Good Blogging = Good Publishing = Good Business

Can’t we lay to rest the endlessly inane debate about whether blogging can succeed as a business? (The latest miss-the-point round is between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler.)

Since everyone seems to be having so much trouble with this, let’s make it really simple:

– Blogging is just a form of publishing

– If you publish useful or entertaining information, people will read it

– If the people reading it are a coherent group that companies want to sell to, those companies will pay to advertise

– The better the blog, the bigger the audience, the better the business

– If you string a bunch blogs together, you’ll have a bigger audience

(This is drugs, this is your brain on drugs.)

This is media 101. It’s NOTHING NEW.

Will all 36 million blogs make a lot of money? Of course not. The vast majority will make none — at least not through advertising, which you’d think was the only source of revenue in the universe.

But as Hugh MacLeod points out: “The other major way to make money with the blogging platform is to use it to market your Global Microbrand, like Thomas did with English Cut. That to me is far more useful to far more people, yet it gets no mention in the Journal article.”

Blogging is a form of self-promotion, as the Boston Globe pointed out the other day.

In many ways blogging is the new novel/screen play writing. At some point, everybody will be doing it, but only a handful of people will be any good at it and achieve any kind of lasting success by doing it.