Why you don’t want to blog about celebrities
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One of the worst tendencies that I have is to jump into projects that are not very well thought out and very difficult to win at. I have tried some Amazon stores some Clickbank malls and even some crazy RSSG schemes to create huge sites that are not very original and quite spammy while I could spend a lot more time creating good content instead. These days hopefully are behind me now.
One of the things that is very popular these days is the idea of blogging about celebrities. Lots of people are interested in the lifestyles and transgressions of celebrities and as you may have heard there is huge volume in traffic going to celebrity scoop sites. I know because I have been caught more than once looking at Perez Hiltons site.
Getting good celebrity content
The problem with creating this kind of site is not just in one place but in two. We are all willing to put in time to a great venture, but just how much time? Perez puts out blog posts day and night, around 20 or so posts a day and the real problem for most people would be to get the pictures, that is what everyone is interested in and the content which is also really tough to get on a timely basis. If Britney Spears is dancing around naked at a club and you post it 10 hours after it happened then 10 popular sites have already posted about it, with pictures and even CNN has an article about it. And the next day? No one cares about day old news when there is always exciting news today. So you archives are useless.
Interesting Blog style
The next thing that Perez or TMZ or I don’t like you in that way, is that the writers are witty, make up names and have all sorts of funny pop culture references that are more of a writing gift then something that can be learned. I try to ber personable in my posts but I am nothing like Perez writing about UnFitney or pAArty times and I certainly could not make up a good nickname.
Low CPM
Lastly the problem with celebrity sites is that people just do not click the ads. The cost per 1000 clicks (CPM) is really really low. There is no reason for most people that go to a celebrity page to be interested in what would be interesting on the page besides the pic and article. The readers are not stalking Britney or Paris, they are just interested in the funny new story. Because of this you need huge traffic which of course is an expensive hosting proposition.
So if you are looking at any one of the always new popular niches to make money in you need to take a closer look at the market within that market. How fresh does the content have to be? How personable do you need to be, and even knowlegable to a large degree and finally, with these types of sites, constant huge content to get lots of visitors and still having a low CPM means that you will be always disappointed, well always disappointed unless you are Perez maybe.
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Hey - good points you’ve made here.
Trying to climb to the top of the celebrity news & gossip pile - especially if you don’t live in LA or NYC, or otherwise have some connections to the industry - would have to be one of the toughest online climbing expeditions a person could undertake.
However I think it CAN be beneficial to insert a celebrity angle to a website entry or blog post any time it makes sense…
i.e. Linkbait and/or reason to fire off a press release.
For instance, if you had a site about wigs, you could take advantage of Britney Spears’ melt down last year where she shaved her head. Have a post something like “The 5 Best Wigs Choices for Britney Spears”… spin the fact she’s bald by suggesting she could now change up her ‘personality’ or image on a whim by simply putting on a new wig (a Vamp at night, scholarly look during the day, wild party girl at the bars, etc).
Perhaps also photoshop those wigs (your site sells or is an affiliate for, naturally) onto a couple of pics of Britney to show what she might look like. For that matter, record the process of you shipping off the wigs to Britney’s house and post the results of the FedEx online tracking report.
Then put out a press release and promote the heck out of it on Digg etc and in some discussion forums where the wig buying markets may lurk.
Doing something like that would likely bring in quite a few links to your website, which in turn would boost your entire website’s rankings and PR, even if it didn’t generate any new sales.
So while concentrating entirely on celebrity news might be pointless, utilizing society’s huge interest in celebrities CAN be utilized to promote your website to targeted eyeballs and improve its ranking in the search engines.
And that’s my 2 cents.