Blogging for Profit (With Legendary GOLD Follow Up Posts)

[biophase]

He PM'd me. Had some pretty good thoughts. Not sure why he didn't want to share them here.

Because he's a douche. How annoying. I kept wondering when he was going to get banned. He may or may not understand how to make money using a blog but who the hell would want to listen to him.

 

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[TonyStark]

Well, at least the ones that really wanted to do it continue doing it, and the one's that are easily discouraged, well they're in for a surprise when they get to the real world.

 

[Yoda]

Do all monetisation strategies for a blog involve generating leads for some business?

Lead generation provides significantly more control than, say, Adsense.

If you have Adsense throwing random adverts all over your users, you never know what they're going to click on, how much revenue you'll generate, etc. You can also test your own design/layout of each CTA, where as with Adsense, it's other marketers doing it for you, essentially.

Yes, over time, you can get averages, but as mentioned, you can almost always do better.

Lead gen allows you control over what questions to ask (how many, or how few), where you want to distribute those leads to, to whom, and for how much.

Something most people don't consider:

Leads can be traded. They're simply data points. Businesses buy data all day long. Here's a few ideas to get the cogs turning:

1. Trade them for cash (selling)
2. Trade them for partial revenue (revenue sharing)
3. Trade them for other leads (lead exchange)
4. Trade them for anything of monetary value (indirect exchange)

Or, perhaps one of the best... lead generation can be your direct sales line where you're selling your own product. SEO's love to claim this as "inbound marketing" or some silly phrase, but it's just marketing, albeit through organic search engine traffic. The key, however, is the fact Google traffic is "Free" once everything is up and running.

Leads also have a "life" to consider, where ads don't. Ads have your users click and be gone. Leads, again, as data sets, mean you can continue to use this data for a period of time, and even then, you can still monetize the data down the road.

Example, let's say you ask a lead for an email as part of their data input... they can now be a part of your list to cross-sell other products.

 

[Andy Black]

Lead generation provides significantly more control than, say, Adsense.

If you have Adsense throwing random adverts all over your users, you never know what they're going to click on, how much revenue you'll generate, etc. You can also test your own design/layout of each CTA, where as with Adsense, it's other marketers doing it for you, essentially.

Yes, over time, you can get averages, but as mentioned, you can almost always do better.

Lead gen allows you control over what questions to ask (how many, or how few), where you want to distribute those leads to, to whom, and for how much.

Something most people don't consider:

Leads can be traded. They're simply data points. Businesses buy data all day long. Here's a few ideas to get the cogs turning:

1. Trade them for cash (selling)
2. Trade them for partial revenue (revenue sharing)
3. Trade them for other leads (lead exchange)
4. Trade them for anything of monetary value (indirect exchange)

Or, perhaps one of the best... lead generation can be your direct sales line where you're selling your own product. SEO's love to claim this as "inbound marketing" or some silly phrase, but it's just marketing, albeit through organic search engine traffic. The key, however, is the fact Google traffic is "Free" once everything is up and running.

Leads also have a "life" to consider, where ads don't. Ads have your users click and be gone. Leads, again, as data sets, mean you can continue to use this data for a period of time, and even then, you can still monetize the data down the road.

Example, let's say you ask a lead for an email as part of their data input... they can now be a part of your list to cross-sell other products.

Agreed.

I even class Adsense as lead gen... You're generating leads for the business advertising on AdWords.

 

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[Kelly C]

I've said it before but I make a full time income from a couple of sites...I haven't touched them in ages....every so often I decide randomly to do a competition but that is it. They have been going since 2010. It is unfortunately a niche I can't really make them grow BUT it has given me the capital to invest in other things and grow them...and its nice to see money coming in from stuff I am no longer working on.

A LOT of effort went into creating those sites....its not easy. You have to really believe in yourself and put in a lot of hours to get something decent up. I think my sites have stood the test of time because I started with the notion I wanted quality content - I do check in now and again just because I get quite a few comments and that is always good to respond to.

I am currently working on a Christmas project but I am also building a branded site in health/fitness. I have put up about 50 articles I outsourced so far and its just made its first few sales from Amazon. Outsourcing is a massive pain in the butt itself...but it frees up time to do other things..but everything is a lot of hard work and perseverance (I am going to try to outsource guest posting next and getting a virtual assistant). I am glad I am no longer writing the articles as that took up too much time. I am hoping to grow this with my brother when he gets back in a couple of weeks. We are spending 3 months solidly working on it. If it can get to a nice monthly income we will be able to sell it for a lot of money...which would be the end goal...then we could put that money into something else.

People under-estimate the effort though....I helped someone with their blog and they gave up after a few weeks. I spent a lot of time helping them...never again wasting my time doing that unless they pay me lol.

 

[Yoda]

People under-estimate the effort though....I helped someone with their blog and they gave up after a few weeks.

As far as Entry goes, I love blogs for this.

It's a perceived easy Entry, but the barrier isn't broken by simply starting!

False perception.

The true barrier to entry with building a legitimate blog is not growing the blogs content, but the audience.

You don't need 700 posts on your blog to go big. You just need an audience who cares about the posts you do write (have written). Now, if you do have 700 and each one is a huge asset, well, money shouldn't be an issue for you whatsoever.

I know I've said it already in this thread, but the market you choose matters deeply.

Think ever green niches (ones which aren't fly-by-night) to get into, but also couple those with something you're truly interested in (to avoid burnout). It should also be something you can create lots of content on, but where the content value won't expire.

Example: If you created a blog on tech, how fast do you think your blog will become obsolete if you were to slow down or stop producing?
​

Finally, your blog should target an audience, not so much the product.

Captivate the audience, then deliver the product(s).

 

[csalvato]

As far as Entry goes, I love blogs for this.

It's a perceived easy Entry, but the barrier isn't broken by simply starting!

False perception.

The true barrier to entry with building a legitimate blog is not growing the blogs content, but the audience.

You don't need 700 posts on your blog to go big. You just need an audience who cares about the posts you do write (have written). Now, if you do have 700 and each one is a huge asset, well, money shouldn't be an issue for you whatsoever.

I know I've said it already in this thread, but the market you choose matters deeply.

Think ever green niches (ones which aren't fly-by-night) to get into, but also couple those with something you're truly interested in (to avoid burnout). It should also be something you can create lots of content on, but where the content value won't expire.

Example: If you created a blog on tech, how fast do you think your blog will become obsolete if you were to slow down or stop producing?
​

Finally, your blog should target an audience, not so much the product.

Captivate the audience, then deliver the product(s).

Listen to this man.

EDIT: or woman...

 

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[Greg R]

As far as Entry goes, I love blogs for this.

It's a perceived easy Entry, but the barrier isn't broken by simply starting!

False perception.

The true barrier to entry with building a legitimate blog is not growing the blogs content, but the audience.

You don't need 700 posts on your blog to go big. You just need an audience who cares about the posts you do write (have written). Now, if you do have 700 and each one is a huge asset, well, money shouldn't be an issue for you whatsoever.

I know I've said it already in this thread, but the market you choose matters deeply.

Think ever green niches (ones which aren't fly-by-night) to get into, but also couple those with something you're truly interested in (to avoid burnout). It should also be something you can create lots of content on, but where the content value won't expire.

Example: If you created a blog on tech, how fast do you think your blog will become obsolete if you were to slow down or stop producing?
​

Finally, your blog should target an audience, not so much the product.

Captivate the audience, then deliver the product(s).

From my experience, the audience seems more likely to get involved with personal blogs due to better personal connection.

Could good branding be a better alternative to having a personal blog?

 

[Yoda]

Could good branding be a better alternative to having a personal blog?

Not to oversimplify but... personal branding is still branding.

Great question, though.

 

[Greg R]

I know a few bloggers who make six figs with their personal blog, but the work they put in is damn near slavery.

The absolute ONLY way I can see this working is if you outsourced most of the writing.

 

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[Lex DeVille]

Wait But Why Model:

1. Make really few in-depth posts about complex subjects w/ stick pictures.
2. Go on TED
3. Sell t-shirts and stuffed animals.

 

[Greg R]

Not to oversimplify but... personal branding is still branding.

Great question, though.

I agree but as I said before, a personal blog pretty much ruins your chances of getting any decent money from a liquidation event.

 

[Vigilante]

As far as Entry goes, I love blogs for this.

It's a perceived easy Entry, but the barrier isn't broken by simply starting!

False perception.

The true barrier to entry with building a legitimate blog is not growing the blogs content, but the audience.

You don't need 700 posts on your blog to go big. You just need an audience who cares about the posts you do write (have written). Now, if you do have 700 and each one is a huge asset, well, money shouldn't be an issue for you whatsoever.

I know I've said it already in this thread, but the market you choose matters deeply.

Think ever green niches (ones which aren't fly-by-night) to get into, but also couple those with something you're truly interested in (to avoid burnout). It should also be something you can create lots of content on, but where the content value won't expire.

Example: If you created a blog on tech, how fast do you think your blog will become obsolete if you were to slow down or stop producing?
​

Finally, your blog should target an audience, not so much the product.

Captivate the audience, then deliver the product(s).

Gold post.

 

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[Yoda]

a personal blog pretty much ruins your chances of getting any decent money from a liquidation event.

You obviously need to match your intent to your end goal (cash flow versus liquidation). If it were me, I'd build a personal brand for cash flow, period.

Besides... why not build a personal brand which, in turn, powers other brands?

Pretty easy "About Me" page if you can list all the successful brands you've built and flipped, no?

 

[Raoul Duke]

Gold post.

Needs to be a Featured Posts.

 

[InspireHD]

Wait But Why Model:

1. Make really few in-depth posts about complex subjects w/ stick pictures.
2. Go on TED
3. Sell t-shirts and stuffed animals.

His Elon Musk post was amazing. I spent hours at work reading it. It's insane how much time and detail he put into writing that.

 

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[Greg R]

You obviously need to match your intent to your end goal (cash flow versus liquidation). If it were me, I'd build a personal brand for cash flow, period.

Besides... why not build a personal brand which, in turn, powers other brands?

Pretty easy "About Me" page if you can list all the successful brands you've built and flipped, no?

Most bloggers I know use their blog as a resume and make the bank consulting for large companies that want to blog or build websites.

I definitely see how this can be leveraged even though a blog used in this way is indirect leverage.

Ad money seems to be for those that can't figure out how to leverage an audience to buy products or get consulting gigs.

But @Yoda I completely understand where you are coming from.

 

[Yoda]

I definitely see how this can be leverage even though a blog used in this way is indirect leverage.

You're so close!

See, their personal blogs are still sales funnels!

The value they provide is up front proof of knowledge, expertise, and execution!

The 'leads' they now generate are for $20,000 speaking gigs, consulting on retainer, and other ultra time leveraged income producing events.

 

[Greg R]

You're so close!

See, their personal blogs are still sales funnels!

The value they provide is up front proof of knowledge, expertise, and execution!

The 'leads' they now generate are for $20,000 speaking gigs, consulting on retainer, and other ultra time leveraged income producing events.

I have personally seen one guy who went from being a scrub to consulting for banking/ trading firm in a matter of a year.

One could reasonably assume by the way he was getting flown all over the country and sitting in top-level meetings that this dude was getting paid handsomely.

I don't think his mailing list was anything impressive either, but he was able to achieve a lot of traffic.

The traffic came from building quality links and that is really about it.

The post themselves aren't anything memorable either.

Moral of this story could be to put most of your effort into traffic driving activities.

Edit: @Yoda I appreciate the rep!

 

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[Tiger TT]

There is a much better way than blogging.

I think most of us want passive income and
traffic, right?

Is blogging passive?

No!

Because you have to write those blog posts. But I don't
want to write everyday or twice a week. I don't even
want to write once a month!

And I don't

Because when you write articles that are going to
be relevant and fresh even 10 years later, then
THAT IS the way to get passive traffic and passive
income.

The last blog post that I wrote was 3 years ago. I have
approx. 35 articles which I wrote 3 years ago.

And they bring about 160,000 unique visitors per month.

Yeah, 35 articles=160,000 unique visitors (my website has
a total of 70 pages approx.)

And I haven't written any new articles in the last 3 years.

And they still bring in traffic.

Even 10 years after those articles will be valuable and
fresh. And Google knows this. As years pass by, those
articles get more and more traffic.

So "you need fresh content, you have to write 100 posts
per day" is not 100% true.

And blogging is a bad idea, because you have to
actually write stuff on a regular basis.

I don't want to write stuff on a regular basis. It's HARD WORK.

I don't like hard work.

I want to write a few articles, and then I want them to
bring a ton of traffic and I don't want to write anymore.

So, in order to do that, all you have to do is do a really
really really good keyword research about evergreen
topics and then write those evergreen articles and
create a GREAT PRODUCT and then maintain the
system.

And do whatever you want after that. Create
other products, or go travel or get out of the
house, go to a club, and meet new people
using this line:

"Hey guys, I'm stupid, wanna be my friend? "

Yeah, I actually used to do this, and it works.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is this:

You don't have to write lots of blog posts, you
can find the evergreen keywords and then
write articles that are going to be fresh
15 years from now.

So now, you won't have to write regularly.

But you have to do a really good keyword
research. And be smart when writing
articles.

You shouldn't write about a topic that will
be out of date a few years later.

 

[RHL]

IMHO The options are:

1. Drive blog traffic to your own product
2. Drive blog traffic to your own service
3. Drive blog traffic to a partner (e.g. you have a direct relationship with a college, and you send them leads in exchange for cash.)
4. Drive blog traffic to an affiliate offer (e.g. you have a relationship with QuinStreet and you send them college leads, then they send them to the colleges. Then QuinStreet pay you.)
5. Drive blog traffic to ads

I started a post in response to... whatever the hell was going on earlier in this thread, this afternoon, but @cslvato already said it better and more concisely.

If I can ad my own tiny little tidbit of wisdom for potential bloggers, it would be this:

Any business plan that begins with "drive," per Chris's formula above, (except the ones that drive recursively, back to your own product/service) crumple it up and throw that away unless it's just a small brick in a bigger wall. If "drive..." is your main revenue strategy, that word clues you in that you're not "Driving the Fastlane, but Riding It." Having been there, done that, I just don't think that it's worth the considerable effort. A good blogger can make tens of thousands. Maybe even hundreds of thousands. Maybe the handful of bloggers who represent the top 5 in their niche or so can even make a few million.

But there are no billionaire bloggers. Absolutely none. There aren't even any hundred-millionaire bloggers (who got there from blogging) that I'm aware of. Even giga-successful "bloggers/vloggers" who tie their content into an actual product (like The Oatmeal or Jenna Marbles) are only single or very, very low level deca millionaires. Fastlane to be sure, but that's a whole lot of a$$ you have to kick in the blogging/vlogging/serial content creation world just to be a relative nonentity in the world of wealth. Do you want being the 5th best in the world at what you do to be worth 2.5 million? or $250,000,000? What if you can only get to 150th or 500th place in the world, and have to take the smaller slice of the pie that comes with that lower level? Want 500th place in a race for 2,500,000? Or $980,000,000?

Given that the top bloggers in each niche "affect" millions when they're at the top of their game, the fact that they aren't making millions points to one thing: A breakdown of CENTS/CENTS. Somebody else (Adsense, Toyota, Under-Armor, dare I say, even Eight or PaintBrushCover) is making millions by their affection, while they make hundreds of thousands, or just thousands.

Make something and sell it.

Make people better in some way and sell them (their skills).

Make yourself epic and sell yourself (magnitude).

Never sell something for somebody else. Leave that to the Girl Scouts.

 

[Yoda]

There aren't even any hundred-millionaire bloggers (who got their from blogging) that I'm aware of.

Um... you simply aren't aware, then.

 

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[csalvato]

Um... you simply aren't aware, then.

@RHL I know some people who make content sites that claim to pull 7 figures in revenue through affiliate offers and the like, spread across several different domains and sub-niches. Someone in this thread, actually.

I think when you talk about personal bloggers (e.g. Pat Flynn, PewDiePie, etc.), you're right. But if you can scale the content game and divorce yourself from the content, the ceiling is much higher.

 

[Greg R]

@RHL But if you can scale the content game and divorce yourself from the content, the ceiling is much higher.

Can you elaborate on that idea?

 

[csalvato]

Can you elaborate on that idea?

Let's say you create an affiliate content site selling motor cycle insurance leads to a major auto-insurance affiliate. Let's call this major auto-insurance affiliate InsureUSA (fictional company).

To do this, you create a motor cycle site with a few pieces of really great content related to motor cycles and motor cycle culture.

To generate the leads, you place a form provided by InsureUSA on several pages of your site in a sidebar. Once submitted, that information is automatically sent to InsureUSA, and they add $11 on the balance they owe you at the end of the month.

You have a 0.1% form fill rate, and generate 10,000 visitors a month. That's 10 leads per month, or $110 in lead revenue generated.

Without touching the content itself, you move some things around the page and get to 1% conversions on the same 10,000 unique visitors. Now you're up to $1100/month in lead generation revenue.

You then create more content on your motorcycle site and get more backlinks. This gets your traffic up to 20,000 unique visitors per month. Now you're at $2200/month in lead generation revenue.

Right now, you're only generating motorcycle leads. But InsureUSA can accept motorcycle leads, auto insurance leads, RV insurance leads, home insurance leads, renter's insurance leads, etc.

You have a great relationship with InsureUSA, so you spin up a whole new site for RV insurance leads. You generate content, and go through the same hub-bub you did before with your motorcycle site. Let's say the numbers match exactly - you're up to $4400month in revenue.

Do the same for all the other lead types that InsureUSA can accept. Then do the same in another niche, say, education, where EducateUSA is the lead buyer.

Or, instead of working with EducateUSA, you spin up an insurance company, and take some leads for yourself, gradually absorbing all leads you generate, and cut out all the middlemen.

You're still "blogging", because you're making high-quality, useful content, publishing and promoting it. But you're not writing it yourself, and your name and persona aren't attached to it. The content stands alone.

This is possible, and there are people doing it. There are companies that are in the mid 7-figures with sites you would consider to have relatively shitty content doing a very similar lead generation model. But it's really hard and it's not sexy. And if we are talking strictly about lead buying and selling, you can find yourself working with pretty scummy people, and inadvertently doing pretty scummy things.

EDIT: Full disclosure, I was trying to execute on this model a couple of years ago, but when I saw how fickle SEO traffic is, saw how much I hated the niche I was in and saw how incredibly soul sucking the work/industry was, I decided it wasn't for me, but these numbers are very similar to those I was working with in my own content lead gen biz.

 

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[RHL]

But if you can scale the content game and divorce yourself from the content, the ceiling is much higher.

Absolutely. To be clear, I'm not talking about blog/content aggregators like BuzzFeed, Reddit or Huffington Post with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of contributors, which absolutely do pull in millions a month (ok, maybe not Reddit). They're still making bigger bucks for other people some of the time (the 10-20+ billion dollar companies that advertise through them), but their scale is so vast, their content volume so enormous, that even making fractions of a penny per user nets massive gains.

I was talking about personal blogging.

Also, and this is more for other people's benefit since I know you know this, I feel the need to beat my perennial drum of "revenue is not bottom line." A family member of mine owned a gas station. People can "do $XXX,XXX/mo in sales" (because of state regs and local competition and zero brand loyalty, gas sales net very, very little profit) and come home at night wondering how they're going to keep the lights on.

If a blogger spends peanuts on AM and paying his content producers and pulls seven figures, that's pretty rad. If he runs $5,000/day in ads and pays out thousands per month to authors and photographers, it's decidedly less rad.

 

[Greg R]

Let's say you create an affiliate content site selling motor cycle insurance leads to a major auto-insurance affiliate. Let's call this major auto-insurance affiliate InsureUSA (fictional company).

To do this, you create a motor cycle site with a few pieces of really great content related to motor cycles and motor cycle culture.

To generate the leads, you place a form provided by InsureUSA on several pages of your site in a sidebar. Once submitted, that information is automatically sent to InsureUSA, and they add $11 on the balance they owe you at the end of the month.

You have a 0.1% form fill rate, and generate 10,000 visitors a month. That's 10 leads per month, or $110 in lead revenue generated.

Without touching the content itself, you move some things around the page and get to 1% conversions on the same 10,000 unique visitors. Now you're up to $1100/month in lead generation revenue.

You then create more content on your motorcycle site and get more backlinks. This gets your traffic up to 20,000 unique visitors per month. Now you're at $2200/month in lead generation revenue.

Right now, you're only generating motorcycle leads. But InsureUSA can accept motorcycle leads, auto insurance leads, RV insurance leads, home insurance leads, renter's insurance leads, etc.

You have a great relationship with InsureUSA, so you spin up a whole new site for RV insurance leads. You generate content, and go through the same hub-bub you did before with your motorcycle site. Let's say the numbers match exactly - you're up to $4400month in revenue.

Do the same for all the other lead types that InsureUSA can accept. Then do the same in another niche, say, education, where EducateUSA is the lead buyer.

Or, instead of working with EducateUSA, you spin up an insurance company, and take some leads for yourself, gradually absorbing all leads you generate, and cut out all the middlemen.

You're still "blogging", because you're making high-quality, useful content, publishing and promoting it. But you're not writing it yourself, and your name and persona aren't attached to it. The content stands alone.

This is possible, and there are people doing it. There are companies that are in the mid 7-figures with sites you would consider to have relatively shitty content doing a very similar lead generation model. But it's really hard and it's not sexy. And if we are talking strictly about lead buying and selling, you can find yourself working with pretty scummy people, and inadvertently doing pretty scummy things.

EDIT: Full disclosure, I was trying to execute on this model a couple of years ago, but when I saw how fickle SEO traffic is, saw how much I hated the niche I was in and saw how incredibly soul sucking the work/industry was, I decided it wasn't for me, but these numbers are very similar to those I was working with in my own content lead gen biz.

Thank you for the great example!

It sounds to me that in order for this to work for the sake of passivity, the site needs to be static and traffic needs to be generated by search engines.

In the one year that I had my blog it seemed extremely difficult to get Google to notice me.

Because of this, I defaulted to; link building, blog spamming, and whole other slew of shameless things just to get some traffic.

Not my proudest moment...

 

[carlolacson]

Awesome.Great thread.

May I ask for suggestions for CONS and PROS I'm still confused though whether I should take the route of posting daily contents like (huffington post, Elitedaily, buzzfeed, Lifehackr) or personal branding like Victor Pride's blog for example. Thank you very much for suggestions.

 

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[csalvato]

Awesome.Great thread.

May I ask for suggestions for CONS and PROS I'm still confused though whether I should take the route of posting daily contents like (huffington post, Elitedaily, buzzfeed, Lifehackr) or personal branding like Victor Pride's blog for example. Thank you very much for suggestions.

Huffington post, buzzfeed and lifehackr are models that are based around HUGE amounts of traffic. So you need tons and tons of general population content.

Tons of content and traffic are required for their model to work. It's not true for all blog models, though.

If you don't want to become the next major news outlet, then I personally don't believe in daily or weekly content. That's usually just content for content's sake, which is a waste.

 

[redsfaithful]

A cool thing is that there are publicly traded companies doing what csalvato is talking about.

QuinStreet is one.

Awhile back I found a couple dozen of their sites.

Some examples:

Megabrands:

http://www.schools.com/

http://www.insurance.com/

But also some smaller niche sites:

http://www.citytowninfo.com/

http://www.oldhouseweb.com/

Now, the disconnect, maybe some of you don't consider these sites blogs. And maybe they aren't. Who really cares? You can get tripped up by terminology.

There's nothing about any of those four sites that an expert SEO/SEM/PPC with a team couldn't replicate (when it comes to the first one, obviously they'd need some capital to buy domains like those.)

In fact, the latter two are almost certainly sites QuinStreet bought from some random small company, because they do that.

So can you make money writing "personal blogging"?

Not if you're writing about your family, and your day to day life, not really. Not unless you're funny or interesting enough to where you could get a book deal anyway (someone like dooce.com)

But if you want to "personally blog" about something like personal finance or higher education? Sure, you can make six-seven figures if you are talented enough.

Forget all that though and just start thinking about making websites. I consider everything I have to be a blog because they're all running Wordpress, but really they're just websites.

To circle back to QuinStreet being publicly traded, you can read their quarterly reports and see exactly how much money they are making in different lead generation industries. Insurance. Education. etc. You can read about acquisitions they make. You can get a feel for how the industries are trending.

And there are other online companies to check out that do similar things:

CHGG
RATE
IAC
DMD
MARK

Someone wanting to get in the website game would really help themselves by spending a day and looking at all of these companies histories, and reading all the quarterly reports for them.

And seeing how they all monetize. There's a lot of ways to go about doing this. There's no one right answer.