff) and it turned out they have one hell of a customer support-system.

4)      Portfolio/ Writing career

Now, I need you to answer a question. Why do you write? Is it just for fun? Is it to gain a bit of audience? You like the money? Do you write for a living? Other reasons? More then one reason? All answers are all OK. What you should remember is that, if you are a writer, and you want to make a full-time income from writing, you will need more than just your articles on Triond. It is OK to send your links here to job ads, but it is much more professional (and let’s face it-it looks a lot cooler) if you have your own site with your domain attached to it) to have your own site. I am saying website, but a blog is essentially an interactive website. You can choose to have a website or just use your blog as your site. I am in the midst of putting together a website other than my blog, but right now my blog is doing a pretty good job of landing me writing jobs. When you apply to jobs, they ask for your links and your blog is the source of all your stuff. Or you can copy your posts into a Word file, if that’s what they want.

Plus, you know you can link to your blog from Triond and vice versa. Before deciding to switch to full-time writing, I made a lot of research and “every writer must have a website” was the advice I got from all established writers. They also suggest you get your website in your own name, or your penname. Now, my full name is Pinar Tarhan. That’s why I did not get creative with my website’s name. Yes, I know it sounds dull and not at all creative, but you have to pay attention to the advice that every one agrees upon. Plus, getting your name out there in the web has tremendous advantages, the most important ones being the professional look and monetizing flexibility.

Yes, it has some drawbacks. For instance, my previous movie blog inthenameofmovies got traffic a lot faster than my current blog, but now I have huge traffic (compared to my beginning. I am not a “guru” yet. But 12.265 for one month is not bad, Considering 4-5 months ago it was 260 or something). Surely, search engines notice you more easily if your name indicates the area you blog about. But do not forget: Your name is a much better fit if you are monetizing your writing and especially better if you are writing about a lot of stuff like me. How can I get a name to represent movies, music, career management, writing, blogging and other stuff at the same time?

If you are a writer, please get a blog or a website. I preferred starting with a blog because it is much simpler and faster to form. You can get a free website/blog from a lot of sources, but they come with their name attached. My blog address doesn’t have a wordpress.com attached to it, because I pay for it. And it looks much better that way. Yes, it is wordpress and it says so on the blog, but the URL looks so much more professional. It is your call. But I am having a much better return rate with pinartarhan.com than I did with inthenameofmovies.wordpress.com.

5)      Comments

Triond Community is divided when it comes to commenting. Because each viewing comes back to us in the form of money, some believe any comment is appreciated. And some believe (and don’t forget this is almost all bloggers feel about commenting!!) that if your comment doesn’t bring value, you shouldn’t comment at all. I am with this crowd. Look, of course I appreciate any one who supports my writing. But “supporting” is not just about earning someone a couple of cents. No one writes only to make money. I have been writing since I was 9. I have been getting paid since last year. I want to be read and I want to hear what my readers feel about it. Love it or hate it or be indifferent. But the important thing is for you to show you read it. “Nice share, nice review, etc” means nothing, valuewise. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have time. Just make the comment when you have the time. I am not saying your comment can’t be short. I am saying it shouldn’t be generic. I already wrote about this on this post: http://writinghood.com/writing/two-worst-comments-ever-itll-drive-most-bloggers-and-writers-mad/

And don’t forget, generic comments are more “welcome” on Triond because your hit earned the author money. But on other blogs, it will make you invisible. And trust me, you don’t want to be invisible. You want to make connections and build relationships. Yes, you got on that blog and gained them traffic. But they won’t return the favor if you make them think that you just go and copy paste your comment on every blog. An article or a post is personal. The writer put an effort into it. Either truly appreciate it or don’t waste time at all. My thoughts are also based on a lot of research and do reflect a lot of probloggers’ opinions -a problogger is someone who makes money out of teaching others how to blog and how to monetize it. Check out Yaro Starak, Darren Rowse, Chris Garrett, Brian Clark… They won’t tell you any differently.

6)      Time Spent on publishing

Triond: You are dependent on Triond editors. Some of my stuff was posted right away and some took like 1,5 days.

Blog: It is your own blog. It will be on the web as soon as you hit the publish button.

7)      Time spent writing

It takes time on both cases. Now, obviously there are many factors: the length of your post, the formatting, how picky you are when it comes to images/videos or whether you put any…. If you pay attention to some basic seo rules, chances are you will spend about half-an-hour editing. Put an average of half-an-hour for writing (this is if you type fast, don’t write something very long and you know your subject so you don’t need to research). With Triond, you are luckier because you get suggested images and keywords along the way. But depending on how picky you are and what kind of a piece you want to put out there, it is not going to be just 5 minutes most of the time. For instance, ever since I published 20 Reasons to Love Stardust on my blog, my traffic increased substantially. It is a list post, easy to read and it doesn’t have a long text. But it is long enough for Google to take me seriously and it has lots of quality images. Those images are tagged specifically by me. They all include the keywords. For instance, the picture of Siena Miller says Siena Miller in Stardust. You can read that, but I also tagged it only for search engines as well. So, that attracts traffic. Same for Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer and others. Seen how many pictures there are? Formatting took me a long time. I am not saying it is perfect, but I put a lot of time into it and I enjoyed the process. Also bear in mind that it took me a long time to learn to edit in a certain way and why I should edit it like that. Everyday, I get an average of 20-30 hits just on that post. It took a long time, but I am still reaping the rewards. 

This is it from me on this subject for now. I might be back with more bullet points if I realize more should be mentioned. But I am beat for now. As you can guess, it took quite some time to write this post. If you calculate the research and application process that went onto it, I can say many months were spent.