Starting a Firearms Blog

[GlockenSpiel]

A friend of mine wants advice on starting up a firearms blog. He isn't very computer-savvy but has enough knowledge that it might be able to find a following, or at least use this to meet like-minded individuals and have good conversations with them. I'm helping him out with editing and some research on the technical side of it.

The generic answer for any intro to blogging seems to be to use wordpress or another easy blog hosting service. However, I know a lot of these don't allow certain firearms content, especially if it "facilitates the sale" of firearms or parts. Articles about where to find certain guns, parts, or deals aren't out of the question, so we would prefer to avoid that. I note that most firearms blogs of any size tend to have their own domain names, so I'm guessing that's the route to go down? If so, any general advice about selecting hosting, and ecommerce or ads down the road? Profit is not the main goal but trying to be at least cost-neutral in the future would be nice.

[Borderland]

This should be interesting.

[Stephanie B]

Google’s Blogger has hosted @Tamara for something like seventeen years.

Https://www.blogger.com

It’s easy to set one up there. One only need to be slightly more computer-literate than a baboon.

[Sig_Fiend]

I do this for a living so feel free to pick my brain (I'm NOT shilling services and don't freelance, just giving advice free of charge; my way of giving back to PF.). The more gun sites the better as far as I'm concerned.

For any long term site that he might want to monetize in the future, Wordpress is the safest bet for multiple reasons. Specifically, starting with a wordpress.com hosted site since you can create a free one to start and grow it from there. There are several important considerations.

Content Strategy
As a site grows over time, site structure, navigation, and internal linking are critical. This is where most sites that are several years old, and without a clear strategy, usually fail or lose out on a lot. With Wordpress, you have categories, tags, pages vs. posts... there are many options to more neatly organize the structure of your site. You also have header and footer navigation that can be fully customized. This is crucial. Some of the free blogging platforms out there, such as Blogger, Weebly, Wix, etc. are terrible at this.

Also, many of those platforms are specifically terrible for search engine optimization (SEO), which is critical for generating organic (unpaid) traffic from search engines.

Traffic Generation
This is the worst part and why most give up within 1 year. The typical traffic channels are:

• Organic - search engines
• Paid - SEM, paid search engine traffic/ads (expensive)
• Social - traffic from the popular social platforms
• Referral - traffic from other websites linking to yours
• Direct - people have your site bookmarked or a number of other situations
• Email - email marketing from you or others linking to your site

Starting out, a new site will likely see zero real traffic for at least the first month, maybe two depending on posting activity. Search robots have to crawl the site, see the content, and start to rank it. It takes posting frequency and volume of content to start generating anything on the organic side. With a new site, this can take weeks or even a couple of months to start taking effect. Of course, being active on social, on other sites, occasionally linking back to yours where it's allowed, you can also end up generating social and referral traffic.

I think it's important to set a realistic expectation on what results will look like. Many people start out and maybe they create one article per month. Often without any coherent structure or taking into account certain common sense principles for SEO. As an aside, SEO can get complex but, at the end of the day it's merely a matter of how you organize and optimize content around specific terms such that the content is interesting, readable in a natural way, and creates a good user experience that fulfills the user's needs for that search term or subject. After 12 months and after that person only created 12 articles, maybe they end up only having 100 visits a month or some other underwhelming number. It can be downright demoralizing if approached without a plan. It takes more than infrequent and sporadic efforts to be sure.

If I was making a serious go of it with starting a new site, I'd be planning a content strategy and structure and working towards seeding my new site with at least say ~30-40K words of content. Generally speaking, most articles really need to be over 500 words to be taken seriously by search engines. Ideally I'd say 750-1K words minimum. So call that ~30-40 articles (maybe spread across 3-4 categories e.g. "Holsters", "Red Dots", "Rifle Slings", etc.) to get the ball rolling, some keyword rankings starting to pop up, content you can link to on social without saturating the same articles too frequently, etc. 30-40K sounds like a lot, and it is, and maybe that takes 2-4 months of serious effort to produce. That's fine! Main thing is working towards a specific goal like that, that is non-trivial (that's a sizable content volume to start with) but still achievable.

And don't get caught up in volume for the sake of volume. Readability is important, and it still has to be interesting or entertaining enough for people to want to read it!

Site Infrastructure
If building a site for the long term, you want something built with a robust architecture. Millions of sites use Wordpress. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Wordpress developers out there for when things get serious. There are tons of independent WP hosts out there. This creates limitless options for scalability in the future. If starting with the wordpress.com free option, say he ends up wanting to customize the site more significantly, turn it into an ecommerce store, etc. You can run an export tool on wordpress.com to export all of the site's content, images, etc. and import that to a Wordpress instance on another web host. This is great for avoiding vendor lock-in and getting forced into a corner by any one vendor or proprietary architecture.

Domain Name
If going the wordpress.com-hosted route, feel free to just start out with the WP domain name you can choose (it'll end up being mysite.wordpress.com or whatever he names it). If at some point he wants to get a custom domain (e.g. superblasters2000.com or whatever lol), buy the domain from a separate registrar! Trust me on this. It's an added hassle, but it's added security in the long run.

Use a separate registrar like Namecheap (There are many others. I recommend strongly against Godaddy, they've pulled many alleged unethical shenanigans over the years). That way in a worst case scenario if a web host bans the site or does anything unethical like that, you can take an export and database dump of the site, upload it to a new Wordpress host, change a few DNS records at your registrar, and be back up and running in a few hours. Always keep your domain registration separate from your web hosting.

If buying a custom domain name, my recommendations would be:

• Stick to .com if possible (In some cases, .net, .io, .org, etc. can be fine. Avoid stuff like .xyz.)
• Don't use names with dashes
• Try to keep the name under ~20 characters
• Maybe avoid arbitrary numbers in the name

There are some branding and SEO considerations behind those recommendations. Especially if trying to build more of a long term brand that's memorable. For example, say I wanted to create a die-hard enthusiast site dedicated to the illustrious creations of John Browning. I might decide to create a brand of "Gospel of JMB" (gospelofjmb.com). BTW, that domain is actually available and it's ~$9, so I totally just created a brand for someone to run with if they so choose. Hint hint, some PF'er should totally do it!


I'll stop there since this is getting long. Happy to add more if there are other questions about specific things.

[Sig_Fiend]

As an example of some of the things I mentioned with content, structure, SEO, just take a look at my post above in context of itself (how it's structured with headings separating distinctly-themed sections so it's not a wall of text and easier to scan through) as well as in context of the topic of this thread. My post alone was 1,100 words. If there were no other posts in this thread, from a search engine standpoint, robots will get the gist that the page/thread is about:

Starting a Firearms Blog

• Content strategy
• Traffic generation
• Site infrastructure
• Domain name

That's not exhaustive, and other important and relevant subjects also apply. Regardless, though, anyone researching starting a firearms blog is inevitably going to be interested in some of those subjects. So, a search engine will see this thread as quality (over 1K words, not terribly written, organized, etc.) and relevant in ranking for keywords like ("start a gun blog", "how to start a firearm website", etc.). A user will also be relatively satisfied that they're finding answers to at least some of their questions.

Successfully blogging, for the most part, is often as simple as rinsing and repeating the above recipe provided it's on subjects people are actually searching for and interested in. No "rocket surgery" necessary.

[Tamara]

Only losers blog.™

[jetfire]

A friend of mine wants advice on starting up a firearms blog.

Don't. That's it. That's the advice.

[Stephanie B]

Only losers blog.™

Blogging's not only not cutting edge, but that cut's healed over years ago. There have been lots^100 of people doing it. It's going to be very hard to break though the background noise of the Internet with a new blog. Especially since there are about a pasta-gazillion newer social media platforms than blogs.

I'm not saying that someone can't do a new blog, but they should be doing it for their own enjoyment, not with a view towards raking in moola.

[Tamara]

I'm not saying that someone can't do a new blog, but they should be doing it for their own enjoyment, not with a view towards raking in moola.

The absolute best maxim I've read on the topic came from the blogger at Say Uncle, who was a customer at Coal Creek Armory when I was working there and was kinda my Blogfather:

"Remember: I do this to entertain me, not you."

[Sig_Fiend]

The competition aspect often seems impossible. It's not nearly as hard as people think. I gave some of the recipe above. The difference is when people publish content no one is searching for, post infrequently and too little in volume. In cases like that, yes, it will never work. People just need to be realistic about the fact that it takes significant work (this is true of most niches/industries), consistently, and over time. Blogging and building websites in general will always be a thing, regardless of what social platforms exist.

That said, what I will say is, the firearms industry is extremely volatile and a significant risk factor from a monetization standpoint. Lots of typical ad networks and traditional monetization methods people might easily use in other industries are often closed off to the firearms world. I do agree that, if someone is starting a gun blog, I would set expectations very low as far as what you can earn.

Also, with what few monetization methods are open to the gun world, if trying to earn a sizable income or maximize profit blogging in the gun industry, you will almost immediately sell your soul. Some manage to do it while maintaining a good degree of integrity but, they're the exception to the rule.

Just go search about any random product-based keyword right now (try "best glock owb holster") and what you will find is a majority of what comes up first are trashy affiliate marketing blogs (in this case what we call MFA - made for Amazon sites) linking to trash holsters on Amazon. Absolute trash quality sites shilling trash products. Best = literally not even once. Souls = sold. Some of this is due to the fact that there are more industry-agnostic marketers actively pursuing this than their are legitimate gun bloggers who are producing quality and respectable content actually pushing legitimate products. We need more good gun bloggers.

What @Tamara said is important and something I'd strongly consider. Do it because you love it and have a passion for it. In this particular industry, other reasons might lead you down a path of despair that compromises integrity.