Learning from others: Darren Rowse

April 28, 2007

I have been reading a lot lately, mostly about how to get ahead in the blogosphere. One of the blogs I’ve been reading a lot lately is Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net.

Why?

Since I started blogging back in January I found out that there’ some money to be made with this hobby. In the following months I discovered a lot of blogs that provided a lot of techniques to make money quickly. From black hat SEO techniques to try to game any and every online tools, to fooling people into linking to their site to gain a high ranking so their site would become more valuable.

One thing was very clear: Most of these sites use the greed of fairly new bloggers for traffic and ranking to their advantage to get their own traffic and ranking to grow. They often put a finger on the sore spot, by pointing out what kind of money can be made if you have a certain PageRank or number of visitors. But then they are quick to suggest ways their blog can help you gain momentum. These ways often involve actions that will benefit the author of these blogs way more than it will benefit the newbie blogger.

Darren

Darren’s blog appealed to me right away, the content that is. My thought on growing on keeping consistent traffic, thus income, were kinda reflected in his posts. And the more I read through his archives, the more I see confirmation of my strategies.

Darren makes it abundantly clear that there’s no need to rush things, especially growth. Step by step, without trying to skip steps, and you will reach your goal faster and more stable.

He started blogging as a hobby. After he noticed a small consistent growth of income with Adsense, he started to wonder if this small growth can turn into something big. He didn’t look at the numbers, he rather looked at the percentages his income was rising each month. This rising got him thinking of ways to get more income from his blog.

Important is that he didn’t “quit his daytime job” when he started blogging. He made sure there was a backup first. The more his income started to grow, the more time he needed to spend on his blog, the more he let go of his other jobs and work.

There is so much to say about this man. His archives are full of this information, so it all would not fit in one post.

Learning from Darren

Darren did a lot to get to this point. He shares a lot of that knowledge in his blog. As a new blogger I think it’s important to study the ways of Darren Rowse, find out what applies to your own situation, and try to learn from his mistakes (like depending on one blog). It’s no use trying to reinvent the wheel. Other were ahead of you, so learn from them.