Going at it Alone or Using a Niche Service to Promote Your Writing

A dillemma faces freelance writers in today's publishing scene. Whether or not to blog exclusively and raise revenue through advertising, blog in someone else's network and contribute to a larger brain trust or use a service like Helium or Associated Content to promote their work. In many ways these sites are built off content management systems in a more sophisticated and professional way that most blogs are and recieve their revenue in quite the same way.

But there are distinct advantages. First off these sites can monetize advertising a lot better than you can at home. Secondly they offer hold contests and encourage writers to either network with each other or with publishers they have a business relationship with and can push a writer a lot further than they would have went with their own blog. Any seasoned blogger will tell you that writing is a small part of what is needed to actually monetize their content. At the same time larger writing communities can be very competitive and weaker writers will get lost in the shuffle and could benefit from pushing their own work a lot harder through the blogs.

Another thing about pushing your own blog though; it's easy to either get kicked off of, or fail to gain acceptance in, a good advertising network. Some networks want you to have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of impressions or page views before they even allow you to sign up. Google Adsense is the easiest one to sign up for and coincidentally the easiest one to get kicked off of. Yahoo! and Microsoft have systems that are either in beta or invitation only; assuming that they are ready for prime time. Communities like Wordpress discourage blogging for profit and aren't allowing ads or pay for post writing, the latter of which tends to dillute the integrity of the blog and leaves amatuer bloggers as being perceived as desperate for revenue at best.