BlogWorldExpo 08: Making Money Online with a Blog
This was also commonly referred to as the “Super Bloggers” panel. The members consisted, in total, of:
- Jim Kukral, JimKukral.com (Moderator)
- John Chow, JohnChow.com
- Zac Johnson, ZacJohnson.com
- Darren Rowse, ProBlogger.net
- Brian Clark, CopyBlogger.com
- Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney.com
Jeremy was late due to some quality Vegas partying, but once he did arrive he had some quality things to say. They all did, really, but I especially enjoyed Darren & Brian’s takes as I had never heard them speak before and I’d heard John & Zac.
Bullet Point Review!
- Jim asked what their number #1 money maker on their blog was:
- John Chow: Switching from an ad network to direct advertising sales using the OIO Publisher Direct plugin.
- Zac Johnson: Direct ad sales
- Darren Rowse: Recommended affiliate products.
- Brian Clark: Launching a membership site & selling WordPress themes.
- Selling any old crap decreases content value; sell things you actually believe in.
- Bloggers just want to write, not sell, so plugins are useful.
- Write about something that’s interesting or else it’s not sustainable.
- Revenue: 1. Direct Ad Sales 2. Affiliate Programs 3. AdSense.
- BC: Selling things (information, membership, etc) instead of advertising makes more money.
- A couple of years ago readers would complain about ads, but now they’re accepted as par for the course.
- The amount of money to be made in “non-sexy” niches is ridiculous.
- Start with what your readers want to buy, not what you want to sell.
- Offer incentives to sign up for your newsletter – 3x the money to be made with subscriptions.
- Newsletters vs. RSS – it’s way more beneficial to get people onto your email list.
- Aweber – BlogBroadcast tools count is included in RSS subscribers & sends an automatic newsletter with your blog posts.
- Many people still have no idea what RSS is, so offer delivery by email too.
- Blogs don’t have to look monetized.
- Sell yourself using consulting.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Wait until 100 or 1000 readers to bother displaying RSS numbers on the blog.
- RSS subscriber count is powerful for branding and can be factored into ad prices.
- JC: Rule of thumb when setting an ad price – what is the ECPM for that same spot on an ad network? Double that. Offer the ad to run for a month at a time or a quarter, depending on price.
- Condense your header – big headers take up valuable space.
- How much traffic do they see through search? DR sees about 40% to ProBlogger and 60% to Digital Photography School.
- Chitika is a good ad network with powerful blog widgets for contextual, relevant ads.
- Write for your users, not Google. Search traffic is just a bonus.
- It’s a tricky line to keep your editorial integrity and still sell stuff, so don’t sell willy-nilly.
- Build a business – get repeat customers, loyal readers.
- What percentage of the time do they work? A LOT – you have to bust your ass, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme.
- Always look deeply at a product & only recommend valuable things.
- Announce it
- Talk about the product info, merchant or manufacturers information.
- Share testimonials of readers.
- Review your experience with it.
- Credibility is key with sharing information.
- Endorse, review products.
- Sell advertising in newsletters, lots of merchants love that.
- Establish yourself as an expert.
- Remember that Teaching Sells!
This was a very informative panel, and a great way to kick off the sessions. The room was packed, and I especially liked Jim’s approach to using Twitter to get questions for the audience. With a tech set crowd like bloggers, it was highly effective and a great panel for sure.
Read MoreMe, Director of Affiliate Marketing?
Yep, that’s right. As of last week I’ve resigned from PsPrint and I’m now the Director of Affiliate Marketing with New Edge Media, an awesome media agency out of Dallas, TX. I was recently in Dallas right after attending CJU and Blog World Expo to meet some coworkers, get set up, and get the ball rolling on our projects.
I’d point you to the website for my excellent new employer, however they’re so busy working their tails off for clients that the site isn’t ready yet! So for now you’ll just have to take my word that we rock :).
Dallas was a great new experience, as I’d only ever touched down in Texas on layovers on my way to the East coast. I’m so glad that I rented a car and opted for the Garmin navigational device – it was very cool to drive around the city after work was over just exploring and seeing what there was to see. I did have my very awesome boss Brandy drive me through the infamous Grassy Knoll where JFK was assassinated…it’s fairly unimpressive for such a significant place. There is a modest plaque on the ground inset into the grass, but she had to shut up my rambles before I missed that we were driving through.
So I tell you this, dear reader, so you’ll perhaps forgive me for slacking on my reports from CJU and Blog World Expo. I’ll get on that right away, if you’ll have me 🙂
Read MoreCJU Course: 7 Keys to a Stellar Landing Page
I was excited for this panel, which promised some great information on how to perk up your landing pages. The speaker was:
- Olivier Chaine, CEO & Founder, magnify360.
Bullet Point Review!
- Software-as-a-service delivers different landing pages to different visitors.
- Personal based development is growing.
- One experience, “the best” experience doesn’t work for everyone.
- Why do people abandon?
- Intent mismatch: their intent when finding your site doesn’t match what your site delivers (i.e. their intent is research and you have buy links but no reviews, or their intent is to buy and you have reviews but no purchase links).
- Personality mismatch: they just don’t jive with your site.
- Visual design/ease of use: pretty isn’t always the best, you want it to be functional and branded first and foremost.
- Product/Pricing perception: you must understand shopper personality types to sell to the different types of consumers.
- Reinforce Banner/Ad Message.
- Support ad copy; must have direct correlation.
- Image copy can match too.
- Have a strong call-to-action.
- Optimize header & call to action copy.
- Don’t forget the button copy.
- Variation in page flow.
- Form/copy split up.
- Can generate 30-50% lift by splitting form questions into multiple pages.
- Mobile.
- People on their phones have a different intent; may not be ready to buy over the mobile net.
- If they do want to make the purchase they are fast and very transaction oriented.
- Target Behaviorally.
- Look at the profile performance.
- Check weekend performance vs. weekday performance.
- Check branded landing pages vs. non-branded pages.
- Target multiple personalities.
- Look at buying process, purchase attitudes, industry knowledge, learning style, purchase criteria, buyer readiness.
- Design for the customer.
- Why are they here TODAY?
- How do they THINK?
- How do they BUY/STICK?
- What kind of DIALOG is best to have with them?
- TEST, TEST, TEST!
- Use manual testing & improvement.
- AB & Multivariate testing.
- Behavioral targeting & optimization.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Start page variation by removing elements or large ad copy chunks & seeing what happens.
- Try completely different designs entirely.
- Making changes to landing pages allows you to buy more traffic & still be profitable.
- 25% conversion rate increase can mean a 75% volume increase, which means more buying power.
- Start small with behavioral targeting.
- Test often, measure always.
- Work with your sales and customer service departments to optimize.
- Find the right technology partners.
- Have fun & remember that this is about engaging with people.
- What to ask an agency before hiring them?
- Do they optimize manually or automatically?
- Do they focus on small elements or full pages?
- Do they do behavioral targeting?
- What kind of reports & analytics do they have?
- Are they a full service agency?
- Do they have any performance guarantees?
I really learned a lot from this session since I’m not entirely familar with landing pages. This really got me jazzed to apply what I’ve learned the next time I need to assist on a landing page design or even if I have to make one myself! I might even try to do a landing page for something to excercise this new knowledge.
Read MoreBlog World Expo Underway
From miss604’s Flickr Stream
Blog World Expo kicked off this morning and is going strong. Due to a late arriving flight, my desire to sleep overtook my desire to hear today’s keynote – the one I’m looking forward to is tomorrow with Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park & Fort Minor anyway. Ran into some familiar faces right away and hit the ground running into the super blogger panel moderated by Jim Kukral and featuring Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, Brian Clark of Copyblogger, Zac Johnson, John Chow, and Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney, who misunderstood the timing I guess and was 45 mins late 🙂
Great stuff from those guys and I was even randomly picked to win a copy of Darren’s ProBlogger
Next I stayed in the same room for the affiliate marketing panel with Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit, Mike Allen of Shopping-Bargains, and Tim Jones of TheRealTimJones (yes, all familiar names if you listen to RedHatBlueHat). They had some really good stuff and brought up some tools and such that I’m definitely going to be looking into when my whirlwind crazy travel is done. Once again, more to come.
You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t blogged a lot about CJU. Due to the motel I was staying at being so far away and the internet there being spotty I didn’t have a lot of time to get those written up. But I’m working on it!
If you’re stuck at home with Twitter and trying to keep up with what’s going on out here, go to Twitter Search for #bwe08 and you can see all the tweets that attendees have tagged. I’m trying to keep mine updated as I remember to use TwitPic to share a photo of something.
Read MoreCJU Course: Affiliate Marketing 101
As the first course of the conference yesterday, I’m sure there was a lot of pressure for this hour and fifteen minutes to really set the tone for the three days of Commission Junction University. Titled “Affiliate Marketing 101: Back to the Basics”, I attended hoping to maybe pick up some things I didn’t actually know considering I taught a lot of the basics to myself a couple years back. The speaker was:
- Jeremy Palmer, President, QuitYourDayJob.com
I converse with & follow him on twitter and I’ve heard great things about his last projects The Black Ink Projects and Black Ink 2, although haven’t had a chance to check it out myself. I won’t know until Thursday if this session really did set the appropriate tone for the conference or not, but it was definitely worth my attendance!
Bullet Point Review!
- Choose Your Niche
- The niche you choose should be your passion – it’s the easiest foundation to build upon.
- Know a lot about your niche to be successful.
- Develop a Business Plan
- Put together a SWOT analysis for you AND your closest competitors – their weaknesses can be your opportunities.
- Just make it a simple spreadsheet.
- Have a unique selling proposition. It’s not enough to just copy someone else, you have to see what they’re doing and how you can do it better.
- Learn about the customer persona.
- Inventory your own skills objectively – what can you do yourself and what would you be best served by outsourcing?
- Write Value Added Content
- Start writing content before you design your site.
- Content is the key to the site.
- Have 10-15 pages of content before you launch to improve Quality Score.
- Design Your Site
- You must have professional tools to create a professional site.
- Be objective about your experience and consider outsourcing.
- TOOL: 99Designs for design contests – you only pay for the winner, and you pay much less.
- Develop Your Site
- Outsourcing programming can be done on Elance or oDesk quite effectively.
- Be sure to write extremely detailed specifications on what you want the site to do and how it should be done when using outsourced talent.
- With these services you can escrow your payment so that no money is released until certain milestones are done – and done to your satisfaction.
- Test the Waters with PPC
- Google hates “rich pages” (also referred to as “thin landing pages”) where the only intent is a conversion.
- Google recently updated their algorithms and human QC when assigning Quality Scores, so be sure to read up.
- Essentially Google wants you to develop your own content: they want independent reviews, content not found directly on the merchant’s website, and the comparison of several merchants.
- Many affiliates have had good success with video reviews because they resonate more with consumers.
- Remember that Google isn’t the only game in town – test on Yahoo & MSN to discover what works in terms of keywords and ad copy.
- Test & Optimize
- Look at conversions using keywords.
- TOOLS: Tracking 202 (free), Prosper 202 (free), Optimize My Site (paid), Google Website Optimizer (free).
- Pay equal attention to conversion rate and click through rate.
- Don’t use vague or hype laden copy – it won’t convert well.
- Split test your landing pages.
- Build a Sustainable Business.
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
- You want to thrive without Google just in case.
- Facebook Ads are growing with better ROI.
- Remember the viral marketing element (what can you do that people will pass on?)
- You want to be who people will think of when they think of your niche.
- Create a brand for yourself.
- Random Tips
- Some books to check out: Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin & Malcolm Gladwell
- When doing product comparisons, try throwing in a weaker competitor to enhance the value of the better products.
- DO NOT use the standard WordPress template when adding a blog to your site – make sure it looks like the rest of your site.
- Comparison pages only need to be very simple tables.
- Some books to check out: Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin & Malcolm Gladwell
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Mobile has great opportunities for merchants and advertisers, but it’s hard for affiliates. People are not (yet) likely to use mobile devices to make purchases.
- Outsourcing content? Elance is ok but Jeremy expressed some displeasure with what he’s got from that site. An audience member suggested PR Newswire and searching for keywords to find experts.
- My own suggestion is to try going to LinkedIn & looking for experts to approach for writing.
- Go where the good designers and writers hang out to find them – when you go to freelancing sites you’re getting the people who might be hard up for work and not that great of results.
- In regards to CJ, pay a lot of attention to the Network Earnings bar.
- Once your site’s Quality Score tanks, you’re done. You have to start over with a new site because there’s no way to get that back.
Jeremy did an excellent job mixing up the experience level of the information he put forth, knowing instinctively that most people attending wouldn’t quite be at the 101 education level in regards to affiliate marketing.
Read MoreCommission Junction University – Day 1
I’m down here in lovely Santa Barbara for Commission Junction University, and day one is in the can. The weather has been nice…although living in California I’m generally used to this weather, but being in the Southern end of the state there’s a distinctly different feel that I can’t quite put my finger on. But I enjoy it.
I flew from Oakland to Los Angeles on a puddle jumper, and from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara on a pack of gum. Between flights and layovers and cab rides, I arrived at my motel at 12:15am. The room is your average motel fare: 70’s floral bedspread, translucent yellow cords on the lamps, inmate furniture. The room also has a mini fridge, microwave, nicely sized TV, free wifi, and a surprisingly comfortable bed & pillows – not too shabby for $77/night. This makes me glad I’m staying at a real hotel for Blog World Expo this coming weekend.
Because of the high cost of cab fare ($25+), once I got the conference hotel I didn’t want to leave until the end of the day. I ran into Lisa Picarille and Wade Tonkin almost immediately in passing after I registered and headed to the first session, which I’ll cover later. Jeremy Palmer from Quit Your Day Job lead the first “course” as CJU calls them, and Olivier Chaine from Magnify 360 led the second. On a personal note, I read his name in the program and knew the pronunciation would be something like “o-live-e-ay shayne” and was confused when the emcee pronounced it very phonetically (olive-er chain). I was disappointed in CJ when Olivier pronounced his own name at the end of his session much like I’d imagined it was properly pronounced…if you’re going to introduce someone, learn how to pronounce their name.
I digress. Both courses were informative and well done, and I’ll be posting a bullet point review of both later on. After the courses were done I took a quick break and then headed out to the CJU Expo, a small area of tables nicely held outside under umbrellas that more closely resembled the Meet Market at Affiliate Summit than your typical trade show. It was mostly merchants and different CJU programs with tables, with the exception of an OPM (Schaaf Consulting), a couple affiliates (SurfMyAds.com), and a table for the Performance Marketing Alliance.
It’s a good thing I saw that PMA table, because it made it easy to run into some familiar faces in the form of Connie Berg & Brad Waller. Also was able to say hello to Michael Brucker from RingCentral at their table, one of the organizers of the BAAMC whose quarterly meetings I attend. (By the way if you’re an affiliate manager with a company in the SF Bay area interested in getting involved and possibly hosting about 20-25 ppl for lunch some day, let Michael know).
After the expo it was zoo time with the welcoming event being held down the street at the Santa Barbara Zoo. As much as I wanted to go, my phone was practically dead for some reason and my stomach was a bit upset, so I opted to head back to my motel. Tomorrow is a day full of sessions that look pretty good, and a keynote from Guy Kawasaki…who I think may literally be giving me the nifty orange Alltop shirt off his back afterwards. More about that if/when it happens 😉
