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Supplement Your Blogging Income With E-Reports

Andy talks about RFIDNews.org and their paid archive subscription model. This is an excellent idea and a carryover from niche newsletters. I remember the newsletter craze of the early 1990s. Business, entrepreneurship, health, law, and financial newsletters commanded $97-1,000/yr per subscription, but had to be spot on with their articles. Just a few dozen subscriptions could sustain a business, and because such costs qualify as “professional fees”, subscribers can often use them as a tax writeoff.

If you have extensive experience in a niche industry, you could utilize your special knowledge by producing something equivalent to a newsletter. For example, I’m working on a hush-hush project with someone to produce a large series of free and paid e-reports (in PDF format). We’ll be launching a blog as well, which will excerpt/showcase the topics of the reports, in order to generate SE traffic. The paid reports will provide case studies, but the free material will cover most of the concepts. So there’s value in both.

This method, if you pick a suitable topic, could sustain a writing/ blogging career, without you having to beg for donations, or hope that someone clicks on your contextual ads. Now while we are not producing monthly reports per se, if you think that you can regularly produce ultra-high quality content weekly, biweekly, or monthly, you may want to look into offering subscription e-reports (PDF format). This is slightly different than the paid archives Andy discusses, and requires an extra time commitment. But the returns can be very sweet.

You will need free blog content and free teaser reports, and both will have to show that you know what you are writing about. If you have contacts with experts in your field, you may able to get some guest articles – although they’ll cost you dearly. But since you can typically charge $97 – $147 – $197 – $247 – $297/yr, it may be worthwhile, and a strong selling point. And industry professionals are likely to subscribe if you produce quality reports.

A series of one-off reports could also be lucrative, and would not require the same kind of commitment. If you plan a loose schedule of, say, 10 reports per year, and do not assign dates to them, a 50- to 100-page report could go for $27-47-97 or more, depending on the topics and how much of a niche you’re filling. You may not make a large amount of money in the first year on each report, but for 4 weekends of work, you may be able to supplement your blogging.

So if you sell 50 copies per e-report in the first year, at $27+ each, that’s 10 x $1350/yr = $13,500 minus advertising/ promotional costs. That’s not a lot, certainly not a lot to live on. But the long-tail phenomenon suggests that the sales per report will be exponentially decreasing over time, and that you may sell more copies in total in the “tail” of the life of a report than in just the first year.

If your topics are timeless, over 3-10 years you may earn some nice returns for 10-20 hours of work per month. So in the second year, you’ll have sales of new reports and older reports. In a couple of years, you could very well commit full-time and not have to rely on contextual advertising.

Why Micropayments and Donation Biz Models SUCK

The news that Kottke ditched the donations biz model he started a year ago comes as little surprise. At the time, I posted that I hoped he had a better plan than that and was none too kind about the whole ludicrous idea of expecting readers to support a blogger for just blogging. I don’t take any great delight in seeing Jason fail, I don’t know him, but Im certainly glad to be able to point to a great example of the models failure. Maybe now we can drop that silly line of reasoning once and for all.

We have talked about models where one would pay to get into the archives of a particularly useful blogs content, and indeed it seems to work well for some, but that’s a very different model to simply holding out your hand and hoping enough pennies come your way to feed the family.

Maybe it’s just me, though i suspect not, that finds the idea of the donation button repulsive?

Productivity: Content Recycling

As Chris pointed out in “Do Something Different – Mix it up” there are moments when you are stuck in routine and enthusiasm is going down.

Are you always more willing to create new projects instead of hanging with the old ones?
But how to get the new content?

My tip: Use valuable content you have already published and renovate it.

I am going to mix the two subjects ‘motivate yourself’ and ‘recycle content’. I’d say that you can reach these two goals with one action. Start a new platform and use the ‘old’ content to speed up your new project. A speed booster factor of two or three should be normal compared to creating all content new from scratch. The result still can be doubled by taking care of two publishing platforms – the old one and the new one.

Side note – ‘meta articles’: If your content is ‘news’ or ‘product’ … no big problem with ‘content recycling’ … it’s a question of the mix and your editorial capabilities … old news make wonderful keyword rich ‘overview’ lists. Just use your archive (= old content) as the research source for new articles. Create ‘meta’ articles like ‘what did I get for 500 bucks two years ago compared to today’. Do heavy linking to the old articles! Don’t forget the title tags and the bookmarking and tagging!

The editorial and technical trick is ‘content enrichment’. Let’s say you still have an old PHPNuke platform hanging around with nice content but the site itself is not state of the art anymore. You are seriously motivated to switch to a new platform because YOU would like to use all that geeky new stuff (active sidebars, RSS feeds, Javascript includes, …). Well, I’d say so do your readers! Don’t try to tune your old platform to be fit for all that geeky stuff. You could do so but I promise you will not reach that ‘motivate yourself’ goal. It’s just work. Instead of tuning the old platform just open a new system and enrich old content with new features on the NEW platform. The fresh design and the new features will attract old and new readers (like switching from PHPNuke to a more modern blogging platform).

Now you are playing around with your new system. That’s a lot of fun. But how to get the ‘content issue’ solved? If you follow your statistics and see that you have many new readers then renovating the old content (on both systems!) is still a good and valuable editorial ‘trick’ (newspapers do it by publishing their archives to the web). Take content from the ‘old’ page and do some renovation. Let’s say you have a photo blog … the pictures itself don’t get ‘bad’ just by hanging around in the archives of the other site. Just publish them again on a new article on your new site. You must find your own way of ‘refreshing’ the content!

BTW, if your articles on the ‘old’ site are in the archive for like six months think about to bring them back to the front page in a renovated new version and attach advertising for your new site (trap!: don’t just change the article date, please see “Managing Titles and Paths For Traffic”). Call it ‘refreshment’, ‘update’, ‘follow-up’ or whatever … the goal is to get changing content on your front page and to draw readers to both sites. The old page can pretty comfortably hang around online for as long as you want it. Nobody forces you to switch or migrate from one day to another.

Talk to your readers about the new site. Ask for comments. If you do it right and polite you will gain new readers on both platforms. That is a third goal which comes in handy through the back door.

Regarding the better productivity … it should be obvious that you can’t use old content 100% but you can have a ratio up to 90% old content to 10% new content. Your primary self motivation is the fun to create the new platform. Instead of solving the content issues with ‘lorem ipsum’ text you do some heavy copy and pasting plus the very important ‘content enrichment’. I’d say that only costs you the amount of 20% to 30% of the work you would have to invest for newly created content.

Reading this article I must admit that it is a pretty rough ride ‘concept wise’ … not as clear and straight forward as I would like it to be. But I just wanted to paint a rough picture … pretty ‘bloggish’ isn’t it 🙂 Let me know what you think? Did you do ‘content recycling’ yourself before? How was the success?

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, blogging, content, management, recycling, productivity, writing, publishing, archive, editorial

Do Something Different – Mix it up

Have you found your enthusiasm is waning? Are your traffic stats plateauing or even showing a downward trend? When you get comments are they from the usual suspects? Feel like you are living in an echo chamber with no new ideas or perspectives?

When blogging becomes routine it is very easy to get stuck in a rut. You read the same old blogs, talk to the same people, write the same posts and stories about the same or similar topics. If you do what you have always done you will always get the same results. It’s time to mix it up a bit.

Decide to be different

In some cases it only takes the thought that you would like to make a change that causes the change. It’s a little bit quantum, heh. Just intending to do things differently could make all the difference.

There definitely is a comfort zone to blogging. In the early days of a new blog everything is new. Each post could feel like you are breaking new personal ground. After a while though things become familiar and that is when there is a danger of the familiar turning into the stale. Repeating themes can be a good thing, when you start sounding like a broken record it is time to take action.

New reading

First the easy stuff. Remember when you started your blog you went out and found the best sources of information? Do that again, find fresh new sources. Go to technorati, digg, del.icio.us, et al. New websites launch every day, if you have not been consciously looking they might have passed you by. In many niches it is so easy to only notice the a-listers when actually a lot of the original thinking is not in those echelons.

Use different search terms and decide to look for websites that deviate from your normal viewing habits also. This is not an exercise in more-the-merrier, you are trying to change the flavour not just improve or increase it. If you really struggle here is a radical idea; ditch your OPML and start from scratch. You might be surprised at how markedly different it turns out.

Go to the library or book store and browse the isles, and not just your favourites. You might be inspired by new topics or find a great brand new book for your existing ones with a new perspective.

Different blogs, different strokes

One of the good things about having multiple blogs is you are forced to be exposed to different themes, topics, social groups, etc. On my personal blog one of my favourite topics is all things related to Canada. Because of my “canadian connections” I also see news items that relate to my other blogging topics. For example I spotted a story about a photographer being stopped by police for photographing the Calgary LRT, this was a perfect story for my DSLR photography blog. These are things others in my niches are less likely to see, especially if they are only ever focussed on their particular niche for inspiration. Perhaps starting a new blog could freshen up your old one?

80/20

As Nick says, it doesn’t hurt to drift off-topic once in a while. When you do though, for best results make an effort to relate it somehow to your niche. Also make sure you tag your post very effectively. This will cast your net to not just a wider audience but a whole new audience where you ordinarily would not be on the radar. Try and think what different, but related, audiences would like to see. Put yourself in their shoes.

Change of viewpoint

It might be all it takes is to think with a different point of view. What would your niche look like in a different geography, or up-market or down-market. How would your topic be perceived by someone with less experience or more experience? Are there biases in your niche that could be explored from the other side of an argument? In some cases there might be dogma that can be investigated for their validity.

If all else fails you could consider bringing in fresh blood. Another brain and another voice might be just what your blog needs to keep fresh. New people have different ways of looking at things and their own ideas for what to write about and how things should be done. You don’t need to agree on everything, in fact it could be an advantage if you don’t.

You?

Those are my ideas for how you can keep your blog fresh, how do you keep your blog feeling original, fresh and new?

Productivity: Clipboard as Auto Save

I just thought about how to auto magically save my textual work without all these file here, file there and how to name it aspects. Just auto magically save my work without all the hassle. All these nasty ‘did I really delete this text’ moments are gone with my solution.

Best of all … It works for absolutely every application because it uses a system wide available feature and it gives you chronological versions … primitive but very effective.

It is so easy … use a clipboard monitor!

What is a clipboard monitor? A clipboard monitor is a feature which exists in every good editor. A clipboard monitor automatically appends data copied to the clipboard to a file or draws it into an an internal application which manages clipboard activities. If you are lucky this file can be auto saved every n minutes. If you are very lucky both applications ‘monitor’ and ‘manager’ can run parallel and give you plenty of possibilities to monitor, manage and save your textual work just by the simple use of ‘copy to clipboard’. Ctrl-C becomes your backup wizard!

Open up the text editor of your choice, open a new file and activate the feature ‘clipboard monitor’ (if available). I am using and recommending two editors of my choice. In PSPad it’s in the menu tools / ‘clipboard monitor’ or can be activated with Alt-M. In Note Tab light it’s the menu Document / ‘Use as paste board’ or the shortcut Shift-Ctrl-P.

PSPad gives you the opportunity to manage every single clipboard entry but doesn’t automatically save the monitored content to a file. The ‘manager’ feature is very helpful because during a day you will have many messy entries and maybe just want to reuse a single one or a single version. PSPad does NOT SAVE the clipboard monitor entries if the application is closed (as far as I know)! This is totally fine for people who don’t need the storage feature of clipboard monitoring. Better use a second application which gives a more messy result but saves every copied text. Below I will explain how to do it with the free text editor Note Tab light.

In Note Tab light it is also very easy to get incremental versions of the saved files if you need it! How to activate and configure the Note Tab light text editor:

Open the general options in menu View / Options
Go to tab Files
Activate ‘make backups‘, backup type ‘incremental‘ and ‘every n minutes‘
Open a new file
Save it as ‘you-name-it.txt’
Activate menu point Document / Use as paste board

So, how to use it? For safety reasons I use to copy the version of my content always when switching views in i.e. PFF or an online editor. I do this automatically to makes sure I always have the latest version in memory in case the application is messing things up. (Side note: It’s also an often criticized AJAX feature if it is not caught by the developers … press ‘back’ and your text is gone!) That’s the old experience with software testing. I learned it the hard way 🙂

You have the choice … it’s a feature not a bug 🙂
In PFF text is copied depending on the viewing style. If your are copying from RTF view the source code is not saved but a text version of your content. If you are using the source code view … well, then the source code is saved.

The best thing is that you can use both applications parallel. Use PSPad as clipboard manager and use Note Tab light as storage device for all the great things you are copying to the clipboard.

Clap hands, spread it, link it, comment it and give feedback how YOU are saving your work!

PS: Paste without formatting … search for PlainPaste.ahk. A double Ctrl-V and formatting is gone …

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Markus, Merz, 2006, clipboard, monitor, manager, tool, cool, auto save, editor, PSPad, Note Tab, text, productivity, safety, storage, backup

Focus or Fail

A thread by Chris McLeod that I commented in got me thinking about focus. Raj has mentioned a couple of times about his zomblogs, and it seems part of the problem is an affiliction I am very familiar with; an addiction to starting projects.

I love starting new projects. The invention part is my favourite bit. I’m aware enough of this part of my character that when it matters I know how to deal with it but if I left it unchecked I would start a new blog every day and never look at it again! What I see in my own work is if I focus my projects do well, if I do not focus they fail.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you should only have one blog. There are many advantages to having several blogs running in parallel

Spreading risk
Network effects
Variety keeps your interest
More income
Learnings from one used in rest
More opportunity to make contacts
Testing ideas
…

With so many advantages I would recommend anyone have at least a go at one more blog. The problem comes when you spread yourself too thin or try to do too many new things at once.

Each blog needs to have a lot of effort put in at the start to ensure it takes root. You need a good body of content so you have at least a small archive. People need to see more than a “hello world” post to decide if they want to stick around or not.

One you have a new blog up and running though you can reduce your time commitment to it down to posting a few times a day and tending your daily comment and spam crop. That is when you have the opportunity to start a new one.

How many blogs are too many? Only you can decide that. It’s based on how much time you have, how much energy you want to put in and how difficult the topics are to find and generate content.

The other problem of course is you really do need to start. I had a phase of buying domains and not doing anything with them, or I would get as far as building a “coming soon” homepage full of promises of how great the new blog will be if I could only get off my big fat arse and build it.

While you might have grand plans for your new blog the only solution to this problem, if it is one you are at risk of falling into, is to actually build something (anything) no matter how imperfect and get it started. Commit to updating it with content and improve as you go along. It is better to have a maintained blog with a default theme rather than a beautiful but contentless blog left to rot.

Some blogs deserve to wither, they are experiments that don’t pan out. That’s fine providing you really did put in the effort. Remember it is hard to judge when a blogs tipping point will be. It takes months before you know a blogs real potential in traffic and income.

For myself I resolve to either drop my domains or do something with them. After our crazy current schedule is more quiet and sane I will create a new blog and actually stick with it.

How about you? Do you find the “million domains and not doing anything with them” experience of Raj and I familiar? Or do you have only one blog and can’t understand anyone wanting more? Let us know ..

Scoble Nails It: Why Full Text Feeds Are GOOD

Not only does Scoble do a fantastic job of describing why full text feeds are good for everyone, including pro/commercial bloggers but he also nails Duncan for slapping Steve Rubel about over his views on RSS which is quite amusing in itself. Much as I’m loathe to break the habit of a lifetime and agree with Steve on anything, I have to say that him and Scoble are bang on the money, and Duncans views are just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Duncan Said:

How bout then RSS advertising actually pays out Steve? The reality is RSS advertising sucks (sorry to my friends at Pheedo who are trying very hard to make it work, and continue to get better at it). I’m yet to find anyone who is making decent money from RSS advertising, particularly compared to traditional on site advertising (both CPC and CPM). Firms like Weblogs Inc can offer full feeds with RSS advertising only because they’Â€Â™ve got enough revenue coming of the main blogs themselves.

[……..]

In another note Steve, I’Â€Â™m starting to worry about you, you are starting to sound more like Scoble every day, please don’Â€Â™t join the everything for free and damn the money crowd, some of us are trying to blog for a living.

To which Scoble went completely off on one, in the nicest possible way of course, but a slaps a slap, and as far as they go, this was pretty interesting, because what came out of it was a fantastic post on why FULL rss feeds really work for both those of us making ad $$$’s on regular web pages and readers. Its a long post, and I suggest you read all of it, but here’s a little snippet to whet your appetite:

So, how does anyone make any money?

Well, let’Â€Â™s stay in TODAY’Â€Â™S world. In today’Â€Â™s world you get journalists, geeks, bloggers, connectors, to read your content and link to it. That’Â€Â™ll bring a larger audience to visit your Web page. How do you do that? Serve out full-text RSS. Why? Cause by doing that you treat the connector with the most possible respect and give him/her the easiest way to consume your content and link to it.

I tend to view the full text vs we want to make money debate a little like the p2p vs record industry debacle. It’s been proven, i think, that p2p users buy more records. And in the same vein, having more link friendly bloggers read your work, weather it be on your blog or in a news reader, the more your influence spreads, and the more links you get, and……. the better rankings, page views and ad clicks you get as a result.

Time Wasters Need Not Apply

I got a great lesson in how to stop other people wasting your time yesterday. Its one thing to be efficient, and dilligent in your productivity efforts, but when you start adding other people to the equation you can quickly get bogged down in tedious, unproductive tasks, conversations and meetings.

I got a chance to talk to Merlin Mann from 43Folders, and before we’d even spoken he’d politely asked if i’d like to bullet point what we needed to get done in our discussion, and asked me if 15mins would be sufficient.

As a result of sticking to a time frame, and having a defined structure to the call, we got what we needed to do done in time, and managed to chat about his odd way of scheduling calls in the process. In fact, he posted about better meetings later that day, and its well worth a read.

The act of deciding what had to be accomplished in the call, followed by agreeing how long it would take made for a very productive meeting, and I learnt a lot about getting other people to be productive when it would affect me in the process.

From now on, im going to adopt the same strategy, as i can’t stand rambling, going nowhere conversations when im busy 🙂

If only we could do that for IM heh….

By the way, the other thing I learnt was that though I consider myself a fast thinker, there is always someone faster — The only reason I dont suspect young Merlin had amphetimines for breakfast is that he actually managed to talk a lot of sense, even at 90mph heh!

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