My non-profit friend Emily asked me for advice on setting up a blog.
I recommended she use WordPress (it’s what I use in this blog) for the following reasons:
Cost — WordPress is mostly free (you will have to spend $10 to $20 on hosting stuff (explained below)
Flexibility — WordPress is open-source and has many different developers supporting it with widgets and plug-ins.
Google Loves It — WordPress appears to be indexed by Google faster than other blog platforms (including, ironically, the Blogger platform which is owned by Google). This quick indexing is important in terms of Google sending you free traffic.
7 Easy Steps On How To Set Up A Blog Using WordPress
Here’s a 51-minute video tutorial by blog pro Chris Abraham explaining how to set up WordPress.
In it, he explains everything you need to get WordPress set up — they include these 7 highlights (in that order):
Getting Your WordPress Account — Username, password, naming your blog (At first, your blog name will be [TheNameYouChoose.WordPress.com] (later, you can register a domain name and point the blog to it so that “WordPress” is not in your URL)
Activating Your Blog
Understand the WordPress Dashboard
Setting Up A Theme (the design) — He uses the Neat themes: I use Thesis/CopyBlogger (note: you can the theme any time)
Inserting A Picture Of Yourself
How to Register A Domain Name So That It Doesn’t Include “WordPress” — Abraham shows how to register a name through GoDaddy and then how to adjust the settings on WordPress. After that, your blog will be available for viewing at the new URL you registered (I’m a big fan of GoDaddy because they’re available by phone to help you with this integration). Note: This will cost you $10 on GoDaddy and $10 on WordPress.
How To Post A Blog Entry — This can be done in Visual mode (looks like MS Word) or HTML mode. He covers such keys to posting asL
I started blogging on April 22nd of last year and I just reached my 100,000th visit with around 200,000 Web pages viewed (e.g. each visitor is looking at two articles I’ve written).
Since I started my blog I’m amazed how many people have asked me:
“Can you make money from blogging?”
Indeed, one of the reasons I began my blog was to study the different monetization models used to make money from blogging.
I’ve looked at two ways to monetize my blog so far:
Advertising (through Google AdSense) and
Affiliate marketing (mainly through Amazon’s Associates program and some through Zazzle)
Two Myths of Monetizing Your Blog
Myth #1: You Can Monetize Your Blog Through Google AdSense Ads
If you want to make money with a blog through selling AdSense, you’re going to have to have a lot of traffic…a LOT of traffic.
You can expect to make a CPM of $.25 to $1 in selling your ads through AdSense, according to my own numbers, and those of friends of mine.
What does CPM mean? CPM stands for cost per thousand (this is an advertising term as in an advertiser is willing to pay $X in cost per thousand of some audience metric (readers in magazines, viewers in TV, etc.) — interestingly, on the Internet the metric is page views.
For example, when I say that you can make up a $.50 CPM on a blog, I am saying that an advertiser (in this case many advertising bidding through Google’s AdWords system) is paying you $.50 for every 1,000 “page views” that your site generates.
So, back to my blog…if I were to receive a $.50 CPM, I would make:
$.50 for 1,000 page views
$5 for 10,000 page views
$50 for 100,000 page views
$500 for 1 million page views
So, if I were to have put Google AdSense ads on my site since I began, I would have generated a total of around $200 (The $1CPM ($.001) times 200,000 page views = $200).
Myth #2: You Can Monetize Your Blog Through Affiliate Marketing
A second way people try to earn money blogging is through affiliate marketing.
What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is just another form of selling ads: you put a link on your blog promoting another company’s product.
The difference is that you ONLY get paid if a person clicks on the affiliate marketing ad on your site and then buys a product from the site (the affiliate marketer) they then visit.
For example, I joined the Amazon Associates program (arguably the largest of its kind) and I include links to many products sold by Amazon (mostly books I review) here on my blog.
If someone clicks on my Amazon link, and they visit Amazon and buy any product (not just the one I linked to) during that visit, Amazon will pay me anywhere from 4% to 8% based on the volume of sales I help them generate.
In the year I’ve been testing out monetizing my blog through Amazon affiliate links, I’ve sold 51 products for Amazon, generating $1,048.31 in sales for them and $50.02 in commissions for me.
Basically, I’m making around $1 for every Amazon product I help sell — I’m converting .05% of my visitors to becoming a customer.
I could move that conversion number up to .25% immediately if I put more affiliate links up.
This .25% conversion number is fairly common for a content-oriented Web site like mine (and like most of the blogs of the world).
However, if you had a Web site that was focused exclusively on commerce (as opposed to advice like I do), I estimate you could move your conversion up to 2 or 3% of visitors buying something.
So, in total, I’ve learned that making money blogging (Google AdSense and Amazon’s Affiliate Marketing Program) has been very tough: I’ve generated just a couple hundred bucks from the 100,000 visitors who’ve come to my site in the last year.
Don’t Fret: There Is Some Good News About Monetizing Your Blog
So, we covered the tough part. For your blog to make money, you’re gonna need enormous traffic.
But in addition to enormous traffic, there are many other ways to earn money through your blog. Here are some:
You Can ByPass Google AdSense — You can acquire much higher ad rates if you increase your traffic to the 100,000 visitors per month level and beyond (in my estimation, you could sell ads yourself for $1 to $10CPM at that range. That’s up to 20X as much as you’d make from AdSense!
You Can Earn Higher Affiliate Commissions — You can earn 100X+ higher affiliate commission fees than you get through Amazon by doing some research on what types of affiliate marketing offers would be most relevant to the content that you write about (for example, the relationship advice company I work for will pay $15 or more to you if you generate an ebook sale for us.)
Go search “affiliate marketing offers” on Google or visit AffiliateTips where as of right now some poker sites are offer more than $100 if your blog generates them a customer. That would be about 100X higher than the $1 commission I’m generating for each book I’m helping Amazon sell.
Endorsed Relationships — This is a new term that a few of us have been using lately. It’s the same concept as your putting up an affiliate link but in this case you go directly to the company selling a product you believe in and you write up an endorsement of it. Steve Pavlina writes in his book Personal Development for Smart People that he selectively chooses certain products to promote through his super-popular blog (only ones he believes in) and sometimes receives a share in the sales for it (some of you may recall that Steve Pavlina used to monetize his blog through AdSense).
Sell Your Own Product — You can earn even higher amounts of money if you sold your own product (e.g. if you were to write a book or manufacture some product that you sell directly through your blog). You have to figure out what type of product would be of value to your audience but if you did figure out how to create such a product (a book, ebook, audio or video program, piece of art, software, etc.) cost-effectively, you can generate much higher amounts of money through your blog that way.
Collect Email Addresses & Market To Them — You can often charge higher CPMs for emailing advertisements than you could for selling the same ads on your Web site. It’s not unheard of to charge $25 CPMs for sending out an email promotion to your list (that would be $25 for every 1,000 people on your email list).
I hope these tips on monetizing your blog were helpful.
I’ll be writing in the future about effective ways to monetize your blog or Web site and, as always, welcome your input.
Here are some tips he shared on turning your blog into a six-figure a year business (all specifics and examples are related to his Digital Photography School) :
1) Start With Content
Don’t start with making money in mind.
Focus on value
Don’t forget beginners — E.g. when Darren wrote a post on how to hold a digital camera it ended up getting huge traffic.
How frequent should you post : He believes you should post at least one to two blog articles a day (to build up your content library for the search engines to index).
In addition to posting content himself, he hires other writers who he pays about$60 (U.S.) per post.
His other bloggers can come up with their own topics though Darren also gives them ideas on topics.
2) Promotion
Ask yourself: Where are my readers gathering already (and then go and find them).
Chances are your audience is hanging out already in places like Twitter, Facebook and forums.
3) Community
He recommends using forums in addition to blogs. While Darren and I chatted later in the day he told me that forums appeal to a different community than his blog does.
However, he pointed out that Google and the search engines don’t crawl his forums content as much as they do his blog content.
He also recommends engaging the audience in polls — For example, a member of his photo site asked for advice on how to photograph their dying grandma and they generated 100+ responses.
4) Capture Contacts — Find a way to stick visitors to your site
Of the 410, 000 subscribers, over 300,000 are email (versus 100,000 for RSS feeds)
Traffic is three times the volume of normal days when he sends an email update out. Advertising revenue goes up too.
5) How to Monetize Blogs
In years 1 and 2, he used ad networks and affiliate markets.
In years 3 and 4, he hired 50 writers initially (from his audience) (now it’s 12 writers writing 50 posts per week).
He says he generated $13,000 in Amazon affiliate revenues last month.
How he monetizes his blogs now:
Sell ads directly (to Adobe, Lenovo, etc.)
Higher-end affiliate marketing (ebooks, training courses (they pay 30% to 50%)
Recently sold 10,000 of one ad partners ebooks within a couple of months
Launched his own ebooks (for $29.97) and sold $70,000 in ebooks within a couple of weeks.
I first heard of Posterous when I saw that Steve Rubel, an influential writer & publicist about trends in the digital space (and my former colleague at CMP Media), had moved from WordPress to Posterous to publish his content.
I’ve tested Posterous — which allows you to email content to the Web — myself and see its potential: indeed, it may be the fastest way to publish pictures, audio and video to the open Web (as opposed to through a more closed environment such as Facebook).
Note: Mashable does a good review of Posterous versus Tumblr (a somewhat similar tool) here: Posterous Versus Tumblr).
I decided to ask Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal some questions about his business. Enjoy.
Q: Hey Sachin. Congrats on Posterous’s fast growth. How do you describe the market that Posterous is in?
Posterous can be used for many different kinds of sites. It can be used as a micro blog or blog.
Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal
But it can also be used as a groups product, an email list, a photo stream, a video channel, and much more. Posterous doesn’t limit what you can post or how you can use it.
So the market is pretty large. You might be new to technology, but you can use Posterous via email.
Or you might be a pro blogger. It doesn’t matter. Posterous can be used by anyone
Q: What’s the difference between Posterous and blogging?
We don’t like the word “blogging.” Historically, people have set up blogs…and then done nothing there.
It’s about photos to share with friends and family or business. We don’t want to be known as middle blogging or micro-blogging.
Posterous has no limitations. What can you not do on Posterous that you can do on WordPress?
It’s more of a LifeStream (Steve Rubel is the first person who used this as it has to do with Posterous) — I’m out and about and this is what’s happening to me, live.
Twitter doesn’t allow this because it’s confined to 140 characters. And almost none of my real friends are on Twitter.
Facebook doesn’t provide it because it’s completely closed (I can’t export my data (and the only people who can see it are Facebook users (and that’s not most of my family). And much of my family is not on Facebook
Q: Who do you consider your competitors (besides Tumblr)?
WordPress, Blogger, Google Groups, Flickr, YouTube. But we can do all of what those can do right within Posterous.
Q: I noticed Michael Arrington’s Posterous and it was just a flow of photos with a headline (describing the photos). Do you see emailing photos and videos as a popular application of Posterous?
Defintely. One of the big reasons we created Posterous:
1) We wanted rich media support (video and email out of the box) and
2) Wanted to make sure you can post via mobile.
It’s the simplest way to use Posterous. It acts as the on-boarding for Posterous. Our goal is not to be a micro-blog.
Q: Who are you proudest of that’s moved to Posterous from some other platform?
Ted Fellows Posterous — It’s really great to see this incredibly smart group of people use Posterous to share and stay in touch.
Their site has all the Ted fellows added as contributors, and they can all post to the site via email. Posts are sent out to all the members instantly, and they can reply to those to add comments.
Q: How are you measuring success:
Number of accounts, number of posts, number of page views.
Q: What metric can you share with me?
We’re at eight million unique visitors and eighteen million page views per month.
Bigger Than Twitter and Facebook?
Q: How Large can Posterous get in terms of unique visitors compared to Facebook or Twitter?
Posterous will be bigger than Twitter and Facebook. This is because of the following reasons:
No limits to what you can post. 140 characters isn’t enough. People want to share photos and video
It’s fully customizable. Make it yours. Use your domain and your theme
Posterous has an extensive API. Use it to post, or to export. We don’t lock you in
It’s easier to use than these other services since all you need is email and no account
Q: How are you doing financially?
Right now we don’t have any revenue. Raised an angel round in 2008…and using it to expand.
Q: What do you think the most likely business models for Posterous will be?
We’re planning to charge pro bloggers and commercial users in the future for our Pro version. This will allow javascript, ad sense, and more advanced features. But we’ll always stay free for consumers.
Q: How are businesses using Posterous?
Small businesses are starting to use it as company blogs. And large companies, such as PR companies, are setting up Posterous accounts…such as Chevrolet Posterous and Microsoft Posterous.
Chevrolet's Promotes Audio and Video Clips Directly From Events
Q: What’s your biggest opportunity or challenge these days?
Hiring — hard to find good people. It’s such a big risk to bring the wrong new person into the company.
Q: You were with Apple for more than five years — How accessible was Steve Jobs during that time and what were the most important lessons you learned from him or Apple?
I met Steve Jobs a couple of time while I was at Apple, but I didn’t work with him directly. However, it was very clear to me the impact that he had on the product that I was working on.
Our managers and VPs would let us know how their meetings with Steve went and what feedback he had. It was clear that even for Final Cut Pro, he had an impact.
