Category Archives: Blog Network Tips

Paying Bloggers

7 Replies

One of the worst things about the end of the money for me right now is what happens to my bank account as I go around and pay all of the bloggers and other freelancers that I work with. I continue to spend inordinate amounts of money on slowly growing my business online, and the one thing I have learned is that Paypal, while great in some respects is such a huge rip-off sometimes. Not only does it use horrible currency conversion rates, but they also fee my freelancers to death.

I wish there were other popular services that I could use. Luckily, some of the people I work with live in the same country as I do, and as such, I can e-mail money to them through an e-mail money transfer system that all of the banks in Canada participate in.

Why not just use advertising revenue, and have companies pay the freelancers directly? Well, the sites I run outside of this one, don’t make enough to do that. Hopefully, at some point that will change, but for now, it is definitely helping me realize how much work I have to do on the ad sales side to make this business of mine break even.

Are there better services than Paypal? Are there better ways to pay bloggers? Let me know in the comments below.

Originally posted on April 30, 2008 @ 9:36 pm

How Much Time and Money Do You Invest Before Giving Up?

6 Replies

One of the things I am dealing with currently is building some new blogs, and while I sometimes wonder if there aren’t already too many blogs on the Internet, I still feel like I could make more of a business from blogging than I already do.

The biggest concern currently is money. It costs money to register a domain, pay for hosting, designing a WordPress theme, and developing a brand and logo. It also costs money to get a great writer to spend their time in producing content for the site.

The other thing it costs is time. I have been spending so much time developing the site, working on WordPress, integrating plugins, finding the right themes to use as a basis until I can hire someone to do a better job that by the end of the day, I feel completely exhausted.

I have given up on blogs in the past, either because my financial situation has changed, I have run out of time, or I haven’t seen the results I was expecting, and while I don’t think there should be a hard line that helps people decide if their blogging efforts should continue, I do think that there are a few indicators that it might be time to give up on a blog that you are trying to build into a business.

If by the third month, you aren’t getting more than five hundred unique visitors a month, it is probably time to move on.

If by six months, you haven’t earned back ten percent of what you have put into the site, it might be time to call it quits before you invest too much more into the site.

This means that if you haven’t found a way to monetize it that it earns ten percent on the money you are putting into it, you are probably not going to be able to get the blog to the point where it pays for itself.

If you are paying $500 a month on writers and other blog related expenses, and the blog isn’t earning $50 each month by its sixth month. Then this should be a huge concern for you.

If by the sixth month the blog is providing you with more stress than reward, then take a break from it, and shut it down. It isn’t worth pouring your heart into a project that isn’t rewarding you how you hoped. The reward could be RSS subscribers, advertisers, traffic growth or just a good feeling that you get when someone “gets” your idea.

My Current Situation

Currently, I am running three blogs, not including this one, that are using up upwards of $800 a month of my financial resources. These blogs have until October to get to the point where they are paying for upwards of thirty percent of my monthly expenditures or I will have to shut them down or sell them off.

This is the goal I have set for myself partially because of the upcoming addition of a new family member in November, and also because at that point, all of the blogs will be past their six month mark.

I truly believe that a blogs potential or lack there of can be seen long before the six month mark, but giving it half a year to mature will really tell me if it is something worth pursuing.

Originally posted on April 10, 2008 @ 8:43 am

Blog Network Blogger Lifestyle

9 Replies

When people ask me how they should get into blogging as a part time or full time job, I think carefully before I answer as I have seen great success as a network backed blogger, while only receiving what I consider moderate success on my own outside of the network.

Being a blogger backed by a network can be a great experience, but sometimes it can also be very frustrating.

My days are filled with posting quotas that I didn’t set myself, with posting requirements on sites that I don’t particularly enjoy, writing content that I don’t control, and hoping that it does well enough that the company keeps me on.

All the while dealing with the fact that I don’t control how the site functions or the advertising that goes next to the words I write. I consider it to be very similar to working as a reporter for a newspaper.

Blogging for myself, I get to chose how often I post, and where I post. I get to chose how the sites function, and how they are monetized and promoted.

It is a very different feeling, but you can also see the advantages of blogging for a network. I never have to worry about servers, advertising, monetization, WordPress upgrades, design, branding, or promotion. My key focus is content, and everything else is someone else’s problem. It allows me to create more, and worry less, all the while knowing I will get paid for the effort I put in.

I don’t know many bloggers working for themselves that after a month can expect the type of pay checks that network backed bloggers will receive.

As the web gets more competitive, and more blogs are added, I feel like I can recommend blogging as a business on your own, less and less. While there are many sacrifices being made as a blog network backed blogger, I don’t know if I would be where I am today if it wasn’t for Darren Rowse, Paul Scrivens, Jacob Gower, and Mark Saunders.

If you want more details on what it is like to be a network backed blogger, I suggest you check out Jennifer Chait’s and Deborah Ng’s Network Blogging Tips.

Originally posted on April 9, 2008 @ 5:24 pm

Business Enemies?

5 Replies

I think of myself as a pretty good guy and most people seem to tolerate me fairly well, but sometimes, no matter what I do, I seem to ruffle other people’s feathers. While, I don’t think this is one of those cases, I do find it interesting that Paul Scrivens, a man that I highly respect and dare I say, envy online, has listed Grand Effect, the network that I co-founded as one of his business related enemies.

Expert Idiot

I always secretly hope that a competitor to 9rules would stand up. With the new 9rules coming shortly there will be more defined targets for us to keep an eye on. Chawlk goes head-to-head with plenty of other sites and if we don’t do better than the competition we die. Grand Effect is very similar to 9rules and I like to monitor what is going on over there to see what we can steal or do better. That is why you want enemies and although I have no problem with David Peralty or Sarah Perez I am going to put their network on my enemy list. “Enemy” may be too strong of the word, but I hope you can understand where I am going with this.

I haven’t yet figured out if I should be excited, or worried, as Scrivs has always done well when he gets competitive. And the support team he has in 9rules with Mike Rundle (a talent set that Grand Effect could sorely use), and Tyme White (we could use a person like her as well) make Grand Effect look rather small. The flip side though is that Sarah, myself and the rest of the Grand Effect members are getting very excited over the attention we have been receiving from all the wonderful blogs that are taking interest in what we are trying to build.

Much like I thought 9rules original intentions were, we have decided to keep things small, leveraging the power of the group and helping members with things they don’t have time to become experts on, namely advertising and promotion.

I never saw Grand Effect as competition to any other network out there, as none of our membership belongs to a network and they are all self-established brands, but if Scrivs needs to have a business enemy to remain competitive, then I look forward to helping increase that competitive spirit to really see how far he can go, while still attending to the needs of the people around me.

Do we really need business enemies to remain competitive?

Originally posted on April 8, 2008 @ 12:35 am

Getting into Niches You Don’t Understand

1 Reply

Right now I am working on developing a blog in the Fashion niche called The “IT” Fashion. This isn’t something I am particularly familiar with, but one of my writers was interested in fashion, and so I want to help her focus on that passion and turn it into a blog. I am paying her a fair bit of money, and I don’t yet understand how I will promote it, monetize it or really make it great.

The issue is that I’ve never taken on too many blogs that were totally outside the gadget, geek mindset that I have. I am not fashionable, nor have I ever tried to be. I don’t even know colours, beyond the ones you learn as a child in school, but here I am trying to run a blog focusing on fashion.

For the most part, many of the things I have done before I will be repeating, except that I will be looking for things related to the topic at hand. Something like Digg probably wouldn’t work for promoting such stories, but maybe Sk*rt would be.

I won’t be signing up for geeky advertisements, instead looking at places where celebrity and fashion are more important as those are the new groups of people I am going to be trying to appeal to, and draw into the site.

Thankfully, I am not working on the content, as I know it would be dreadful, so I owe a lot to the wonderful writer I have working on the site. Thanks Michelle!

If you have any tips on promoting blogs outside your normal comfort zome, please let me know as transitioning from something I live each day, to building something that is like voodoo to me might just be one of the more difficult things I have done recently. Check out The IT Fashion if you want to watch my progress and are interested in the fashion world.

Originally posted on April 9, 2008 @ 7:59 am