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This has ended up being by far my longest post to date on The BLCU Blog and it's mainly because I'm writing about a subject I'm so passionate about: Blogging. I've tried my best to tie it in with the whole subject of the Beijing Language and Culture University and at the same time offer useful advice to anyone who is thinking about starting their own blog on BLCU. As someone who has read quite extensively on blogging, I hope you will get a lot out of this post and the information that it links to which will help you on your way.
And finally, if you haven't yet considered or thought about starting your own blog, perhaps the five reasons listed below will act as inspiration and open your eyes to the potential benefits that blogging can bring into your personal life.
1. Making money from your blog
As an individual, I'm very excited about the future of blogging. I see massive potential in it not only as a way of sharing information with the worldwide community but also in its PROVEN potential as a way to earn money online. It may surprise you to learn that there are people right now under the age of 21 who are earning thousands of dollars a month through their blog. Blogging has allowed them to quit their full-time jobs and live a life of freedom in which they are their own boss. Due to the nature of blogging you can do it from anywhere with a computer and an internet connection.
If you're interested, you can check out a list of highly successful young bloggers over at RetireAt21, but two cases I'm going to mention in this post are YoungPrePro and ViperChill. The former is only 17 years old and is making over $5000 a month from blogging, with his blog being only 14 months old at the time of writing this. The latter is only 22 and has been hugely successful with various blogging projects over the past seven years. The Gaurdian newspaper (one of biggest in the UK) wrote an article on him and he has been talked about all over the internet, from Forbes magazine to Reuters and Wired.
So although these are extreme cases, there are still thousands of bloggers out there who, although not earning a full-time living from blogging, are still making a substantial income from it on the side. That is what I aspire to attaining one day with The BLCU Blog and its precisely because of the science behind how building a blog works that allows you to continue earning from it years after you stop creating new content. Once you get it to a certain point and have learnt enough about how to optimise your blog to rank highly in search engines like Google (called search engine optimization or SEO), the traffic will continue to come in organically and without effort on your part. This traffic will also generate you an income and I'm going to talk a bit about just how it will do this below. If you want to learn more about successful blogging, I recommend you visit sites such as ProBlogger (one that has opened my eyes tremendously to the world of blogging and from which I'm still learning new techniques every day).
Adsense: There are actually many ways to monetize your blog, but one of the most basic methods is by placing adverts on it. Google offers a free service called Adsense that anyone can sign up for and takes only a few minutes to set up. It will then display a mixture of text and image adverts that are relevant to the content on your site. That's why you may notice adverts here at The BLCU Blog related to studying mandarin, studying in China, and more generally studying abroad. Because visitors to your site are already interested in your niche or subject and more than likely searching for more information on it, they may also be interested in offers and adverts related to it. Whenever a visitor clicks on an add, you will earn a small amount. It's called pay per click and has been a highly successful way of monetizing websites for years now.
Affiliate marketing: The most popular way of monetizing blogs today is through affiliate marketing. This simply works by you linking information in a post to a product and then if that person decides to buy the product based on your recommendation, you make a commission (sometimes up to 75%). If you're going to use this method (and I suggest you do) it's important to only recommend high quality products and preferably ones you have used yourself. Building trust in your readership is important and if you want them to buy through your links in the future you have to ensure that they are getting a good product at the end of the day and one that you would like to use yourself. Sites such as ClickBank and Amazon Associates are a couple good places to start if your interested in the earning potential of affiliate marketing on your blog.
2. Helping others
Making money from your blog is a nice bonus and can be a great motivation to continue, but ultimately the most important thing is to create great content that in some way helps others. That's what's going to keep people coming back to your blog and drive your visitor numbers up in the long-term. It's also going to help you rank well in Google (though it isn't the only factor).
For most of us - and I remember this clearly for myself too - trying to find quality information online about BLCU before going was pretty tough. The simple truth is that not enough people are blogging about their experiences and life at BLCU in a way that can really help others. My aim with The BLCU Blog is to create a wealth of information all in one place for people who want to find it. That means it's also important for it to rank well in search engines such as Google so it's quick to find and you don't have to go digging through all the back pages before the link appears. This all involves a long-term commitment and a lot of work on my part (which is partly why I'm trying my best to monetize the blog and learn about the best techniques for doing so) but it's something I want to do and has become a personal project of mine that I work on in my free time.
Currently, the best sources of information on BLCU can be found at sites such as Chinese-Forums' Beijing section and the popular blog BLCU Beijing Diary, both of which rank on the first page of Google for the search term "BLCU", though the latter hasn't had any new content since January 2009. I would hope that in the coming months this blog will also rank among the first-page results of Google when searching for information on BLCU and it's my continued effort to ensure that this becomes a reality.
So to keep this from being too much about my personal story, the point I'm trying to make is that by starting your own (regular) blog about BLCU you are making valuable contributions to an online community that is desperate for new information on the subject. It doesn't matter that there are already a few other blogs out there talking about BLCU, the fact is that 99% of them are inactive and ultimately people want fresh content that is up to date. If I see a post from a few years ago, depending on the subject, the first thing I think is "This information may no longer be valid or the situation may now have changed. Where can I find more up to date information?"
So you, a current or soon-to-be student of BLCU, has a lot to offer the online community and you should take advantage that while you're there. Share as much as you can and you may be surprised at the results, but keep the information as accessible and problem-solution based as you can. By this I mean that people may be looking for information on, say, banking at BLCU, so you should let them know what their problem is and how your going to help them find a solution to it, or at least give them some helpful alternatives.
To give an example, a couple days ago I had a visitor who found my site by searching "banks inside BLCU beijing" in Yahoo search (I use a free service called Feedjit to help with this). This inspired me to write The Ultimate Guide To Banking At BLCU post the very next day. I saw his problem and I offered solution from my own experience. It's as simple as that and by working this way you also know what information is currently being searched for or is in demand in your niche. I'm now going to talk a bit more about "niches".
3. Low-competition niches
BLCU is a low competition niche. That means there's a lot of searches every month for information on BLCU and not a lot of websites that meet the criteria. I'm going to share with you two examples from Google Adwords and Google Trends to help you get a better idea of exactly what I'm talking about. These are two services that help bloggers research what keywords are being searched for in Google and how much competition there is for that particular keyword, as well as showing whether or not a keyword is trending or not (i.e. monthly searches for the keyword are increasing).
Google Adwords: In the graph below (click to enlarge) you can see that there are 12,100 monthly searches in Google alone for the keyword "Beijing Language and Culture University" and also for "BLCU" (further down in the list). Tests have shown that if you rank on the first page for a keyword you can expect to get a 50% click-through rate. This means that out of the 12,100 searches each month for BLCU, approximately 6,050 people will click on your link if they see it on the first page. That's a lot of monthly traffic. Think how many times you do a Google search and don't bother to look past the first page, but check out a few different links that come up immediately.
The graph below also shows "Competition" bars that tell you how many relevant websites there are for that particular keyword search. In all of the example below, the bars are almost entirely empty, signifying next to no competition at all, in spite of some keywords such as "university in Beijing" and "Beijing university" receiving as many as 110,000 monthly searches.
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A Google Adwords graph showing monthly searches for BLCU-related keywords and competition for each one.
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Google Trends: This is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to type in any keyword and find out how it is performing in terms of search popularity over the short or long term. This helps give bloggers an idea of whether or not the industry they're blogging in is growing in popularity of declining.
What you will find with search trends for keywords such as "BLCU" is spikes in search traffic between semesters, during which time people are eagerly looking for information on the university before either heading off to China or applying to study there. From the graph below, you can see that in the last 12 months searches for "BLCU" have increased and decreased depending on the time of year, but overall the traffic has consistently peaked at predictable times. That means your going to get a lot of visitors during peak months and fewer during off-peak months. So researching your niche trends helps you understand why you may be seeing more traffic at certain times of the year than others (especially if you're blogging about BLCU like I am).
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A Google Trends graph showing search popularity for the keyword "BLCU" at different times over the last 12 months.
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So really what I've wanted to show you here is that there is HUGE demand for more blogs dealing with BLCU and studying Chinese in Beijing. If you start a blog on BLCU today and keep filling it with consistent and quality content paired with learning a bit about the technical side of blogging, pretty soon you're going to see a flood of traffic. As we've already discussed, this can convert into potential revenue as well.
If you're studying at BLCU and enjoy blogging, you've got a great opportunity here. You're on some prime real-estate and it's up to you to make the most of it. I hope this little look at niches has opened your eyes a bit to the possibilities for starting your own blog about BLCU and why it's such a good idea considering the present climate.
4. Blogging looks good on your resume
I recently read an article titled How Blogging Gives Student Journalists An Edge In The Job Market and I thought it made some very good points. As a soon-to-be Journalism student and avid blogger, I felt it related a lot to me personally. However, I don't think the advantages of writing a blog are just enjoyed in the journalism industry. I think a well-run and professional blog can look great on ANY resume, in ANY industry. For one, it shows that you can write well and that you're an able researcher. Do you think this post came into being without a bit of research on my part? Ok, I didn't have to do hours of research for it (though I did spend hours writing it!) but that's maybe because I'm fairly internet-savy and am part of a generation of kids brought up with the internet. Because blogging is a hobby of mine (and perhaps one day a source of income too) I read quite extensively on the subject and that's why I have been able to write a fairly in-depth post on it today.
So my point is that blogging can be a resume-builder if done correctly, much in the same way that work-experience and internships are. I think this will only continue to be the case in the years to come, particularly in industries such as journalism where it's already considered to be almost essential on a resume and can easily land you a job over another candidate who has no experience writing online or maintaining a blog.
To bring this all back to the subject of BLCU and how it ties into this post, if you're looking for a subject to blog about and are currently a student at BLCU or considering going there to study Chinese in the future, starting a blog about it can be more than just a personal hobby. It can be a real investment in your future too, so keep that in mind and don't be ashamed to put it on your resume.
5. Personal satisfaction
I've talked about a few reasons why you might want to start your own blog at BLCU, but I've failed to mention one of the most important ones: Personal satisfaction.
The personal satisfaction you will get from writing your own blog and recording your own memories and experiences is great. Whether you intend to share your blog with the world or just keep it as a private place for you to come back to in the future and remember your times at BLCU, it will definitely have been a worthwhile endeavour.
I did a fair bit of writing during my time at BLCU on my old China In My Pocket blog which has been reborn here but with a different approach. At the time, I wrote more about my personal life and less with the idea of really creating valuable content for readers on a large-scale (like I am trying to do now). The result was that the blog became more of a "Personal Journal Land" and ultimately I decided that wasn't what I wanted. Today I still have all my old writing saved on my computer but I'm not sharing it with the world any more. It's purely for my own personal satisfaction now and if that's all you want from your blog then that's ok too.
I remember getting many emails from people asking questions about BLCU during 2010 and how satisfying it was to be able to give them answers and solutions to their problems. The whole blogging experience for me has been very positive and that's why I'm continuing to do it today. Although I've been away from BLCU for some six months now, I still have a lot of memories and advice I can offer to newcomers and that counts for a lot.
One last thing...
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