Here are some reader suggested articles: How to Make Money Online From Your Dorm Room Blogging Is Submitting Your Articles to BloggingZoom a Good Idea? Makes Ends Meet, and Then Some Whateverlife.com is a Prime Example of How to Make Money Online Are You Blogging to Make Money, or Are You Blogging to Become Rich? Part 1

In the related article about how to make money online from your dorm room by blogging I mainly went over the technical aspects of creating a blog using the free Blogger service Google provides. I didn’t talk about what to actually do with your blog. An easy business to start with your blog is to blog about your college and college life itself.

Your Fellow Students — Free Content
I’m from a small rural town in Western Kentucky. We lived 10 minutes from the closest McDonalds and 30 minutes from Wal-Mart. Going to college was really me going into a whole new world. At college, you’ll run into students that come from a totally different background than yourself; they have different hobbies, some you’ve never even heard of before.

Write about your fellow students activities. I’m not saying write about your roommie John Smith, but go with him to his horse stable, watch him practice his rodeo events, and write about the up coming rodeo. Take some pictures to add some color.

Know what this style of blogging sounds like? It sounds alot like you’re a reporter. There are key differences between you blogging about college life and writing for the school paper.

• Your content, your control — Having worked at a school paper, I’m telling you now, there’s alot of politics involved between student writers, student editors, and faculty advisers. I had a story I wrote get a rewrite between my submission and print, with no notice given to me or any explanation given beyond “we thought it would be for the best” after I asked why it was changed. With your blog, you have complete control over what you write about and how you write it.
• Make Money Online — I never made a dime working for the school paper. You can monetize your blog and work to create income.

Content Overload

There are just so many things happening on or off campus, there will never be a lack of articles to write. You’ll only be limited by your own initiative. Thinking back to what I did at school, I could write about the weather during the 3-4 aday trips to classes. I went to school at Murray State University in Western Kentucky. Anyone familiar with the campus will tell you that from the dorms to classes is about a half mile trip one way. Plug into that 18 degree temperatures during winter, and you’ve got yourself one miserable, almost hourly, experience. Turn that into an article about how non-traditional students and seniors get better parking around the class halls, an article warning people about the weather the next morning, or set-up a carpool network. Cover sporting events, dorm RA community projects, movie night at the student center, etc. There’s no reason you couldn’t make several posts per day.

Marketing

There are so many free ways to promote your blog on campus.

• Billboards — Make up some fliers on multicolored paper and post them on the dozens of cork-board billboards all over campus. Talk about your blog and give the web address.
• People Like to Read About Themselves — Visit a club, be it the college drama group, a frat house, or the local baptist student union, get with the leaders and tell them you’re writing an article for an online college website and would like to interview them about their group or club. Ask easy softball type questions that bring up positive points about the group. At the end of the interview, thank them for their time, give them the web address, and tell them when it will be posted. They’ll pass it along to the rest of the group, and may even use your article as publicity themselves and direct others from outside the group to your article.
• Get featured in the school paper — Still a free form of marketing, but this will be out of your control. If you haven’t made enough buzz from the above methods to get approached by the student media, contact the school newspaper or school radio station and tell them about what you’re doing. Always looking for a student related feature, they will probably ask for a sit-down interview. Offer to do it at a computer lab where you can show off the blog itself. You’re opening yourself up to possible bad reviews, but any exposure is good exposure.

Make Money With Your College Blog

You can start with using adsense and other standard blog related methods, but as your traffic improves, and if word of mouth is getting out about your blog as it should, you should start getting contacts from local businesses for advertising. If not, once you have some decent traffic, initiate contact yourself to those businesses about buying some advertising space. Hit up the local text-book buyer/resellers, pizza shops, and chinese take-outs; anything students need or use on a regular basis. Advertising costs on your blog will probably be nothing compared to pricing in local print and broadcast media; have your traffic numbers handy to show off your appeal.

Expand Your Blog into a College Blog Network

What you’re doing can easily be replicated at other colleges. Contact some of your friends from high school, get them into the act, and create a blog network. You can run the network from a brand using subdomains for each college (an excellent suggestion if you plan to go big time with this) or use different domains, linking to each other as needed. You can either bring the friend in as a full partner with the network or pay per article. If you go with pay per article, I would get several writers from each school because you wouldn’t want your content source to dry up or burn out. Once the new site is established, you can create a new site for yet another college, rinse and report.

Buy or Sell, Your Choice

Despite what some think, you can stay at college only so long. No matter if you graduate or not, you eventually have to leave school behind. Does that mean that you just pack up and end your blog (or blogs)?

You can partner up with a younger college friend and buy content from them. Again, get several writers because, as other businessmen can tell you, no one will care about your blog as much as you do.

You can sell your blog. There are plenty of entrepreneur spirited students who can see what you’re doing and the benefits, and might be willing to buy your blog, lock stock and barrel.

Blogging as a Business

What we’ve done here is create a business from thin air. We’ve created a media outlet for students and the world based upon your everyday life experiences and brushes with others while in college. Sometimes, creating a business is not only taking advantage of an opportunity, but creating an opportunity yourself. Everyone sees the same things you do, but it’s what you do with them and how you take advantage of them that sets you apart.

college business, dorm room business, Blog Business, Make Money Online, Murray State University, College Blog, College Life, Online Business Blog

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