I met Tim Zagat of the Zagat Guides (one of my clients) the other day. He took one look at me in my blonde, stiletto-heeled Los Angelene glory, and boomed out, “Young lady, do you like to shop?”
He had in mind that I would perhaps edit a Zagat LA shopping guide, but I had to turn him down. For a couple reasons:
1. I don’t really like to shop
2. If I did, by the time I edited a complete guide to Los Angeles shopping, I would come to hate it.
That is, perhaps, one of the greatest ironies of being a creative. You work as hard as you can so that you can do what you love…and then, when you reach that ultimate peak of being able to DO it, you become over-glutted with whatever it is that you…no longer love it.
UNLESS you can manage to limit your production, and own all your rights, and somehow still turn a profit. For writers, that’s the obvious appeal of the blog.
I’ve seen plenty of business blogs on this site: marketing, tech, PR, small biz, general interest… But the big, profit-turning blogs that I follow have nothing to do with business.
I am a sucker for gossip blogs, actually. And restaurant blogs. Travel blogs (but only the helpful ones, not the ones that talk about trekking in Nepal with goats). I actually have a dating blog myself, which will be unveiled for you shortly, and I’m launching a singles’ travel blog. So I’ve been combing through the blogosphere for weeks on end, in search of inspiration. Here are a few of my favorite just-for-fun blogs…proof that with enough time spent online, anyone can make money from doing what they love (and talking about it).
http://wickedchopspoker.blogs.com/
Owned by three guys who intentionally come off like the scummiest of potbellied, beer-drinking scumbags, but are actually all very cute and sweet and happily married. (Obsessed with cards, but nobody’s perfect.) They used to have day jobs, but thanks to this blog, two of them have moved to Vegas and are now running rawvegas.tv.
Marcia Gagliardi did what I’m going to do as soon as I can find the time and the will. A restaurant writer who works for magazines, books and local papers, she started this San Francisco dining e-newsletter to provide an outlet for all the great stories she couldn’t sell to her clients. She sends out a weekly email and keeps back issues archived online. With a clean look, chatty voice and uber-sleuth of a head researcher (that would be Marcia, of course), this site’s a winner even without funding or a traditional publication to anchor it.
http://www.dlisted.com
This gossip site is hysterically funny though borderline filthy; it goes where Perez Hilton dares not tread. Owner Michael K is an amazing writer with a crazy off-color flaming gay sense of humor. I love him. You may not–in fact, if PerezHilton.com and TMZ offend you, then you shouldn’t even check this one out. But if you have a soft spot for dirty-minded, completely uncensored gossip bloggers, then by all means click away.
http://blogs.timesunion.com/dowdondrinks/
This is my dear friend Bill. He was an editor at a New York paper for 20 years. Recently retired, Bill is now focusing most of his efforts on this blog, which is, I believe, also syndicated in print by the Times Union papers. He writes primarily about wine, beer and spirits (although for some strange reason, he just did a whole post on Snapple’s new juice line).
There are several dating-related blogs on this site. Actually I used to write one of ‘em–I just quit because I was tired of talking about my personal life online. (Especially when I’ve been doing essentially the same thing for the LA Times.) But I love their “Daily Dish,” which discusses the news and entertainment gossip of the day through the dating/mating/relating filter.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Laptop Meditations, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
