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 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 book after asking a decent question. Of course, I’ll have more on that panel later.
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 MoreDay 3 Affiliate Summit – Part 1
Still sick, I managed to get as much sleep as I could and skipped breakfast in favor of that goal. Once I slept as much as I could without skipping more than just some food, I headed down for the Super Affiliate Strategies that Work panel. I was interested to see how this differed from the What Super Affiliates Want panel I attended at the last Affiliate Summit in Miami.
It was a great panel, and I hear it was standing room only. Rock on – my sick self managed to score a seat otherwise I never would have lasted in there. It was a great panel by Kris Jones of Pepperjam, Amit Mehta, Zac Johnson, and John Chow. It was mostly Q&A from the audience with a little bit of moderation from Kris, so lots of good stuff. Someone actually blatantly asked about black hat tactics…to which he received a pretty unbiased response from John that he was just better off in the long run to stick with whitehat tactics if he wants to be a success overall. Which makes sense to me. Since this session was Q&A style it was pretty different from last year’s panel I already mentioned, which is good for me. I’d hate to get a lot of duplicate content. Some great points I picked up from the session are:
- Amit looks for a niche where there’s a lot of search traffic and builds a site with content & landing pages. Optimizes through SEO.
- Keep working on content & adding new things.
- Relevant content around affiliate links help the buyer make a decision.
- The long tail search terms are more stable for long term success.
- There’s an incredible risk for affiliates using black hat tactics. There’s an incredible amount of opportunity in white hat channels so you’re better off keeping your nose clean.
- John noticed that people were scraping his RSS feed and he started by sending cease & desist orders and trying to go after the culprits, but when the culprits became too many he just started throwing ads into the RSS and continued to make money off them.
- Develop your business system & that’s something that no one can just copy off of you.
- Amit uses an umbrella domain then makes sub domains for the more specialized, high traffic stuff or registers an alias and redirects the traffic.
- Social networks (resources, Facebook applications) are what’s hot right now.
- Yahoo & MSN seem to convert better for whatever reason than Google. Google users are more savvy.
- Spaces between 3 & 5 are the sweet spot in search results. Constantly bidding for the Sponsored Results box may not necessarily be worth your time.
- Day parting (bidding lower during the night) can increase ROI
- Continually split test everything.
- Have a great relationship with your affiliate manager and that will help you to leverage to increase commission rates or added bonuses.
- Amit advocates his strategy of bidding on hundreds of keywords and spread the sales between them, while Kris advocated creating a narrower ad campaign that’s very clearly related to your content.
- Some good programs & tips:
- Winner Alert: everyday it sends you a report with what’s winning
- Efficient PPC
- AdWords Editor
Overall it was a great session, and in case I missed anything J. Botter live blogged from there as well.
After lunch and some hours staffing our booth, I headed to the Asymmetric Warfare: Battling Fraudulent Affiliates session. More on that later.
Read MoreBlogOnExpo – The Day is Here!
Let the games begin! The BlogOnExpo started today, with PsPrint as an exhibitor. There are some great sessions available online FOR FREE! This is the first free online bloggers expo of its kind. Setting precedents is important people! The organizer has done a bang up job of getting some pretty knowledgeable people interviewed and contributing to the online sessions. Today’s contributions are:
Sessions
- Social Media – Neil Patel from ACS SEO
- Logo Design Trends
- What to Do When you lose your Biggest Traffic Source – John Chow
- SEOmoz Guides – Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
Interviews
- Matt Mullenweg
- Guy Kawasaki
- John Chow
- Darren Rowse
- Ryan Block
Having personally attended sessions with Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin on the panels, I can say that those will be great quality and I’m looking forward to checking them out. Darren Rowse is also a great guy (man behind ProBlogger.net) whom I enjoy following on Twitter, so that should be a good interview as well.
The expo will run for a few days, so mosey over and check it out.
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