I’ve just been roaming a bit around the various forums I like to visit (I can’t help it - it’s my version of laying on the divan eating bonbons), and it occurred to me that there is a lot of mystique about pro blogging.

In one forum, someone asked about “making money with a blog” - and got a whole lot of answers about how it’s a ton of work, and it doesn’t happen unless you can build up a large and loyal audience.

The “large and loyal” audience model (aka the branded blog) obviously does work. But that’s definitely not my approach. Blogs work well for me because they fit my overall approach to web publishing in general. Basically, I rely on natural search results for almost all of my sites, blogs and non-blogs.

That means I’m pretty realistic about things. I do the research and figure out a good niche, then I put the site or blog up. I’ve had a good taste of the Google sandbox for quite a few of my sites now, so in my gameplan I make use of my sandbox time. When I’m doing a regular site, I put up the site with a few pages and then add content slowly, on a daily basis. Since I’m aiming for search engine traffic, this approach works well for me. The site gets indexed, the sandbox time starts ticking, and when Google is ready to let the site out to play with all the other, more mature sites, it’s grown to a nice size with pages that have search appeal for less competitive keywords.

My blogging approach is the same. If I were to describe my approach, it’s the natural search engine results approach. I definitely don’t expect to develop a core of loyal visitors on any of my “entrepreneurial blogs”. I’m aiming to get visitors landing on a post solely via the search engines, and once they’re there, I’m hoping they’ll click out of the page using a monetized link, whether it’s Adsense or an affiliate program.

So I try to optimize my blog posts as much as I optimize my regular web pages. I work from keyword lists whether I’m blogging or writing an article for a content site. I try to make sure my blog titles are search engine friendly. I keep my eye out for plugins that make SEO for bloggers a lot easier.

What surprises me is that no-one really talks about this. There’s a whole lot of blogging mystique going on out there. People figure you have to get your readership up and you have to get people to subscribe to your feed and follow along with you daily. But really, the niches I’ve picked for quite a lot of my blogs are really targeted, and I don’t expect a whole lot of people to subscribe to my feeds. Visitors come and they go, and to be honest, it always blows me away when I check my stats and see that I actually have returning visitors on my workhorse blogs.

On the other hand, I’m working on a few blogging projects that are more of the “branded blog” approach. I have my concepts in place, and a gameplan drawn up for these blog “network” ideas, but it’s scary going. To me, these “branded blog” ideas of mine are more like this blog and my Adventures blog - the main difference is that I’m going to be monetizing my branded blogs, while this blog and the Adventures blog definitely don’t have money as their goals. But despite the “monetizing angle” of my branded blog network ideas, they’re scary because there’s a whole lot more ego involved. Mainly because, in order to make them work, I have to get that audience thing going, and get it going big.

I’m rather shy, so that kind of terrifies me, actually. But on the other hand, I love the branded blog network ideas I’ve come up with, and I don’t see myself letting go of them anytime soon.

So it may not surprise anyone that I do a ton of thinking about my branded blog networks - I’ve got index cards and mindmaps and brainstormed lists all over the place. But in the midst of all that thinking (with very little doing, I might add) I’m also quietly posting pages regularly to my search engine workhorse blogs and affiliate websites. I kind of know which way my virtual blog empire is growing …