Lessons in Niche Blogging Part 1: Talk Is Cheap

Background
Just about 50 days ago, on May 30, on a whim I started a blog dedicated to the Dave Matthews Band titled The Blog That Jane Likes. This series of entries deals with some of the things I've learned after running the blog for a mere 50 days.

While there are strong communities centered around several message boards, there really are no real DMB blogs out there. In addition, most one-shot audio recordings (as opposed to full-length lossless recordings) are shared via yousendit and other ad-supported downloading sites. Since these sites are bandwidth or download-limited, most popular files need to be re-posted ad infinitum. It's a huge pain and a rather unreliable form of file propagation. With over 1TB/month of bandwidth and 25GB of storage to spare, I set out with the goal of making BTJL the place to download songs from the current tour.

The site has been a huge success, exceeding all my expectations. In the month of June, I've had 397 thousand requests to the site; July has had 150 thousand so far. I served 316 GB of data in June and 149 GB in July. All of this has been at zero incremental cost aside from the $7 domain registration.

I've made more from AdSense in the first few days from BTJL than I have in the year and half I've run this blog. Granted, I've peppered that site a bit more with ads than this one, which only had one ad until the latest redesign where it now has zero. While there's no way I could live off of the AdSense revenues, they will most likely cover my hosting costs for the year, which is good enough for me. I'm doing the site more for the fun of it than for any monetary reward.

Without incurring any costs, I had little to lose on a failed BTJL. Though I was in a bit of a unique situation with pre-existing hosting, there are plenty of free options (Wordpress.com and Blogger, for instance) for anyone who wants to start a blog. I don't know what those sites' policies on placing AdSense is, but I'm sure you can get away with Amazon referrals and the like.

Even if you do have to spend a bit, how's this for an idea: do it for fun and compare the cost to the price of a movie ticket, sporting event, video game, etc. Which one do you think will come out ahead? Talk is cheap, do it.