Why Blog in the First Place?

I had my first “live,” in-person blogging class Wednesday night – and it was a whopping success. The participants were friendly, eager-to-learn and asked lots of great questions.

But one question stood out: Why blog at all? Isn’t this just an indulgent waste of time? Who really cares what you think anyway? Is this “Myspace” for grownups?

I’d like to address that briefly from my perspective as a veteran copywriter.

1. Advertising Saturation. First off, we are living in a hyper-marketing world. New technologies have created a situation in which the average person is bombarded by between 500 and 5,000 sales messages every single day.

More and more, marketers are viewed as SCUM, unwanted guests who shove their way into our personal spaces and whom we want to avoid at all costs. We create strategies for filtering out sales messages – from TiVO screening commercials to spam filters for our computers.

2. Peer to Peer. What this means is that, increasingly, we are turning to peers or friends for our buying advice. If we’re thinking about buying a computer, we ask our friends which is better, not the sales guy at the computer store.

3. Making Friends. Businesses of all types are discovering, therefore, that they have go back to basics if they want to sell anything to people. They have to actually make friends with their prospects first… and only later sell them something. They have to serve their customers by providing them with quality information that they can trust.

4. Starting Conversations. And that is why blogging is increasingly a “must have” tool for all businesses – especially mom and pop operations but also big businesses as well. Blogs are designed to create two-way conversations. They allow readers to post comments on your posts – and you can interact with your prospects and customers.

5. Getting to Know Customers. Blogs allow people in a market niche to tell businesses what they REALLY want… as opposed to what businesses THINK they want. They allow businesses to GET TO KNOW THEIR CUSTOMERS, to make friends with their customers. They allow businesses to test out ideas and concepts in a low-cost way and see what their market thinks about them.

6. Peer to Peer Marketing. Blogs are easy-to-create, inexpensive and easy to modify. That allows small businesses to use technologies – including email newsletters, videos and mass marketing – until recently reserved only to big companies.

Bottomline: So, the bottomline is this. The reason why you should be blogging if you’re in business is that blogging allows you to identify, interact with and serve prospective customers in your market niche.

You can build an online business by dedicating yourself to SERVING a particular market niche – whether that niche is professional crocket players or knitters or Mixed Martial Arts enthusiasts.

You become a preeminent CUSTOMER of your own niche. You buy all the products that people want to sell to your prospects – and then you tell your prospects what are valuable and what are crap.

Do that… be a true and loyal friend to your market… and then, when it comes time to sell your market something, they will trust you and buy from you. You’ll have built up enough street “cred” so that your market will know you know what you’re talking about.

That’s why you should start blogging. Identify a market you want to be in. Step up and become a “servant leader” in your niche. And then start selling people what they really need and want.

P.S. If you haven’t started a blog yet, you can set up a free blog in under 2 minutes by viewing my introductory video here. If you’d like to get your own domain name and start a blog for business, you can start here.

Why Blogging is the Perfect Business

There aren’t too many businesses you can run while sitting at the beach… but a successful blogging-based business is one of them! Of course, what people don’t tell you is that before you can sit on the sand and update your blog from anywhere in the world… you probably spent 60 hours a week in a windowless room getting your blog to do the things you want it to.

But the truth is, blogging is an entirely Internet-based business. That means that it is geographically independent. You can run your blogging business from anywhere in the world that has wireless Internet access. You don’t have to work in an office. You probably won’t want to actually blog from a beach, of course, because the glare from the sun… not to mention the distractions of beach life… may it difficult to read a laptop screen.

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Lesson #9: How to Create and Use Web Signup Forms on Your Blog

I jumped a little out of order on this video lesson. One of my subscribers actually asked about this and so I decided to do this video right away. She wanted to know how you do one of those sign-up forms you see that pop into view and partially obscure the web page.

They’re called “hover boxes,” and, although some people hate them, they are two to three times more effective than most other types of sign-up forms.

Like almost everything else associated with blogging, they are also super-easy to set up and use. If you can copy and paste this sentence, you can set up a web sign-up form. That’s about all the computer skills you need.

Anyway, check out this new video lesson. I bought a new mic and you can actually hear me now.

Is It Possible to Make Real Money with Adsense?

I thought I’d comment on Daniel Lyons’ recent column in Newsweek. Lyons, who said he was a fanatical blogger, complained that he never made any real money with Google Adsense — despite the fact that he got as many as 1.5 million unique visitors to his site on a given month. That flood of visitors, which any blogger would kill for, earned Lyons the princely sum from Adsense, he says, of $1,039.81. To say Lyons’ column is discouraging for bloggers is an understatement.

Yet something about it all just doesn’t make sense to me. I know very little about Adsense, because I use my blogs primarily as lead generators for my businesses, but what little I know tells me that Lyons must have been attracting the wrong sorts of people to his blog — and thus the keywords he was using were low-bid words.

I’ve experimented a little with Adsense and my results, while certainly not spectacular, have been a lot more encouraging than Lyons’. For example, one blog I created, as a test, only gets 135 visitors a day. Yet it nets about 7 clicks a day for an average of $4.35 per day in Adsense revenue.

Okay, so Lyons is right: I’m not going to get rich off of this. But that’s $130 a month ($1,566 a year) for a blog that cost me $10 a year to set up, 30 minutes to create, and which I ignore completely. This blog is set up to syndicate news articles about a particular health topic so it requires no maintenance whatsoever. (It did, however, require some time before I got the traffic I have now… about a year.)

My success with this one test has encouraged me to set up a dozen new test blogs. If I could consistently make $4.35 a day with one blog, I would gladly create 100 like it — assuming, of course, I could identify sufficiently high-paying, low-competition keywords that would attract enough traffic. Revenue of $435 a day still isn’t going to make you rich, but it would be a nice supplement to anyone’s dwindling retirement savings.

As part of my BlogClasses.com curriculum, therefore, I’ve decided to throw myself into Adsense to find out the truth. Is Lyons right — and no one makes any real money blogging, or at least with Adsense? We all know that Internet marketers can make money — literally millions — but they do that with Joint Venture deals and email marketing, NOT with pennies-per-click Adsense. Yet Adsense is the only program many bloggers use… largely because it’s so easy to set up. Joel Comm allegedly makes more than a thousand dollars a day through Adsense, so it’s worth seeing what he does, at the very least.

I’ve decided to set aside a few thousand dollars and buy every Adsense product I can find — products that claim they can help you make real money using Adsense — and try them out. I’ll review them as I use them and tell you, in detail, which ones are worth buying and which ones suck. I’ll also tell you if they improve my Adsense revenue on my test blogs.

I just bought one product, for example, that really, really sucks (although it contains good information for complete beginners.) Here’s a link to the pretty good sales page:

http://www.adsenseoverdrive.com/

I spent $24.00 for this through Clickbank. What I got was a 50-page PDF with triple-spacing and information so general and vague it was an insult to any experienced blogger. You get traffic by posting interesting content. You should experiment with different Adsense formats, colors and placements. You should make sure you’re using high-paying keywords. A total waste of time for anyone but the most inexperienced neophyte.

My next purchase will probably be Joel Comm’s products. I’ve already bought his book, The Adsense Code, but he has a whole array of Internet products and courses. I’ll let you know if any of them are worth spending money on.

Until then, keep blogging. And don’t let Daniel Lyons discourage you too much. I have a feeling that, while his experience as a blogger was no doubt disappointing, it doesn’t have to be that way for everyone.

Need website in a hurry?

If you need to get a professional-looking blog or website up in a hurry… and don’t know ANYTHING about website design… and don’t want to spend HUNDREDS of dollars on a professional web designer… here’s what you need to do.

You can get a very professional-looking, easy-to-use website up and running in ONE HOUR. It will cost you about $7.95 per month for the web hosting and nothing else.  What’s more, each ADDITIONAL website you create will only cost you $10 per year.

Here’s how.

Step 1: Sign up for a web hosting account with BlueHost.com. It will cost you about $95 for a whole year but you can get it for as little as 3 months, if you want something temporary. This price INCLUDES the cost of the domain name… unlimited email addresses… and, if you want to create another website, the additional website is only $10 for the whole year (including domain name). This step only takes about 5 minutes.

Step 2: Install WordPress on the BlueHost account. If you don’t know how to do that, watch the video below that explains everything in just 21 minutes. The actual amount of time it takes to install WordPress on the BlueHost system is about 1 minute.

That’s it.  The beauty of this approach is that it lets you create unlimited websites for just $10 per year… including the domain name AND webhosting.  You can’t beat that.

Step 3: Pick a FREE WordPress template that you like from the hundreds that are available through WordPress.  We will cover this in a future video.

Step 4: Design a professional-looking BANNER for the top of your site. This, too, will be covered in another video.

Step 5: Create the pages and posts you want for your site. These can include products and services, sale items, contact information, you name it. Use the blogging (center) section of the WordPress template to write regular updates.

That’s it! This entire process should take no less than about 30 minutes, tops.

Newsweek Columnist Says You Can’t Make Money Blogging

By Daniel Lyons
Newsweek

For two years I was obsessed with trying to turn a blog into a business. I posted 10 or 20 items a day to my site, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, rarely taking a break. I blogged from cabs, using my BlackBerry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks.

Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job. Eventually I shut down—not for financial reasons, but because Steve Jobs appeared to be in poor health. I walked away feeling burned out and weighing 20 pounds more than when I started. I also came away with a sneaking suspicion that while blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.

Now others seem to be riding the same downward curve, with euphoria giving way to exhaustion. Michael Arrington, whose TechCrunch blog empire attracts 6 million readers each month, has gone on a monthlong hiatus after three years of nonstop blogging. His break was prompted, he says, by burnout and by the craziness of the blogosphere (he says he’s been stalked, threatened and spat on) and not by the fact that he’s been trying to sell his company for a year and hasn’t been able to find a buyer who’ll pay his price, which is rumored to be $100 million. Gawker Media, a leading network of blogs, recently laid off all but one of its writers for Valleywag, its tech blog, which has struggled for three years. In January Pajamas Media, a collective of right-wing political bloggers, shut down its ad network, which CEO Roger Simon says “was a money loser for three years.”

In late 2005 a columnist who writes for the ABC News Web site predicted that by 2010 the blogosphere would create “a whole new group of major corporations and media stars” and that “billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get onboard or invest in these companies.” (He was responding to an article I’d done that criticized some elements of the blogosphere.) This guy was right on the first part, sort of. But as for those billions? Last year the total spent on blog advertising in the United States was a mere $411 million, according to researcher eMarketer. That represents only a sliver of the $23.7 billion spent on U.S. Internet ads last year, which is itself only a fraction of the $276.8 billion spent on all forms of advertising in the U.S. By 2012 blog ad spending will reach $746 million, while overall online ad spending will hit $32 billion, eMarketer says. More money was spent on e-mail advertising last year than was spent on blog advertising—yet you don’t see anyone touting e-mail as the next big billion-dollar media business. Technorati, a blog researcher, estimates that bloggers who run ads earn an average of $5,060 per year. Don’t call the Ferrari dealer just yet.

Advertisers shy away from blogs because they’re too unpredictable and because few blogs attract anything approaching a mass audience—and even those that do face so much competition that ad rates remain pitifully low. “A lot of expectations are coming down in terms of monetizing social media,” says Paul Verna, an analyst with eMarketer. ” People have not figured out a clear way to monetize some of these vehicles.” The bad economy compounds the problem, Verna says, but the real issue is “the lack of a clear business model that can generate substantial revenues.”

To be sure, some blogs are little goldmines. Gizmodo, a gadget blog run by Gawker Media, had record traffic last month, with 98 million page views, and is “fantastically profitable,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton says. Dooce, a personal-diary blog run by a husband-and-wife team, does between $500,000 to $1 million a year, according to Federated Media, which sells ads for the site. Arrington says TechCrunch did $3 million in 2007 and even more in 2008. He says he could sell the company today, albeit for a lower price than it would have fetched a year ago.

Those success stories keep money pouring into the space. The Huffington Post raised $25 million just a few months ago. The Daily Beast, led by editor Tina Brown, raised money from Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp. for its launch last October. (Disclosure: Diller is a director of The Washington Post Company, which owns NEWSWEEK.) Then again, The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast aren’t really blogs —they’re media companies that happen to feature, among other things, the work of some bloggers. Some A-list bloggers have found that the best way to “monetize” their work is by returning to the much-maligned “mainstream media”—like political writer Andrew Sullivan, whose blog, The Daily Dish, now runs on The Atlantic Monthly Web site. Presumably Sullivan makes a decent living. But as for that vision of the guy in his pajamas making millions with a blog? Or that one about investors raking in billions by betting on that guy in the pajamas? Take it from someone who dreamed the dream: I wish it were true, but right now it’s looking like yet another high-tech fairy tale.
Article originally published at Newsweek.com

Writing a Blog Post

Blogging for Your Business

It’s almost a given now that if you have a website, you also have a blog. The question for small-business owners is: Is blogging, twittering, etc., really worth your time?

A lot of bigger companies have decided it is. Just check out this list of 50 companies and how they are using social media. In these examples, I think you can find what TO do and what NOT to do when it comes to promoting your business with social media.

Check out British Airways’ Twitter account. It looks like the subject lines of items in your junk mail folder. Why would anyone follow you to see that? Those who would are more likely to be annoyed than intrigued. What’s worse, there’s no touch of any kind of human voice to these entries. A machine is cranking these out, for all we know.

That’s fine for a big company like British Airways, but a small-business owner does not have the time to write and post things that nobody reads. If you treat your blog as an advertisement, no one will read it, because people don’t seek out advertising. They seek out interesting and thoughtful content. That comes from having a personal touch and displaying your expertise on your subject matter.

THE GOOD

Here’s the blog of Marriott Hotels CEO Bill Marriott.

Notice how it’s written in first person, like an actual blog that someone would seek out. Notice the use of pictures—again, content that people would seek out. Most importantly, it’s about subjects that are interesting and beyond the scope of the company, like John McCain and the Beijing Olympics. OK, so the post from September 8 resembles the adspeak that you do NOT want to do, but looking at the blog as a whole, I think it’s pretty good.

Instead of outright promoting your company on your blog, if you write about interesting subjects in your own voice, it will actually get read—and that’s what actually promotes your company and makes social media worth your time. Read more

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