How to become a marijuana reviewer / critic
Writing marijuana reviews for a living is a great job and hobby. I’ll be honest with you, I’m not exactly making a killing off this blog, but I continue to do it out of passion for the plant. The more I write about cannabis, the more admiration I have for the plant and how it helps my life. And that’s the first thing I think you need to propagate if you want to start writing reviews of marijuana for a living. You gotta love writing and you’ve gotta love smoking marijuana.
Think about what a marijuana blog should really do, and focus on your strengths. Do you want to start writing a marijuana travel blog? A marijuana food blog? Are you more focused on legalization efforts? Or are you like me, a catch all website about a variety of topics all related to the herb!? So, there’s a common trick in writing, and that’s to use a formula about a story, but then put a spin on it. So one recommendation may be to take something that’s already well established like a “fashion blog” and put a twist on it, and make it about weed fashion! All the big sites like Leafly have sucessfully cornered the market in terms of a lot of the major search terms, but you can still make your way into small niches with little competition. And as more states start legalizing marijuana, that’s more audiences that suddenly gonna want to know about “Willie’s Reserve Vape Pen” or some specialty strain.
Ok, so lets say you just want to smoke weed, and then write reviews about it. One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard about smoking weed was simply to first take a hit, without lighting it. Just suck on your pipe and feel the tastes cascading over your tongue. If your pipe is dirty, then clean it out so you can get the best hints. Once you do spark it up, just let the smoke sit in your mouth for a bit and then blow it out without even inhaling the first hit. Just let it linger a bit. Think of yourself as a wine connoisseur , you’ve got a lot of experience with smoking weed, so now you’ve just got to put those experiences into your writing and make them into stories.
Think about writing for one person. Who are they? What are they looking for? Do they want hard info similar to a tutorial or are they more interested in following someone and peeking in on their lifestyle? Figure out who that audience is. It could be a small group of people, or it could be a huge demographic. You want metalheads who smoke coming to your site, or some soccer moms? Pinpoint who it is that you’re writing for, and it will make your whole job easier.
Give yourself deadlines. When you first start your site I’d recommend writing one article a day for a few months. Google likes sites that have a lot of pages and posts, that shows that they’re really serious about creating content about a certain idea. With that being said, don’t just bang out content for the sake of it. Produce quality content that will have people trusting your site and coming back for more. Some big “keyword categories” around weed can be found in my categories in the sidebar. Films, Strains, Reviews, Growing, Stoner Girls, Memes, Weed Porn, Gear, Tutorials, etc. You can look at some of my other posts about being a productive pot smoker here.
Get a tumblr, then get a domain name, and use your unique domain name on your tumblr account. This is the simplest way to get into blogging. Then you’re going to think of 7 or 8 categories that you want your blog to center around. You’re going to tag each of your posts with these 7 or 8 categories, and then make these tags into pages. Sounds confusing? Check the video below to see how to set this up.
This is going to allow you to start categorizing your content which is super important. It helps keep you on track, and it also helps your audience to easily navigate to the content they find most interesting.
Social Media is a must in this day and age, and I was a bit old school in my approach. Marijuana reviews and news posts are one of many passions in my life, and I devoted a lot of my social media energy to my career in the arts. But I still love writing about weed, so I finally got on the Instagram train after moving to Colorado. Name your instagram account the same as your site