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Late last week Steve came across a mainstream blog that had stolen some of our content. It wasn't hard to discover the theft ... after all they had taken an entire blog entry of ours and simply copied and pasted it into their blog and that meant that it appeared in a Google alert for one of the keyword phrases that we watch continually.

A firm but basically polite suggestion that they remove the offending post or we would contact their host saw the offending entry removed so we were happy. But we were also left wondering what on earth this particular local business was trying to achieve by running a blog.

Obviously, by the title of the blog, they wanted to rank for some important local terms and they couldn't achieve that with the website their rather dumb designer had produced for them. So their designer had probably told them that a blog would help them achieve the rankings they were looking for.

But when we looked at that blog it was obvious that they didn't have the skills to write their own content and so they were scrapping it from some local news sources. But the content they were scraping almost always failed to include important keywords and there was nowhere on their blog ... that we could see ... where they actually linked back to their own website.

So basically what they were doing was spending a lot of time every day to steal a lot of content that was doing them absolutely no good at all. Personally I like that idea ... anyone who steals content is a low-life in my estimation and they don't deserve to prosper so I was very pleased that this guy was wasting his time.

Well actually he was more than wasting his time because, as a local businessman he will find it difficult to do business locally as more and more people discover that he's not averse to taking things that belong to others.

But it also left me wondering if a lot of people who start blogs these days really do know what they're doing and what they need to do to achieve their goals. An email from one of our sponsors about some new free blog hosting got me thinking even more about it.

Obviously people in our industry start blogs to make money. Even if they look like a personal blog they still need to have making a profit as their primary goal. If you start an adult blog and your primary aim isn't to make money from it then you're pretty much wasting your time.

But how do you go about making money from a blog? That's the question that some people just don't want to think about. Instead they feel that they're going to make money simply because they've started a blog but nothing in this world works quite that easily.

Traffic
The very first step ... even before you upload WordPress to your server ... is to start thinking about where you're going to get the traffic from that your blog will need if it is to make a profit.

Do you swap links with other adult blog owners via your blog roll? Do find a traffic broker that can sell you traffic that will work with your blog? Do you link to it from some of your other sites? Do you just cross your fingers and hope that Google finds you and will give you a good ranking for words like 'sex' or 'porn' just because you use them frequently and you've used those words in your blog's title?

Building a reader base
Once you've got traffic coming to your site what are you going to do to keep it coming back? Now there's something that many experienced webmasters might almost choke on because with galleries and free sites you don't want your surfers to keep coming back ... you want them to signup as quickly as possible.

But with blogs it's different ... with blogs you want people to come back and that means that you have to give them some good reasons to keep coming back. In mainstream blogs some people come back for the conversation ... some people come back for the content ... and some people come back because they like the person who is running the blog.

Now which of those things will make people keep on coming back to an adult blog?

Do you dare to leave the comments open in an adult blog? There are some good filters around these days so it's not all that hard to keep the spammers out but do you really want the sort of comments that you're bound to get from some of the fringe surfers who hang around in adult?

Can you really go on writing or producing compelling content day after day that will keep people coming back to your blog? If you really do want any chance of having your blog rank in Google you're going to need to have more than just photos or links to movies in your blog so where are you going to get that written content from?

Of course you can buy it in ... we write content for several blogs run by adult webmasters ... but it's not cheap and you want good written content if you want people to keep coming back. Even if you produce it yourself it still takes time and time is money.

I could go on but instead I'll stop here and let you think about the points that I've already raised. Blogs can generate a lot of money if you know what you're doing but they can also be a major waste of time if you don't know what you're doing.

So before you rush in to start an adult blog just ask yourself this: "Do I really know what I'm doing?"