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Inner Circle Roundtable of 21st Century Marketers |
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Chapter Thirty-Five Blogging for Dollars
By Ben Hart
So what is blogging? How can blogging help your business?
And why all the excitement around blogging?
Well, if you don’t have a website, perhaps the best reason to launch a blog is that it’s the absolute easiest way to set up a website. You need zero technical knowledge.
The simplest way to get started is just to use an online hosted blogging software that’s already set up for you. Some of the most popular ones are WordPress.com, TypePad.com and Blogger.com
With third-party hosted programs like these all you have to do is log on to the system, type your article into a field and then press “send.”
You don’t have to worry about the design of your site. That’s already taken care of for you. You just use one of the templates provided by the blogging service or software.
Blogs generally follow the same format anyway – just like newspapers follow basically the same format. All newspapers look about the same. And all blogs look about the same.
They have a certain look and feel. No real design decisions are needed.
Blogs are not supposed to look fancy. A blog is mostly just articles and links to articles. Not a lot of graphics. A blog is about as interesting to look at graphically as a newspaper. In fact, that’s really all it is – an online newspaper or magazine, usually produced by one person.
So that’s the first big advantage of blogging. It’s super easy.
If you just head on over to WordPress.com, TypePad.com or Blogger.com – you can have your blog up on the Internet within 15 minutes.
So launching a blog is perfect for those who are not at all tech savvy.
There are many other advantages to blogging as well, but before I go further on that, let me first try to define for you what a blog is, and what makes a blog different from a conventional business site.
What Is A Blog?
Blog is slang for Web Log.
A blog is is a website where entries are made in journal or diary style. The articles are dated. And they appear on the page in reverse chronological order.
The most recent articles appears at the top of the page and than goes backwards in time. Blogs are usually long scrolling webpages, with article after article that you see as you see as you scroll down the page.
Many web designers think a site should be designed so an entire page should be able to fit on a computer screen without scrolling. I do not agree with that.
And that certainly is not what a blog a looks like. The home page of a blog is a long scrolling page with lots of articles.
Most blogs are one-man bands. The best ones are infused with the distinct, often quirky, personality of the blogger.
A blog can be on any subject. A typical blog is mostly text. But many blogs also include audio and video podcasts.
The ability for readers to post comments about articles is usually important for a blog if it’s to be popular. The best blogs are forums where readers can sound off and offer their perspective.
All blogging software allows for input and comments from your readers. You, as the editor, control whether a post gets on your blog.
The blog search engine known as Technocrati is tracking 80 million blogs as I write this.
The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives.
But blogs have become much more than vehicles for individual self-expression. With Internet-like speed, blogs have gone from self-indulgent hobbies to flourishing businesses with real revenue streams from real advertisers.
Some blogs have become major media properties. Advertisers spent $40 million to run ads on blogs in 2006 – double the amount spent advertising on blogs in 2005.
Blogging is quickly becoming one of the most powerful marketing vehicles on the Web because blogs allow advertisers to reach highly-targeted niche audiences.
One of the pioneers of blogging for dollars is Nick Denton.
Denton launched his blogging company in 2002 with a media gossip site called Gawker and another blog called Gizmodo that covers gadgets. His company now has 13 blogs, including Defamer and Wonkette.
Gawker Media’s blogs get about 70 million page views per month. Each site is a one or two person operation. Gawker Media raked in about $3,000,000 in ad revenue in 2006
Another blogging pioneer is Jason Calacanis.
He launched some 85 blogs and recently sold them to AOL in for $25,000,000 million. So blogging is now big business.
The big revenue source for bloggers is Google AdSense, which is expected to generate sales of $5 billion in 2007. The fastest, easiest way for a blog to make money is to become part of the Google AdSense network.
When you do this, Google runs its AdWords ads on your blog and you are paid a commission on each click. So if you have a high-traffic blog, you can make a lot of money from people clicking on Google AdWords ads that you allow to run on your site.
So what Google is paying you for is traffic.
This business model – of becoming a Google AdSense partner -- works best if your blog is focused on one topic. You want your site to fit into a definable category so that Google will list your site high up in listings for searches that use keywords and phrases that relate to your topic.
A big reason for the success of blogging is that search engines tend to reward blogs with high rankings on listings because blogs are newsy, educational and full of content.
Search engines like lots of text – especially if its focused on a specialized topic.
Here are some blogs worth looking at. I list these blogs, not because they are necessarily great, but because they represent different kinds of blogs, and might give you some ideas for your blog:
This site is aimed at those who want to get rich. It makes money by running Google AdSense contextual ads
This blog by the famous investment advisor is primarily designed to promote Tobias’s books and other products.
This is an interesting blog from an ad agency in Chicago. This is a great site to look at for those who want to use a blog as a vehicle to promote your business.
This ad agency engages in no paid advertising to bring in clients for its agency. It generates new business primarily with this blog, which drives 12,000 visitors per week to it’s general business website.
The articles are on the blog, where people expect to find articles. The general business site is more like a brochure-style corporate site.
The traffic to its general site is generated by people finding the blog to read the articles. This blog is updated twice a day.
This is an usual, but very effective blog for what it’s trying to do.
Primal Records is located in Berkeley, California. It’s a record store that specializes in off-beat underground music. This blog features inventory updates, company news, special offers and announcements of in-store events.
The message board is a key attraction here, which lets customers post comments and give the store feedback. This allows Primal Records to find out what its customers want. And it helps the store stay on the cutting edge of what its customers are thinking and looking for.
This store deals with a lot of underground offbeat music so the feedback the store gets on its blog helps the store deliver what its customers want.
In other words, this blog acts as a kind of polling or focus group mechanism.
For your business to be successful, you need to poll your customers. You want to stay up to speed on what your customers think of you and what they want from you.
This is a real estate blog. It makes money by selling ads to developers, realtors, home sellers and home buyers, by driving traffic to its main site and by listing properties.
This is a popular blog by B.L. Ochman on what’s happening in Internet marketing. It makes money by selling advertising, participating in Google AdSense, and by collecting the email addresses of visitors (leads).
This is a terrific example of using a high-traffic blog to sell advertising, participate in Google AdSense, and promote one’s own products. This site also works hard to collect email addresses of visitors – essential for following up with offers to your site’s visitors.
Great For Commissioned Sales People
I beleieve that one of the easiest, and most effective ways for any commissioned sales person to gain traction and set himself apart from his peers is to start an interesting educational blog – like one of these I’ve just listed.
Once your blog is up and running, you’ll want to let your customers know about it.
If it’s good, strangers will stumble into it through word of mouth, or with their searches on search engines. Most important, a commissioned sales person who has a blog on the topic of what he is selling begins to position himself in people’s minds as a expert, not as just a salesman.
People trust experts. People want experts to solve their problems.
A big key to success in blogging is to update it all the time – everyday, even twice a day. Word of the most interesting blogs travels quickly through the blogosphere. Word-of-mouth on the Internet is sometimes called “word-of-mouse.”
The way blogs make money is really the same way all other websites make money:
1) A blog can make make money by selling advertising.
That’s how a blog called Endgaget makes money.
Endgaget is the world’s most popular blog. It covers technolgoy. If you go to Endgaget.com you will see lots of ads for tech products. And you will see articles with titles like:
"How To Make a Solid State AV Switcher" or "E-Paper DrawBot Uses Old School Analogue Recorder" or "802.11n creeps closer to finality as Draft 2.0 reaches milestone"
I have no idea what these articles are about. I’m not a techie.
But these articles are apparently fascinating, stop-the presses-type news to the techies who read this blog . . . because this is the world’s most read blog.
And the techies clearly see Endgaget.com as one of the most valuable sources of information out there on technology.
The blogging world is covered by a wbsite called Technocrati.
It’s a kind of search engine for the blogosphere. The main way Technocrati tracks the popularity of blogs is to count the links from other sites leading to the blog.
Technorati counts 428,199 links coming into Endgaget from other blogs. So that’s pretty huge.
That’s why Endgaget is the world’s #1 blog at the moment. Counting incoming links from other sites is also an important way that Google measures a site’s popularity.
If you want to have a high-ranking on Google and the search engines and if you want to have a lot of free traffic coming into your site, the very best way is to have as many links as you can coming to your site from other sites.
To be a high-traffic site, you need content that is updated all the time. And you need lots of incoming links.
Search engines love blogs. Search engines reward the good blogs with high rankings for the subjects they cover.
What’s also noteworthy about Endgadget.com is that as recently as 2005 it was not ranked even among the top 100,000 blogs on the Internet.
This rapid rise to #1 blog status just shows you how quickly a blog can grow if it gains a following, once it gains traction.
The top blogs on the Internet are tech blogs followed by politics as the #2 category. The Huffington Post is the #1 political blog followed by Michelle Malkin’s blog at MichelleMalkin.com
The next most popular topics after tech and politics are pop culture and games followed by design and business.
The most popular marketing blog is Seth Godin’s, which you will find at http://sethgodin.typepad.com.
I’m a big fan of Seth Godin. You should be reading his blog and his books if you are not already. Seth Godin’s blog contains lots of useful information and tips on marketing (mostly Internet marketing), plus he’s a lot of fun to read.
Okay Ben, you say, “but how can I apply what you are telling me to my business?”
Well, let’s say you are a local realtor located in Peroria, Illinois.
You could have a website that looks like the site most realtors have – which I call “business card” websites. These are websites that are little more than a business card.
If you work for ReMax or one of the big national firms, they give you a website that isn’t much more than a business card.
Really all you get is a slot on their website.
It has your photo, your contact information and that’s about it.
Or if you are more ambitious, you might have a web designer design a nice looking brochure style website for you.
That’s better than the business card site. But the problem with it is that a brochure-style site is usually static. It just sits there. It does not look like a news site or a blog.
It looks like a brochure. And, like most brochures, it just sits there gathering dust.
Plus, it’s relatively expensive to pay a website designer to put up your brochure style site. You might pay $3,000 or more for a site like that. And then you’ll have to work through your web designer to update your blog.
The alternative is to pay almost nothing to have a blog – a blog that you can update at a moment’s notice. You can throw your articles up on your blog at 2:00 a.m. if you’re having trouble sleeping instead of waiting days or weeks for your webmaster to get to it.
You can have a blog on WordPress or TypePad or Blogger for free. And you can have your blog up in 15 minutes. Then you can make your blog the #1 blog on the real estate market and property value trends in Peroria.
You could have categories on your blog that focus on each neighborhood in Peroria.
Because you would be posting a new article on your blog everyday, your blog would probably be the #1 site on organic listings in Google for anyone looking to buy or sell property in Peoria.
Why?
Well, because search engines favor blogs over the static brochure style websites.
Why?
Well, because blogs are updated with new information all the time. And that’s what search engines like. It’s also what readers want.
People want to read news. They don’t want to read a brochure. They don’t want to read ads.
If you are interested in getting a high-ranking on a search engine for your site, the easiest, quickest and surest way for that to happen is to have an interesting blog that focuses on a particular topic, and that is updated all the time.
Content really is king on the Internet. Great content trumps all ads on the Internet. People don’t want to read ads. They want to read articles – articles that directly address their interest.
So if I were to pick just one kind of website to have, it would not be the usual general business website that just sits there doing nothing. It would be to have a blog – which is free.
Blogging is also a great way to potentially make a nice living doing what you love doing. It can be a business unto itself.
Let’s say you have a full time job that you need to keep because you have bills to pay. But you could start a blog that focuses on your hobby or your sport. You could work on your blog at night and on weekends.
And if you become part of the Google AdSense network, allowing Google to run AdWords ads to run on your site, you will start to make money.
The more traffic that comes in through your site, the more money you will make from Google AdSense, as a result of people clicking on the ads. You get paid everytime someone clicks.
I don’t do that much with Google AdSense myself. I have not had time, or I would put more effort into it.
But I have several friends who are bringing in $5,000 and $7,000 per month from Google AdSense. So that’s pretty good – especially if your blog is on something you love doing anyway.
And if your blog is really successful and you start bringing in a lot of traffic, you might get into a position in the not too distant future when you can quit your full time job and become a full time blogger on your hobby.
Maybe you are a wine connoisseur. I just plugged the words wine and blog into my search engine, and did not find much in the way of wine blogs.
There are a few wine blogs out there, but not many. And I did not see any that were much good. The #1 wine blog is something called Dr. Vino’s Wine Blog.
Wine, of course, is a multi-billion dollar industry. There are hundreds of millions of wine fanatics out there.
I would have thought I would see a whole lot more on wine in the blogosphere than I found. Looks to me like there is plenty of room here for a great wine blog that could generate near limitless advertising revenue from the wine industry for an enterprising blogger.
The way to make money in blogging is to write about one topic. To be a specialist in one area.
What then happens over time is that you build up a big archive on that topic.
The search engines love a big archive all on one topic. Archives on a topic are valuable to search engines because they are valuable to searchers.
When people surf the internet, they are primarily looking for information on one topic. Your topic should be one that you love . . . because you need to write about it everyday if you are to have a successful blog.
And you’ll want to pick a topic that is of intense interest to a lot of other people.
So if your favorite topic is something like collecting dirty undershirts, that probably won’t be a very successful business blog because there are probably not a lot of people out there who share your enthusiasm for collecting dirty undershirts.
But if your passion is, say, Fantasy Football – you will certainly build a hard-core committed audience for a blog on that topic. Lots of fanatics out there playing Fantasy Football.
Or maybe your passion is travel. There’s plenty of room in the blogosphere for a great travel blog – one that would give all the straight dope on the best travel bargains. On a blog like that, you’d want to have articles with titles like:
“The Best Travel Bargains Right Now” “The 10 Best Kept Exotic Vacation Secrets” “Why Now is the Time To Go on a Safari If You Ever Want To Go” “How To Retire In Costa Rica on $20,000 a Year” “The World’s Cheapest Beach Front Property That Looks Like This” “The 7 best Islands in the South Pacific” “The 10 best Restaurants in New York for the Money” “The Friendliest Hotels in Spain” “How To Travel By Boat Down The Amazon”
These are the kinds of articles readers of your travel blog would want to see. The key here is for your blog to really be good – to be useful for those who love to travel.
Or let’s say you are a handyman. I could envision a great blog for the do-it-yourself guy.
You would find articles on there on how to install a ceiling fan, how to put up dry wall, how to roof your own home, how to install a light switch. Articles like that.
Plus, a great blog like that would quickly establish you as the #1 home repair and fix-it guy in your region.
In fact, if you had a popular blog on this subject, you would probably pretty quickly be out of the handyman business and evolve into a full-time blogger, offering ad space on your site to the home-repair industry.
Home Depot would probably be anxious to buy you out and brand your blog as Home Depot’s blog. You would then be paid tens of millions of dollars probably by Home Depot for your blog that’s so popular with the handyman, home-repair market.
Speaking of corporate blogs, one of the most popular blogs out there is called Scobleizer. This is another tech blog – this one by a guy named Robert Scoble who works in middle management at Microsoft.
Actually, this is not a corporate blog even though this blog has done marketing wonders for Microsoft. Scoble just started the blog on his own.
It was not planned by Microsoft and is not a Microsoft product.
Scoble is a self-described tech-geek. And that’s what his blog is about – tech stuff
The reason I mention this blog (aside from the fact that it’s interesting) is that this blog did a great service to Microsoft by helping to humanize Microsoft and improve Microsoft’s image in the tech crowd . . . because the techies love Scoble.
Scoble’s blog includes a podcast where he interviews techies. His podcast is called “The Robert Scoble Show.” And it’s part of his blog.
It looks like he holds his video podcast at his apartment.
It’s very informal and down to earth. Not at all high-production or pretentious. And that’s part of it’s charm. It’s just a couple of tech geeks sitting there talking about tech stuff. You should check it out at Scobleizer.com
Scoble did not start his blog as a business. He just started it because he wanted to blog.
The #1 rule for success in blogging is just to start blogging. You learn by doing. Don’t worry about perfection.
You’ll find out what works and what doesn’t work by doing it and getting feedback from people. Soon you will begin to find your voice.
Maybe you yourself are not cut out for blogging. But maybe someone at your company was born to blog – like Robert Scoble at Microsoft.
He probably did ruffle some feathers in management with some of his candid admissions about Microsoft, like when he says “Yeah, we really stink at that.”
But have you noticed that Microsoft’s image has improved significantly in the last couple of years?
Microsoft does not seem to be attacked nearly as much in the tech publications as it once was. We don’t see as many viruses created by the tech crowd aimed at destroying Microsoft.
I think it’s because Microsoft does not appear to be seen as the big mean, nasty company it once was. I think Robert Scoble’s great blog is a big reason for that.
By the way – on a side note, but in this same vein -- I think Apple’s ads against Microsoft are backfiring. You know, those ads with the supposedly young hip know-it-all apple guy who always gets the best of the nerdy Microsoft guy.
People don’t like know-it-alls. I think a lot of viewers are feeling a bit sorry for that nerdy, geeky Microsoft guy in those Apple ads.
The nerdy Microsoft guy in the ad gets the laughs. The supposedly hip Apply guy in the ad just looks like an arrogant smart-alec to me.
It think Apple is doing Microsoft a big favor with its ads, helping to humanize Microsoft – just like Scoble’s blog and podcast for geeks.
But for your blog to be good, you will really need to invest time in it. You will need to be committed to it.
You will need to add to it everyday, or you will lose your audience.
Remember this key rule in marketing. You want to become part of people’s regular routine. If possible, you want to become part of people daily routine.
One of the events I look forward most to everyday is getting my morning newspapers. I’m a newspaper junkie. So starting my day with my morning newspaper is just part of who I am.
You want your blog to be like that. You want people to look forward to reading your blog – everyday. And what’s awesome about blogging is that it’s free, or almost free.
Unlike a daily newspaper, you don’t have to print it and pay people to drive around or ride their bicycles through neighborhoods to distribute it.
It’s free for you to produce and distribute, because you publish it and distribute it on the Internet. You just need to invest time and brain power into your blog.
More and more, people are getting used to reading their favorite publications on the internet. I remember when the term “Information Superhighway” first started being used. I really did not have any idea what that term meant ten years ago or even five years ago.
Well this is it. The Internet. The Internet is where people go now to be informed and entertained.
If you are not part of this information super-highway, if your business is not taking advantage of this information super highway called the Internet, you are seriously short-changing yourself.
Blogs work best if they are not only informational, but if they are a fun place to hang out. People want to be both informed and entertained.
YouTube is really structured a lot like a blog. It’s a place where people post their videos and express themselves that way.
They put up interesting videos that people would want to see. YouTube is not a good looking site. But it is a content-rich site.
Frankly, no one cares what your site looks like. What people want when they go on the internet is great content. They want to be informed and entertained. They want to be able to find what they are looking for.
That’s why blogs are so popular. If you can become the “go-to blog” for your topic or industry, you can be an enormously successful blogger.
What makes a blog attractive to an Internet surfer is that it does not look like an ad. It looks like information . . . because that’s what it is.
We know that people are 5-to-10 times more likely to read an article than to read something that is obviously an ad.
That’s why your print advertising will do 5-to-10 times better if your ad looks like an article than if it looks like an ad.
The Internet is no different. A great blog is popular because people like to read articles. People don’t like to read ads, brochures or promotional copy.
The best way to sell is to inform. People hate ads. Studies show that people’s eyes reflexively turn away when they see an ad.
But people love a good blog. They gravitate to the good blogs.
Blogs are articles and podcasts created by a real person. The best blogs reflect the personality of the blogger.
They usually are not the creations of an ad agency – though that’s now changing because the ad agencies see the enormous profit potential in blogging.
Don’t worry about the fact that there are a lot of blogs out there. If your blog is good, your audience will find you. It’s not so much “If you build it, they will come” – as that voice said in Field of Dreams.
It’s “If it’s good, they will come.” That is, if your blog is good. So here are some keys to profitable blogging:
1) Focus your blog on a specific topic.
2) Make sure you love writing about the subject of your blog because you will need to spend about two hours a day on your blog to make it good.
3) You don’t need to be a good writer to be a great blogger. In fact, forget having perfect grammar. Just be the real you. Let your personality show. And have great information for your visitors.
4) Encourage people to post comments on your blog.
Blogging software allows you to approve all comments before they are posted. But when you gain a following for your blog, you’ll start getting some great content from the posts people put up.
One of the keys to success on the Internet is to create sites where much of the content creates itself.
YouTube is like that. People post videos. An enormous video archive is created. That then is the entire content for the site – the videos people put up.
A great blog can attract an informed following that can contribute much of the content of your blog, with you acting as editor. You screen out the junk. And you post the good material.
People love to read the letters-to-the-editor section of the newspaper. Many love chat rooms.
People are looking for outlets to express their views. That’s why call-in radio shows are popular. Not only do people like to call in. The audience likes to listen to the callers.
People like to listen to and read the comments of average people, not just from the professionals.
The same with your blog. You should encourage a culture of participation with your blog – where people comment on articles, post articles, ask questions and get answers to questions from those who are reading your blog.
That’s a big part of how blogs become popular.
It’s not just the blogger writing at his audience. The audience actually contributes significantly to the content of the blog.
If you have not thought much about blogging before, think about it now. Or better yet, don’t just think about it. Start actually blogging!
Not only is blogging fun. It can be a huge money-maker for you and your business.
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