My Career Time Line

October 2007

Bloggy Network sold some blogs to Splashpress Media and I went with those blogs, as I was posting on around half of them. I was really sad to leave as it was basically a company I helped build up from nothing. I always enjoyed working with Jacob, and the others.

I became the new Head of Marketing, and spent time working on many sites. I also helped work with the advertising sales representative in navigating some of the strange rules of buying and selling advertisements on the web.

The company has acquired many blogs since then, and has evolved nicely. It is still creating many blogging stars, and its main properties are doing quite well.

May 2008

After finding myself feeling rather limited in my job, I decided to move on to an opportunity I found on the Problogger Job Board. I became the Community Manager for PicApp. At the time, this felt more like a public relations job, and I was looking for a community job.

The opportunity was a great one, but at the time, the company, and myself realized that a Community Manager wasn’t really what they needed and I decided to move on from the project.

I still consult with them from time to time and applaud them for all of the amazing moves they have made in making the product more blogger friendly. And with the advances that they have made, I sometimes wish I could go back…

September 2008

There was nothing on CollegeCrunch.org, a domain that Ryan Caldwell had bought to build out. I came in as project manager to provide content, organize content, promote the site, and just be a general nuisance to him (joking of course).

This is the project I am currently working full time on. There are over 600 pages created, with over a third having content in them, with the rest being created just to help me keep organized as I flesh out the site. It is one of those projects that the more work you do on it, the more you realize there is to do.

Originally posted on October 22, 2008 @ 11:20 am

Blog World Expo Business Cards

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Over the course of Blog World Expo, I was fortunate enough to meet many new people, and one of the interesting aspects of heading to a conference like Blog World is the number of business cards you pick up.

I wanted to give a quick shout out to the people that gave me their card, and the companies they represent.

Thomas M. Vail – Cart-Away Concrete Systems
Over in the corner of the exhibits there was a concrete mixer, and two guys with very bold green shirts. They were there promoting their business outside of its normal niche, and in doing so, became one of the highlights of the event for me. It made me wonder if other businesses will begin to catch on that Blog World Expo could be an amazing opportunity for businesses that don’t normally interact with bloggers to find a whole new group of potential customers and if nothing else, be noticed by a crowd that is well connected online. Check out their Typepad blog.

While they weren’t giving away any concrete services, not that they service Canada anyways, it was still really great to see them there, and their approach was amazing. I really hope that they do well as a business just because of their outreach to us bloggers.

Zac Johnson – ZacJohnson.com
Out of all of the affiliate marketing experts that were at the event, Zac Johnson was really the only one that talked to me at any reasonable length, despite not really knowing me before the conference. He was an approachable guy, with a very calm attitude. I don’t think he realized how much of a celebrity he has become for a very wide group of people online, as some of the things he has done with integrating advertising and products has been far ahead of the curve. It was a real pleasure to have met him.

Thomas J. Hoehn – Kodak
One of the coolest things that I learned while at Blog World Expo was information on how big name brands and companies are integrating social media, blogging and online story telling into the corporate culture, and while Kodak might have been considered slow in really fighting for the digital camera scene, they are jumping in with both feet with regards to the web. Thomas was great to talk to and really seems to understand blogging as a form of story telling over top of just a marketing tool. I was really impressed with his insights and hope to hear more of Kodak and their online efforts over the coming months.

Sarah East – The Pop Crunch Show
I am a married man, but I still have a horrible crush on Sarah East, the host of the Pop Crunch Show. I hate celebrity news, but I watch it anyways and so when I found out she was at Blog World Expo, I wanted to meet her. We both work for the same person, but I have to admit, I had a little bit of celebrity worship going on when I met her. She was very down to earth, funny, and charming. In the short conversation I got to have with her, she really seemed to know her stuff outside of just the online video realm, and understood the business of producing content.

Angela Lauria – Commission Videos
If there is one person that I recommend every blogger, blog network, and online thought leader seek out, it would be Angela. I had met her before in Vancouver at Northern Voice, and I was impressed with her then, but she has continued to step up her game and Commission Videos looks great! I really enjoyed talking with her and if you are putting video on your site and not monetizing it, then you are getting it from the wrong source, and I recommend checking out Commission Videos. Angela understands advertising, business management and their interconnections with the web, and is building products where her limiting factor is not the advertising side, but finding enough publishers, and in my opinion, that is a great problem for and advertising service to have.

Eric Golub – The Tygrrrr Express
Aaron Phillips – FastServers.net
Mario Phillips – gooseGrade
Greg Kuiper – layeredtech
Debby Phillips – Market Leverage
Kate Heffernan – outbrain
Jack LeVine – Uncle Jack’s VeryVintageVegas.com
Rion Morgenstern – mindtouch
Connie Bensen – Connie Bensen
Becky Jutzi – SodaHead
S. Neil Vineberg – Vineberg Communications
Michael Rubin – gaspedal
Angie A. Swartz – Six Figure Moms Club
Scott S. Lawton – Blogcosm
Dana Rockel – Content Robot
Ezra Butler – Ezra Butler
Andraz Tori and Jure Cuhalev – Zemanta

Originally posted on September 29, 2008 @ 11:57 am

BrandingDavid Update

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I have been working on BrandingDavid.com for a little while now trying to flesh out the consulting side of my business, but one thing I am learning is that in this economy, no one has $120 per hour to spend on learning blogging, online marketing, SEO and whatnot, and so I have been working on alternative plans.

Another thing someone pointed out to me is “why pay for your services when I have your blogging efforts as a great resource?”

This question took me back a little as I have given as much of my knowledge as I can over the last year of running this site especially, and if you are willing to dig around there are some amazing insights, at least I think so, but it might not be presented in a way that you can easily apply, and that is where I see myself getting most of my business, from breaking down the concepts that seem so simple to me, but don’t quite make sense in other people’s minds.

As for traffic, the site is only getting around two to five percent of what this blog is getting, and that is mostly due to my lack of promotion. I am not pushing that site as hard as I did this site, and because of that, I am seeing a much slower growth curve, but that doesn’t really concern me at this point.

The content distinction lines between this site and that site are very fine, and in creating it, I realized how much I enjoy talking about what I do as a career, the industry I am in, and the software I enjoy using.

If you haven’t launched a blog lately, give it a try, and see if it stretches you too thin, or if you enjoy writing on it. Passion for one topic can sometimes spill over into another, and BrandingDavid has reminded me how much I enjoy posting here as well.

Originally posted on November 3, 2008 @ 11:51 am

WordCamp Toronto: Blogging Like a Pro

Full Time at b5media: How Much Traffic is Needed?

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So, TechCrunch broke the news on the new pay structure for b5media, and normally this wouldn’t be big news, but it gives us a clear picture of what the company will be like to blog for going forward.

For me it comes down to simple metrics. As a blogger, what is my potential “take home” pay when all is said and done?

Taking a quick look at the CPM offerings that b5media is looking to offer, how many page views would you need to generate to be able to make two thousand dollars a month?

You would need 500,000 page views per month to have b5media cut you a cheque for $2000.

While that doesn’t take into account bonuses or any other additions to pay that they come up with, I still think that is a very high level of traffic that very few blogs in their network will be able to get to.

The hardest part of growing a successful blog, and building it into your full time business is getting to the transition point. And the reason that it can be so hard is because your time is split, and blogging usually ends up at the end of the line. You work for a company, you take care of yourself and your family and then you blog for companies like b5media.

Even if you are skipping television, radio, reading and other distracting past-times, you are probably only able to put in around two or three hours of effort each night and, if you want to burn yourself out, weekends too.

I am not sure how extensive their “bonus” program is really going to be, as you have to remember that paying out bonuses, surely, hurts their bottom line when it comes to impressing investors, but even if their best bloggers could earn $500 in bonuses each and every month, that still makes blogging for b5media full time a difficult challenge.

As for the $4 CPM that the blogs will make. I agree that it seems like a great rate, until you consider that you could easily make around $1.5 – $2 CPM per ad on your blog, and if you were willing to have four or five advertisements at that rate, you could be bringing in around $6 – $8 CPM. Which, based on page view adjustments that b5media says statistic programs like AWStats inflate numbers by, is pretty much what this blog currently earns.

Of course b5media has to pay for servers, take time to find advertisers, pay for programmers, and a support staff, but as a struggling blogger, hoping to make writing online their full time occupation, that $2 – $4 CPM that the blog authors are loosing out on once their blog gets successful, is hard to live without.

I will give them credit though that their lower end tiers are more than fair, and that bloggers just starting out will most likely make more money being part of b5media than they will earn on their own. But, I worry about those successful few that make it to that top tier, after taking what might be as long as two or three years, only to realize, they are still hundreds of thousands of page views short of transitioning to full time blogging.

This new pay structure also doesn’t talk about bloggers working on multiple sites, but if I were a b5media blogger, and saw this new structure, I would probably want to focus on getting a single blog to higher tiers as quickly as possible, rather than trying to fuss around with two blogs stuck at the lower tiers of the pay structure.

Has b5media come up with the best pay system possible? From a balance sheet perspective, maybe so, but it will definitely put a crimp on many people’s dreams to become full time bloggers in their network.

Originally posted on October 3, 2008 @ 8:47 am

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