Can Weblit Authors can learn from Professional Bloggers?

Over on the "Is your writing worth anything?" thread Karen mentioned that she initially intended to use the "progressive political blogosphere" as an example of a working model for monetisation, but has since decided that this won't work since "it’s seen less as a business than a cause".

This is true, but the political blogging is just a small sub-section of the blogosphere and there are A-List Bloggers in other, more obviously business orientated section as well.

I think professional bloggers are to weblit authors what non-fiction dead tree authors are to fiction dead tree authors. They're another group of authors online, and one in which the A-list, at least, has monetised itself quite nicely. We can certainly stand to study them.

Then @GabrielGadfly mentioned the ProBlogger site over on the "Is your writing worth anything?" thread. It's a site I visit when I remember, so thus reminded off I went for a mooch around.

Anyway across I popped to Problogger and there was this guest post which is a great example of what I mean:

Seven Signs of an A-List Blogger in the Making.

Now, not all of the points in this post are 100% applicable to us, but some of them are and the rest can be adapted. I think I'll write a blog post on adapting these points to weblit soon. For now I'll say points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 apply as is or with minimal tweaking. 6 is slightly odd because while writing style is obviously important, as fiction writers we don't have the freedom bloggers have to mix and match post types.

But that post's not about monetisation, you cry. No, it isn't. It's about looking the part, so people take you seriously. You can't monetise if people don't take you seriously. There are plenty of posts about monetisation on the ProBlogger site as well. It's certainly worth a look.

Becka