Category Archives: Blog Network Tips

5 Tips to Being a Better Blog Manager

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With so many blog networks out in the world, there need to be people to manage the blogs, and the bloggers, but how do you do it right? I have compiled a list of five tips to help you on becoming a better blog manager.  

1. Spend time developing your staff’s skills

As things continue to change, so will your blogs, and thus your business. Making sure your staff continues to use and develop their skills will allow you to keep a step ahead of your competition. This doesn’t mean you need to send them on courses, but giving time for independent study to learn something new, be it advertising, search engine optimization, or copyrighting, could greatly help your business in the long run.

2. Get to know what your staff actually does

One of the hardest things to do as a manager is pin down what your staff are actually doing. You have to remember though that what they produce or don’t produce greatly effects your bottom line. Making sure you keep tabs on their progress will create a better work environment and help your employees have proper expectations for what you would like done.

3. Get to know what your employees are really passionate about

Great blogs require passion, but many bloggers are just looking for a pay check and as such, they won’t be able to keep up a high level of energy about a subject. Positioning your assets correctly will lead to better growth in your company, or new avenues for growth you hadn’t originally considered. At Bloggy Network, we have created certain blogs because there was a niche that a writer really wanted to cover.

4. Provide regular feedback

Bloggers that work from home can feel very disconnected from the world, and thus their task. By providing regular feedback, you are helping them remain focused and setting certain expectations once again. This will increase their productivity or let them know where they have gone wrong, so they can do better next time. There aren’t really any true experts in the problogging world, as the career choice has not even been around long enough for anyone to claim that title. Problogging is a constantly evolving profession and so for every blogger, there is something new to be learned every day.

5. Give incentives

I know this seems a little strange, but even most real companies have incentives in place, and there is a reason. People need goals. We want to aim for something, and it makes us feel great to achieve it. By providing incentives, you open up a system where your employees feel rewarded for working harder, and if they attain such goals, it helps your companies bottom line. It is usually a win-win situation.

Understanding what it takes to be a manager can be of great importance to a new or established blog network, as it is a difficult job, and done incorrectly, blogs can fail. Of course, just like blogging, managing blogs, bloggers or a blog network is a learning experience, but these tips should help you down the right path.

Originally posted on August 30, 2010 @ 1:39 pm

Building a Blog Network is Expensive

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Right now I am participating in two different blog networks, Grand Effect, where I am a code-monkey and co-founder and Digital Life News, where I am the owner. One is somewhat expensive on time, and the other is expensive on time and money, but the real question remains: which one is worth more to me?

With Grand Effect, I am part of a group of very exciting, very prominent blogs that talk about technology and the web. The hard part, building the sites, is basically done. The new issue for Grand Effect is to help these blogs promote themselves, and help find ways to monetize them more effectively. I am also trying to make sure I give each member some of my time, so that they can get help with anything technical, and I would love to help them all with hosting needs in the near future.

With Digital Life News, I am building blogs from scratch and paying through the nose for writers. Because I was once a blogger myself, I feel bad if I am paying my writers too little, but I also realize that this is a bad business practice, as the sites aren’t making enough to be sustainable, and the sustainable level of income versus payments is still a very long ways away. With this type of system, I am spreading myself too thin. I am working on setting up a managing editor for the network who deals with promotion, basic WordPress administration and helps manage the writers, and content produced, but this means more money, and that is something I don’t really have a lot of at this point.

With Grand Effect, I could quickly and easily make a part time income by spending four hours a day marketing the member blogs, working on advertising, and developing new features for the network site, but in order to do this, I will have to slow down on other projects.

With Digital Life News, I own a blog network, but the amount of time and money I have to put into it before it repays me is huge, and the repayment date is measured in years rather than months.

Blog networks are expensive to build, whether you are devoting just time or time and money towards building them. Never underestimate this fact, or you are doomed to frustration, if not failure.

Originally posted on June 9, 2008 @ 6:08 pm

Paying Bloggers

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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