I’m going to start the early part of 2018 by being
unashamedly commercial of a potential venture that is probably not going to
generate much money – my blog, which I started sometime in 2006, when I had my
own little PR business.
I started blogging with no idea of where things would lead. At
the time of writing, it was just a place where I placed the articles that I was
planning to write for the mainstream until they were actually published by the
mainstream. I didn’t even think of the possibility of making money from it.
However, times are changing. Over the years, the blog has grown
an audience. If the analytics of blogger platform are to be believed I am no longer
a “Singapore” only blogger. If you believe the analytics provided by the
blogger platform, the largest audience for most of my blogs is in the USA and
ironically the second largest audience for my main English blog is in France.
One of the most popular pieces on the blog is a piece that lifted from Haaretz,
the Israeli liberal paper.
On a personal basis, people have told me that they read what
I write. I remember Supriyo Sircar, the CEO Digileap and former CEO of Polaris Financial
Technology Asia Pacific telling me that my blog was “spicy,” and Meshari Bin
Khalid, former Director General of SAGIA ASEAN thanking me for this blog. I’ve received
further signs of the blog being read. One of the most prominent was a Reuters
Journalist contacting me out of the blue for a quote and more importantly, my
father told me with regards to this blog – “I can protect you from many things –
but this government isn’t one of them.”
So, it did occur to me that if people were going to know me
for the blog(s) that I publish, I might as well try and earn a few pennies of
the blog. Thankfully Google has made it fairly easy in as much as all I had to
do was to sign up for an AdSense account. So, sometime in 2017, ads have
started appearing and to the shock and horror of my parents (lifelong
advertising producers), I’ve become a space owner.
However, times are changing and its tough to get the traffic
to make online advertising pay. I seem to have a following but like as every
parent knows, things have to become about something more than me. My main “Ah-Ha”
is that the blog needs more contributories. My views are known but I want the
views of others to be shared.
Other than the blog, I’ve realized that I have a diverse
group of friends, ranging from CEO’s and Excellencies to street hawkers and bar
girls. So, I’m hopping my diverse range of friends with a diverse range of
views will contribute to this blog and ad some spice. In the age of Donald
Trump, we have a wonderful range of disunified people who can be brought
together to make a beautiful story.
So far, four friends have agreed to contribute to the blog.
I’ve made an announcement that that they’ve agreed to contribute to my blog on
a Facebook Page called “Tangoland Blogs.” Once again, the analytics have shown
that the decision to have other people contribute has proven to be popular.
I’m looking for more people to contribute to the blog. My
basic terms and conditions are:
- 1. You can write about anything you want and you should try and make a commitment of once a month or at least once every two months.
- 2. While I can’t pay you directly (I still need my day and night job), I can provide you with some publicity with the right audience. You should have your byline, copyright for your piece will belong to you and if you want to add a designation or weblink to promote yourself, please do so.
- 3. There are two main points. I don’t have the resources to hire sub editors to fact check and so, responsibility for the accuracy of information is yours. I’m in the business of expressing opinions not reporting news.
- 4. If you have to get permission from your boss, please do so. I will assume that you when you send me a piece, you have cleared whatever you are supposed to get cleared.
- 5. I believe in Freedom of Speech and Expression. I don’t want people who will praise me for the sake of it. You can use my platform to slag me off and attack my opinions. I will not tolerate smear campaigns against my friends and family.
- 6. I will promote you on my Facebook and linkedin pages, so I think reciprocity on your social media pages is not unreasonable. I will also provide machine translation and publication of whatever you write in English, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, German, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Italian, Nepali, Arabic, Hindi, Tamil and Thai.
- 7. Please support the advertisers of this blog. I need money to survive and if you want to build it to a stage where you get money for your contributions, please support the people paying.
- 8. For those of you who want to sponsor an article, please let me know. I’m starting out and I don’t turn down offers for money. But please make your sponsored article well written. I do provide writing services and I know writers who could do with the work.
- 9. So, if you want to have a bit of fun drop me a line at tigertang@hotmail.com and let me know what you are interested in writing about, how often you want to write and something about yourself. Please send your piece via MS Word format so that I can upload everything.
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