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There’s something I’ve come to realize about most of my fellow bloggers - you guys and girls are not great at marketing.

Don’t take offense, marketing is not something that comes naturally and most people enter the blogging world as writers or hobbyists, not business people.

Some look at marketing as advertising and their current perception of advertising is akin to lying. With that attitude in place, no self respecting blogger wants to learn how to lie in order to promote their blog. This may be an inaccurate assumption about marketing, but let’s face facts, most people don’t know what marketing is and their world view of the advertising industry is framed on their experience with television commercials, magazine advertisements and billboards.

Some might say I’m a good marketer, but I want to be honest with you - if I had a choice, I’d rather sit down and just write to my blog and not worry about how I’m going to “get my message out there”. I’m lucky because I have some momentum here at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, so in a lot of ways I can just publish content and my traffic will grow, but chances are for you, if you build it, readers won’t just show up and read your blog because it’s there.

…or will they?

The Long Road To Blog Traffic

You’ve possibly read the varying arguments about targeting the Long Tail for traffic as a blogger. Some argue that you can’t leverage the long tail for traffic in the same way that a business like Amazon does for profit selling goods.

This is true, in some respects. Amazon, iTunes and companies and services like them, have massive scale and can reach the entire long tail of a product catalog and thus truly leverage the full breadth of the tail.

Bloggers cannot realistically do this since it would mean writing content to hit every single topic and keyword phrase in a niche - effectively millions of articles.

Any blogger who has managed to stick to writing regular content for at least three months - and it really kicks in after about six to eight months - knows about the gift you receive from Google. If you check your traffic statistics regularly, the traffic coming from Google and in lessor respects from the other search engines, will increase if you stick to regular content production long enough.

Thanks to search engines, bloggers who specialize in writing voluminous amounts of content but with poor marketing skills or a lack of motivation to do much more than put creative thought out on their blog, can still succeed - it’s just a bit slower this way.

One Visitor At A Time

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Sarah Lewis, a Blog Mastermind student who blogs at Blogging Expertise, sent me an email yesterday about a website she’s just released.

It’s called WordPress Theme Review and here’s how Sarah described it to me -

Because SEO can have a significant impact on overall traffic, I always encourage clients to get a blog theme design that’s optimized for search engines, even if they go with a free theme. The difficulty, of course, is for them to find a theme that’s optimized without knowing code.

The site offers thumbnail images of the theme in use, as well as info on whether or not it supports tags and widgets, if there’s a cost, etc., but the main feature is that each theme is assigned an SEO score (out of 100) that helps the average user know how optimized the theme is.

Continuing the blogging theme…

Blog Monetization Report

Matt from Blogging Fingers let me know he’s just released a free report titled Blog Monetization Strategies - Make More Money From Your Blog Without Increasing Traffic.

It’s a short and sweet read of 16 pages that cuts straight to the point about monetization tactics for blogs. If you are a veteran there’s nothing that new here, but it’s a good read and well worth investigating if you need ideas for how to best monetize your blog.

You can grab a copy of it here - Download The Blog Monetization Strategies E-book

A Crazy Competition

Gyutae from Winning The Web has put together what he calls the Craziest Internet Marketing Contest You’ve Ever Seen.

There’s over $7,000 up for grabs, including a nice chunk of cash, so you might want to check this one out.

I’m Off To Sydney

I’m heading down to Sydney tomorrow through to Friday and I’ll be popping in to the World Internet Summit, so if you are attending, say hello if you see me.

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You might remember a month or so back I posted about some websites I had for sale. One of the sites was my other blog, Small Business Branding.

I am pleased to announce that Vera Raposo has taken over Small Business Branding and will endeavor to continue to grow the site from where I left off.

I’d like to thank Rob Kingston and the great team of writers who kept Small Business Branding going and will continue to write for the site and no doubt take it to new heights. I wish Vera best of luck with the blog.

Vera has posted a brief introduction and I encourage you to say hello and welcome her.

Sponsorship Opportunities

With the change of ownership some new sponsorship opportunities have arisen at Small Business Branding, so if you would like to reach the small business marketplace, visit the advertise page for details.

A Blog Flipping Story

As long term readers of my blog might recall, back in December 2005 I purchased Small Business Branding from Michael Pollock, who created the site and sold it to me to go build his now very successful blog theme design business, SoloStream.

That sale was one of the first publicly announced blog deals between two well known bloggers and it generated quite a bit of buzz at the time. Micheal and I recorded a two part podcast about the deal, which is still interesting listening if you like the topic of buying and selling websites.

After taking over the blog I quickly came to realize that I could not write to two very similar blogs by myself and began a unique experiment into outsourcing blog content creation. Small Business Branding become a magazine style publication with a roster of authors. In February 2007 I published an article - How To Outsource Your Blogging - A Case Study - that detailed how to replicate my system for blog content outsourcing.

Return On Investment

When I purchased Small Business Branding it was a well known blog with good search engine rankings for some popular small business terms and about 400 daily RSS readers. Michael hadn’t focused on monetization so the site was only making about $100 to $200 a month, mostly from AdSense.

Just over two years later, when I sold the site to Vera, it had grown to 2500 daily RSS readers and around $1500 a month in revenue. The income growth came mainly by increasing the monetization techniques applied, with a big chunk coming from adding banners and text links and selling the ad inventory directly to sponsors for a monthly fee. This was obviously helped along by the steady traffic growth thanks to the team of content producers.

I’m not at liberty to disclose how much I sold the site for, but I was happy with the return I made and compared to what I paid for it, I did very well. However you have to take into account how different the after-market for blogs is today compared to what it was when I bought the site.

Michael and I were pioneers in the industry of blog flipping, which today is a much more mature market, with hundreds of deals made every week. People pay more for blogs now because there are more interested buyers and thus competition raises prices. It’s seen as a good investment to buy a blog, with hundreds of case studies demonstrating this. In 2005 the idea of blogging for money was just gaining traction and wasn’t widespread.

As an acquisition and flip go, this deal was very good and my return was well over ten fold. This doesn’t include the income generated while owning the site and I have no doubt as long as Vera continues to grow the blog her earnings will surpass mine. Blogs can be great cash cows and capital investments, if you look after them.

More Sites For Sale

I still have a collection of two forums and a video site focused on the niche of mini bikes for sale, which generate about $1200 a month in almost passive income (you just have to invoice advertisers). I’ve got a PDF document that breaks down the details, so if you are interested, please email yaroATblogmastermind.com and I will send you the info.

Please note I’m looking for around 20 times revenue for these sites (as a group), so do not approach if you cannot entertain this price range.

In case you are wondering why I am selling these sites it is because I am divesting my self of assets not aligned with my core business focus, which is my blog training programs and information products. While these sites are great income sources, they do require mindshare to look after and grow and I intend to use my mind to focus on my main business interest.

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Over the last two days I attended a workshop run by Andrew and Daryl Grant on the topic of joint ventures (JVs).

The workshop was valuable and covered a topic that is rarely given an entire two days worth of focus. JVs are the best way to drive quality traffic today and while they are not always easy to negotiate, they can make or break a business.

The people in attendance at the event were Andrew and Daryl’s membership site partners - people who are launching membership sites online in all kinds of niches in partnership with the Grants. The Grants provide the training and the technology, the partners provide the content and marketing.

Compare Blogging To Internet Business

As I’ve mentioned before I sit in a unique position in that my preeminence comes from being a well known blogger, but I do so in the Internet marketing industry. Internet marketers often view blogs as marketing tools, but nothing more. They use blogs to drive traffic and augment their information selling business. For bloggers, the blog is the business.

Listening to some of the membership site concepts floating around at the workshop it was clear that the focus for these people is to get a product out the door as quickly as possible and then market it using intelligent, high leverage methods, like joint ventures.

The mindset really is powerful and focused on the business of doing business. Create product, then find ways to sell it.

This is very different to bloggers. Bloggers pour their energy into content and resource creation, giving all of it away for free. The strategy is to create a blog of value, build traffic and then monetize with advertising and maybe, for those few bloggers who are business minded, to produce products and sell them.

You can’t really say one method is better than another, but it did raise the questions in my head about whether bloggers give away too much for free and wait too long to sell their information.

Product Leads To Profit

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Danial Scocco from DailyBlogTips put together a great article - 28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website.

You might think you’ve read all the advice before, however it’s necessary that blog trainers continue to publish these articles to update the status of how you can profit online with a website. Plus of course, some of these ideas are new to beginners and we all know how important it is to help beginners.

What Methods Are Best?

To help augment Daniel’s suggestions, I’m going to dissect some of the points and talk about how truly profitable each method is based on my own experience, from online research and from what I have garnered from conversations with other people who use these methods. Hopefully this will help you decide which methods are worth chasing.

While I love lists of ways to make money, what I really love are stories from people who actually test the methods and provide feedback from their results. So, let’s get to it!

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