Blogging for Money: Learning to Sell

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Steve Pavlina is one of those guys I would love to sit down with and just pick through his brain. His blog is very inspiring and always interesting. His articles are long, but well thought out. His advice is helpful, but never condescending. Suffice to say, I really enjoy his stuff. When perusing through his archives, trying to catch myself up, I noticed a post entitled “Blogging for Money“.

One of the sections, also one of the longest parts, is where he brings up that bloggers need to learn to sell.

Eventually I figured out that if I wanted to run a business, I needed to learn how to generate income. This meant I had to focus on income-generating activities, and game development wasn’t one of them. I made the decision to become active in the Association of Shareware Professionals, a trade association for independent software developers like me. That was an incredibly eye-opening experience for me. I met people (online) who were making $50K, $100K, $250K a year selling their own software. In many cases when I saw their products, I felt I had much better technical skills, but they had customers, and I didn’t. I made some good friends and picked their brains as much as possible, and they were happy to share what they knew. What I learned really surprised me. Most of the people who were doing well financially spent less than half their work time developing software, often much less. But they invariably spent a lot of time working on marketing and promoting their businesses. By comparison I’d been spending about 80-90% of my work time on product development.

I don’t think there could be better advice for pretty much anyone in any business, but bloggers specifically, including myself, generally seem to have a problem with this. I know many successful bloggers that will back Steve up in his statement.

My eyes have slowly been opened to this reality, and I hope if you are reading this, you won’t have to take the long, hard road to slowly realizing that selling is important and make it your top priority. Content is king, but if you never earn a return on your work, will you continue to create such content? If you are in it to make money, I highly doubt that you will.

Originally posted on March 3, 2008 @ 3:06 pm

CPM Rates Drop: Publishers Panic?

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With what appears to be a coming recession, no matter how small or short it might be, the first thing to be cut by companies is usually the advertising budgets. You can’t get rid of the guy making the “blue widget”, but you can cut advertising costs, especially those where you aren’t guaranteed any real return on investment.

CPM advertising is cost per mille. Mille is french for thousand, so CPM advertising is cost per thousand impressions.

Advertisers buy CPM advertisements because it can help increase their brand awareness, spread their messages, and hopefully increase their sales. This type of advertisement doesn’t guarantee any sales though. It doesn’t even guarantee any clicks to the advertisers website. All it provides is impressions.

The types of advertising that companies will want to switch to during any sort of belt tightening is both CPC and CPA. These stand for cost per click and cost per action. With cost per click, the advertiser only pays when someone clicks through to their site, and with cost per action, the advertiser only pays when the visitor has clicked through and completed the action that the advertiser wants. It could be as simple as filling out a survey, or as complex as purchasing a certain product.

These types of advertising reduce the apparent risk that advertisers have when spending money online, and will increasingly be the advertisement of choice.

As a publisher, you have to decide what will be of the best benefit to you and your readers. Do you accept the dropping CPM rates, or take what could be more or less lucrative with CPC or CPA advertisements?

It can be difficult to make the right choice, and as with everything related to publishing online, I recommend testing a variety of different methods going forward. Just be prepared for lower rates than my might have otherwise liked.

Source: GigaOM

Originally posted on January 28, 2008 @ 4:30 pm

Promises and Living Up To Them

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As a network backed blogger, I am under constant pressure to perform well beyond the average blogger, and especially because of my more technical background, I find myself as the only person able to step up with regard to certain tasks, which doubles my to-do list. The hardest problem I have is living up to the promises I make people.

With so much on the go, it seems like my list of things to do is never ending, and add to that my inability sometimes to properly prioritize, and you have a situation where I constantly am setting myself up to underperform in the eyes of someone.

Recently, a friend of mine questioned me on why I had time for “project x” and not his “project y”? Another person asked me why I hadn’t made any progress on another project. And I always find myself feeling like I am starting my week behind with regards to how much work I want to get done versus how much work I accomplish.

What I am quickly realizing is that I have to stop adding new projects to my plate, and I have to stop promising to get this, that and the other thing done for people. Between my full time job with Splashpress (that usually ends up being more than “full time”), this blog, and my wife, I really don’t have much time to enjoy myself.

If you are looking to become a full time blogger, my new advice which I will be shouting from the rooftops is to never promise more than you can deliver. In fact, take a lesson from Scotty from Star Trek. Always under promise and over deliver. Or more simply, give yourself extra breathing room, so you look amazing when you deliver before your own cut-off deadline.

I can’t tell you what it is like to constantly feel over worked, under appreciated and scatterbrained, living minute to minute on information overload and having some wonderful physical signs (chest pains) reminding you to slow down.

Originally posted on February 6, 2008 @ 3:11 pm

Finding a Blogging Job

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If you are looking for a blogging related job, there are many resources out on the web, including the regular job boards that will sometimes list the jobs under writing or content management.

I was searching on a popular site here in Canada called Workopolis, and they actually had some jobs that were basically blogging related. Managing content on a business website with respect to reporting the continued efforts and successes of the company is basically a corporate blog.

So if you are thinking that finding a blogging related job is hard to find, you haven’t been looking hard enough, as they are everywhere.

Some of my favourite resources for looking at blogging related jobs include:

I would also recommend contacting your favourite blogs or even blog networks to see if they have any openings. Some blogs are always looking for new contributors, even if they haven’t opened their blog for more authors before. Blog networks are always looking for passionate people to add to their team, and so if you can prove your passion, you could have a job.

Don’t get disheartened from the low paying, one post a week type jobs that are out there, as for every one of those, there are the hundreds of dollars a month part time gigs that are really worthwhile.

Originally posted on March 1, 2008 @ 11:22 pm

More of Me Podcasting: The FourFourNiner Episode 2

eXtra For Every Publisher

Tips on Being a Better Blogger

Blogging for Money: Learning to Sell

CPM Rates Drop: Publishers Panic?

Promises and Living Up To Them

Finding a Blogging Job

More of Me Podcasting: The FourFourNiner Episode 2