Blog Business Opportunities Weblog
A reader wrote:
I’ve stumbled upon your blog and was wondering if you cared to share a bit of your business plan to a fellow entrepreneur. Obviously, a very successful website, based on the percentage dedicated to advertising, but I was wondering what your success rate was with google adsense vs. the independent advertising revenue. I notice a link for advertisers to contact about rates, but do you actually handle that part of your business, or is that a 3rd party as well.
Am I missing anything, or is your revenue strictly driven by click thru advertising?
You’re absolutely correct. I make all my revenue via advertising. Both third party and Google. All of my third party advertising is view based, and not based on clicks.
I handle the static 125×125 banners in the sidebar manually (and keep all of the money), and Federated Media handles the large banner CPM advertising at the top (they keep a portion).
Direct ad sales are much more profitable than Adsense.
Are you looking to create a competing site? 
Scott Adams, the author of the comic Dilbert is going to start blogging less because of the negative impact his blog has had on his income:
I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert, and make my flagship product stronger. Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it. And a startling number of readers couldn’t tell when I was serious or kidding, so most of the negative reactions were based on misperceptions.
Photo by ~C4Chaos.
Rob May on why blogging sucks and video is where it’s at:
The more I play in the online video space, the more I like it. Normal blogging is difficult because the moment there was money in it, everyone started trying to game the system by stuffing posts with keywords, maximizing titles for SEO, but writing meaningless drivel in the post itself. As a result, Google gives you lots of garbage when you search for things. When you write good posts, they don’t always get read. Blogs have a distribution problem.
Video is the opposite. You can distribute the hell out of a video by uploading it to the top 10 or 15 video sites, and tons of people will see it. It’s a discrete chunk of content that can be part of a blog, or can stand on it’s own. And you don’t face the duplicate content SEO penalties that you get from posting the same text all over the web. Instead of a distribution problem, video has a content problem. Most of the content is weak, and overwhelming falls into one of three categories:
- Stuff you have already seen (tv and movie clips, etc)
- Stuff shot with a cheap webcam that wasn’t edited
- Shows about technology and gadgets
So there is plenty of opportunity for people to come in and create unique content that, with a little editing, is a step above what Joe Webcam can do. If you want to promote something on the web, online video is the way to do it for now. On top of that, there are many related problems with measuring and tracking and all that jazz that present great entrepreneurial opportunities.
ProBlogger:
The potential for StumbleUpon to send traffic is often under-estimated, particularly by new bloggers. Unlike digg and del.icio.us, an item doesn’t need to become popular before you see immediate results. One or two votes can bring a hundred or more readers — more than a new blog might see in a day.
StumbleUpon users are, however, notoriously fickle. The service describes itself as allowing you to ‘channel-surf the internet’ and I think it’s a very appropriate description. Users flick through websites like you might flick through channels, often making a decision on whether to stay or leave your site before it has even had time to finish loading.
FoxNews:
In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards.
The effort is an extension of the blogosphere’s growing power and presence, especially within the political realm, and for many, evokes memories of the early labor organization of freelance writers in the early 1980s.
Organizers hope a bloggers’ labor group will not only showcase the growing professionalism of the Web-based writers, but also the importance of their roles in candidates’ campaigns.
Blogging has lowered the barrier to entry to become a professional writer, and because of this, the number of writers has exploded. Since there is only a limited demand for their services from the professional blog networks and enormous competition for those jobs, the rate of pay is low.
The lowered barrier to entry applies not just to the act of writing itself, but also to methods of remuneration. Google Adsense and other advertising networks have made it incredibly easy to concentrate on creating quality content, because they handle all of the advertising sales and processing.
So, although many blogging jobs might pay a pittance, blogging entrepreneurs, even small time ones, are with hard work and quality content, able to make well more than a “fair wage.”
Disclaimer: I own a blog network and pay my bloggers a flat rate per post.
Photo by nicholaslaughlin. I thought long and hard about what photo to use with this post. I hope you understand my meaning.
The Catalyst Code:
The blogosphere is one of the biggest and most influential global industries created in the last decade. Technorati tracks almost 100 million blogs and estimates that about 20 percent of blogs are active in the sense that they were updated in the last 90 days. Hundreds of millions of people globally either operate blogs or contribute to them over the course of the year. With 1.5 million new postings a day, blogging likely consumes billions of hours of effort globally. According to comScore, blogs accounted for slightly more than a third of the 173 billion US Internet visitors in May 2006. All told blogs have become a significant source of competition for all of the on and offline businesses that make their living attracting eyeballs and selling access to those eyeballs to advertisers. The blogosphere creates vast amounts of news and opinion. It is one the major destinations of the many readers fleeing newspapers.
Despite its size and importance the blogosphere earns little revenue. About 10 percent of blogs make money from advertising but few of those make enough to pay their operators the minimum wage. Of course some blogs now attract millions of visitors a year and earn their operators lavish compensation from the advertising they sell. PerezHilton.com, a highly popular entertainment blog, reportedly gets $9,000 a week per ad and it posts many ads on its web pages. But, by and large, this global industry does not seem to be based on the quest for profits. Most of its participants are volunteers. Like open source software it seems to defy the laws of market economics.
Disclaimer: Our main site is ranked #11 in Technorati’s list of most popular blogs, and we make money from advertising.
In addition to probloggers for the Business Opportunities Weblog Network, I’m also looking for professional bloggers for my new site Clever Cruiser.
Today HP made two new resources available to website developers and bloggers who want to make it simple to print and reformat content from the
Internet in a useful, attractive format.
The Tabblo Print Toolkit at developer.tabblo.com, is a set of publicly available technology components, which enables web developers to incorporate print functionality into new and existing websites. The Tabblo Print Toolkit technology gives developers a simple way to extract content from their web pages and have it reformatted to print beautifully. The end results is users have a simple way to print online content that looks good. The Tabblo Print Toolkit can dramatically improve the printed Web.
Also available is HP’s new blog printing widget, already being used on popular sites such as BoingBoing.net, Dooce.com and TechCrunch.com, which blog authors using the WordPress or Movable Type platform can download at developer.tabblo.com. The blog-printing plugin allows readers to pick and choose the posts they want to print, and skip those they don’t.
“HP’s printing feature is a great way for people to print out longer Boing Boing blog entries for offline reading,” says BoingBoing.net co-founder, Mark Frauenfelder. “I know our readers will appreciate this new experience.”
Initial beta testing proved the market was hungry for such capabilities. Ninety-three percent of testers rated the blog printing plugin as “very good” or “excellent.”
It’s just another way to make money blogging.
Looks like MediaTemple is continuing to have problems with their Grid Server system. Just received this email from them:
On 3/10/07 system engineers rolled out an upgrade (GMR v.1.2) to the (gs) Grid-Server which included many system enhancements and bug fixes. We have since discovered through an analysis of these upgrades, which made several changes to core code and logic, that a miscalculation was introduced to the GPU accounting formula on certain Clusters. Our immediate plans to remedy this situation are as follows:
- All GPU related charges from the date range of 3/10/07 to today will be voided and a credit will be issued to your account.
- In the best interest of our customers, all GPU accounting and overage fees will be disabled pending a full, forensic analysis of our GPU accounting system.
- A new GPU analysis tool is being developed to give you an incredibly detailed view into your GPU usage. This new tool, currently in development, will help you track scripts, software, and files which are causing GPUs to be used. We will be providing further updates on this tool on our weblog.
We regret any inconvenience this may have caused you. Please be assured that (mt) Media Temple will only collect payment for accounting which is 100% accurate and valid. Should you have any questions, please use one of these options to contact our billing department for more information.
ProBlogger:
- Show them what they’re buying.
- Traffic is a Powerful Motivator.
- Collect Demographics.
- Start with Small Advertisers.
- Put together an Advertiser Pack.
- Sell the Niche Angle.
Darren touches on some good points, but I have two things to add:
The first, and most important, in my opinion is to have an actual “Advertise Here” link in a prominent position above the fold. Sometimes its hard to tell whether or not a site, especially a blog, accepts advertising. I try to make things as obvious as possible.
The second is to have a prewritten sales letter that you use to followup with potential advertisers. When I get an email about advertising, I can immediately followup with either the generic email. If the prospect has asked some unique questions, I can quickly customize the email to answer their questions.
