bloggers about to be classified

As far as I can see there are four types of blogger:

The personal blogger, who is really writing a personal diary, which can include rants, complaints, reviews of books and films, descriptions of nights out, favourite food, personal disasters, hatred of boss, co-workers, the ex boyfriend, erratic girlfriend and other likes and dislikes.

Most of these blogs are written by individuals, who are not really doing it for the money. They may pick up a little money from bunging in a few advertising links. Some personal bloggers have achieved fame, such as Mil Millington and the very funny ‘Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About‘, which has lead to books deals and a certain amount of fame.

The specialist blogger, who can range from the person writing about a hobby, a school PTA writing about the school, a number of fans broadcasting details of a star, celebrity, sports star or team.

Some of these blogs achieve great success. A recent example was the political blog, Guido Fawkes, which leaked information that resulted in the Prime Minister’s head of communications resigning. ironically for trying to set up a blog to attack their political arrivals.

Specialist blogs are probably those most favoured by advertisers. Some, with a large readership, do make quite a lot of money. However, many, probably most have been developed just as a hobby.

Business blogs are linked to a business and they have the following tasks:

• to attract customers to the service or product
• to answer pre-sales queries
• sales
• to maintain the business’s presence with suppliers and other business contacts
• to provide support to customers using the business’s products or services
• to communicate with employers

They will often carry links to a sales system for their own products, but generally do not take any other advertising.

Money making blogs, are those set up with the specific aim of making money. There is an obvious overlap between a money making blog and a specialist blog. The main difference being the motivation of the person writing the blog.

Money makers range frm the obvious ‘I’ll tell you how to become rich overnight – by making me richer’ to quite a few excellent sites.  Two I particularly like are  Problogger and Daily Blog Tips.  Both in different ways are successful models on how to do it. Both succeed by providing good content and the offer of occaisional buying opportunities.

The way that Darren Rowse writes his articles on Problogger is an excellent model for improving your own writing skills.  Daniel Scocco’s Daily Blog Tips posts are shorter giving honest insights to his developing work on the net.

Other types of blogs

There are other types of blogs, such as journalistic blogs or photoblogs, which are really a subset of the specialist blog.  Then we can start categorising blogs by niche, by typcal length of a post, frequency of posting, use of media and more.

How would you classify your blog?