by R.A. Rowell; Co-Owner of  Intent-sive Nature & the  Brand Shamans network

Writing online is a highly competitive game - that’s for sure! But if you think you have something new or unique to bring to the table, it’s never too late (or early) to start! It doesn’t matter how young or old you are! I see writers as young as 12 (and there may be even younger, especially on YouTube.) Then, I see writers well into their 60’s, 70’s and even 80’s! As long as you’re a competent writer and have something useful to share, then writing online is well worth a shot!

Starting Young as a Writer

When you’re younger, you obviously have not only time on your side to build your writing portfolio and your personal brand. You have youth itself on your side! This is both good and bad. There are those that will think it’s “cute” or “adorable” that you’re starting so young! It may be hard for some of your audience to take you seriously.

But for those of us who have been in the game for a bit, we have a deep respect for young writers. This is because it takes a lot of time and dedication to build a successful online presence with writing. Yes, many kids have more free time than most of us adults, but there’s more to it than just time and energy.

You have to have a certain maturity to be a successful writer - something many adults don’t even have - to be brutally honest. You have to have a plan and know how to take the steps to execute it. Having a blog, for example, even if it doesn’t do particularly well, is a great learning experience for any writer.

At the very least, writing online can make you connections. These connections can prove quite valuable! We’re more than happy as fellow writers to build up the younger members of the community. After all, you guys are the future of our industry! Sounds corny, but it’s true!


Starting Older as a Writer

Somewhat interestingly, the advantages of time that you have when you’re younger can be the same advantage when you’re an older writer. I’ve seen so many retirees pour all of the time they would have used in their day to day jobs into their blogs and other online writing efforts. The effort really shows. Some of them make a decent side hustle from it!

The other advantage older writers have is that they tend to have a fairly substantial network of friends, family, and former colleagues to get the word out  about their new endeavors. Also, life experience is a huge advantage when it comes to content. While most of us younger writers are still learning how to put the pieces of our lives together. Retired writers can give us perspectives and stories we can only dream of one day sharing.

It really is never too late to start writing, and it’s so easy nowadays to get started with your own blog or website! Also, it’s an awesome hobby, even if you don’t care about actually making money from it. We really love the elder members of the writing community and we’re always happy to welcome more to our ranks.

For Those of Us Writers in the Middle

A lot of us writers are twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings trying to make online writing our primary work. Many of us have regular 40-hour or more a week jobs on top of the dozens of hours we dump into networking, promoting, and the writing itself. Younger and older writers definitely have an advantage when it comes to time.

But for those of us in the middle that are turning to making online writing our primary gig, it’s important to realize that any kind of writing is a full-time job in and of itself. If you’re looking to get into the writing game, realize it’s going to be a 40-hour a week commitment, and often more. Much of that commitment needs to be about building one another up, young, old, and in between.

Whether you are looking into online writing full-time, part-time, or just as a hobby, it’s all worth it. But as with anything, you get back what you put into it. Think of writing as starting your own business. It takes the same blood, sweat, and tears. Even if you aren’t writing as a business, you still have to treat it like one, even if it’s not-for-profit. In the long run, you may not get rich, but you can definitely make a living from it.

It’s never too early or too late to start writing online!

by Lyn Lomasi; Co-Owner of Intent-sive Nature & the Brand Shamans network

Do you like trying new products or reading new books? Want to make money or earn free samples for it? Here’s how to start a review blog.

Choose a Platform For Your Review Blog

The first step in starting a review blog for books or other products is choosing the platform you will use. There are many to choose from, such as Weebly, Blogger, and WordPress. I personally recommend Weebly because of the versatility and the fact that beginners can jump right in. If you’re also a pro, not to worry. You can edit the CSS if you want to, but the default drag and drop options make it simple and fun for everyone. In addition to hosting, if you want a dot com domain, you will also need a domain manager. I recommend rcomexpress.com. However, there are lots to choose from.

About Us & ContactBuild Your Blog

Once you’ve chosen your platform, it’s time to build your blog. This is relatively quick and simple if you’ve chosen one of the more easy platforms. You can choose your template/theme, colors, and so on. You should also be able to choose which pages you’d like and customize each page with the text, images, and anything else you need to. If you’re going to be reviewing products, you’ll want sections for ads on each page. This will help you earn revenue.

Make Sure You Have These Important Pages

At the very least, in my experience, every review blog should have a homepage, a blog page, an about/contact page, and a review policy page. By law, you will need to have a review policy and disclose when you receive products or cash in exchange for reviews. All of the pages and policies mentioned will help your audience have a positive experience with your blog.

Monetize Your Blog For Revenue

Join affiliate programs, such as Amazon Associates, Rakuten LinkShare, CJ.com, and Google AdSense in order to generate revenue. This will allow you to earn revenue with ads that are aligned with the products you review. Sometimes you can align an exact product this way for the best results. Be careful to read the terms of each company and make sure you are following their guidelines if you join. Some may require your blog to be a certain age or have a certain number of posts first.

Start Writing Posts

Once you have made all of your pages, done what you can to monetize, and have something to review, start making posts. The more active your blog is, the better chance you have of people seeing it. At first, it might seem you are talking to yourself. Don’t worry. People will come if you keep writing. Be sure to learn some whitehat SEO techniques to help that along.

Market Your Blog To Companies

Once you have some posts up, you can market your review blog to companies via proper SEO, social media, and by sending pitches out to those who share your interests. It may take some time to build a steady following and you may need to at first review products and books you already own. But in no time, you will start getting more requests than you can handle if you do it right.

Happy blogging! If you have any questions, please comment below or Contact Us and we will do our best to assist.

One of the hardest things about blogging is getting people to come back for more. You can build up a huge initial audience. But, over time, even if you keep up with continuous content creation, that doesn’t mean that people will come back and interact.

You can provide the greatest information in the world. It could even be exclusive. But with this strategy, most of the time, you’ll get an overwhelming majority of “hit-and-run” visitors. Yes, they may click on an ad. They may check out a product or two that you are promoting or selling. But very rarely do you convert this traffic into actual revenue.

Curiosity is great, but it doesn’t make you a living. In fact, big page view numbers can lead to little more than frustration.

There is hope, however. You just have to ask yourself a deceptively simple question.


What’s In It For the Readers?

Ryan Deiss of Digital Marketing once published an article about how he and his team built up a blog from zero to $6 million in sales in only a year. The website is called SurvivalLife.com, and it’s about survival and preparedness. Yes, it does promote products but in a passive way.

Survival Life has become a huge resource in the survival and preparedness market. It’s not just because they have a network of blog contributors and a team of blogger experts. Each article offers something beyond just the article.

Having ad networks and even affiliate programs like Amazon Associates is nice, but they don’t work for everyone. But having a mix of affiliate and in-house offers is better if they’re well-targeted, unlike a lot of those pay-per-click ads.

Ryan says that becoming an authority is so much better than being an “ordinary” blogger for a number of reasons. One of the reasons, he says, is this:

“You don’t need a product, sales copy or even an idea… you just need to have a passion in a market where great content and fascinating experts already exist.” – Ryan Deiss (http://www.digitalmarketer.com/6-million/)

It’s all about the passion. There’s more to it than that, obviously. You have to really dedicate the time and energy to become the sort of “insider” that he talks about. But, in fact, he says you don’t even have to be a writer to become an authority.  What's that mean?

Earlier on in that same article, he mentions Oprah. Everyone knows who she is. She has built an empire by simply associating with experts in multiple fields. She makes big time revenues off of those affiliations. How? It's because those are real sales that she’s generating by the interest in those experts because of the trust that she has built over the years.

So What Can You Offer Your Readers?

Sharing other content is great, especially when it’s by other experts that I trust. However, I don’t necessarily subscribe to Ryan’s idea of “The World Doesn’t Need More Information.” Then again, I do agree that if the information already exists, and is already well-written and presented, then you should share it with the world. You don’t even have to rewrite it “in your own words” as they say. “Spinning” isn’t really necessary if the information is already worth promoting.

This doesn’t mean you can’t still be part of it. You can still share personal experience. What it does mean is that you have to always bring it back to making it about what your audience is looking for when they come to you. Offer up other authoritative content that you love, no matter where it comes from. This sounds counter-intuitive, but people will remember where they heard something from if it’s valuable enough.

Why do people go back to major media outlets or remain loyal to brands? It’s because people create emotional attachments to things that provide them with what they’re looking for if it delivers on a consistent basis. It doesn’t all have to come from your own mouth. You just have to keep the good content coming, no matter what the source.

Sometimes, it turns out that the best approach really is to become an expert by showing how you learned to become an expert in that field. By doing so and showing the process, you teach others how to become an expert in their own field, niche, or area of expertise. The idea is to lead by example, even if you’re not the greatest writer in the world. It’s about sharing and caring, as silly as that sounds.

As it has so often been said, it doesn’t matter so much what you give someone. Rather, it's how you made them feel in doing so. Once you have the emotional connection and you continue to deliver on that connection, you’ve made a fan for life. It doesn’t matter how many of those you get as long as they’re genuine. They will be the ones that not only will grow your blog or business, but also be friends for life.

~ Phoenix <3

For those about to blog, I salute you. However, don’t simply blog for the sake of blogging. Yes, a great many people are currently doing it. More than a handful are doing it well, albeit often with some outside help. But before you begin blogging, you need to ask yourself: "Do I have time to blog?"

It's true. The most important thing to consider when creating a blog is just how much time you can devote to a blog. It’s simply unrealistic to think that blogging is something you can do for even a half-hour every week. Sure, sometimes you may be able to do it. But you want to make sure that you have plenty of content waiting in the wings for when you get writer’s block. The last thing you want to happen is to simply put it off.

Or, Should You Have Someone Blog For You?

If you’re running your own website, posting weekly to your blog is fine. However, most experts will tell you that you should blog at least three times a week. This is a good idea, as it keeps your content consistently fresh. A website that is updated every 48 hours definitely looks good to the search engine crawler bots. But, do you have time to blog that much?

Whatever you do, make sure you’re putting out only quality content on your blog. If that is only possible once per week, that is fine. Still, you should shoot towards at least having a decent short post to accompany it. Whether that's earlier and/or later in the week is up to you.

While it's not for everyone, you could consider guest bloggers. It's good to have a group of good writers that can produce content for you on a regular basis. This way if you fall behind, you have some good content still going up on the website. It also can benefit your guest writers with backlinks and exposure for their work.

Don't Abandon Your Blog!

The trick is to not simply start a blog, post a whole bunch of content to it, and then leave the site abandoned for months at a time. This happens far too often; it's sad to say. Sometimes, those blogs sit there for years with nothing new posted.

Keep in mind that things will come up. Suddenly, you could find yourself not having posted on the blog in three or four months. That not only looks bad in the search engine rankings, but it also looks bad to visitors. Blog inactivity makes it look like you gave up. That's a terrible thing in the eyes of online visitors.

So, yes, make sure you are making time to blog before you start blogging. Sometimes, if you can only write a few words, go ahead and write them. They may be the basis for an entire post later. And, yes, you can always hire outside help to put your ideas into action. There are plenty of writers out there to help you do it.


Whatever you decide, make sure you’re posting genuinely valuable content. If you don’t have the time to blog right now, find someone to manage it for you, whether it’s in-house or contracted outside.

If you want to start a blog, don’t put it off. The later you start, the longer it takes to get results. So, post early and often and only the best quality posts. Whether you find the time for your blog yourself, or have someone help you keep your blog active, eventually, you’re sure to get results.