Blogging

In the ‘Ask Your Blogging Questions Here’ thread, franky asks:

How do you really start a new (niche) blog? Many times the ’10 articles’ and ‘establish yourself as an authority’ is managed, but what pace to set during the first period?

There are two established strategies to successfully launch your blog – the big bang model or the bootstrapping model – and these differ in terms of resources available to the blog owner.

The Big Bang Approach

If you have any one of these two:

• a lot of money
• plenty of good contacts in the industry

This is the ideal way to go. You can write a lot of quality content in advance (around 30-50 articles), and around launch time either spend big or network big and get the word out as quickly and as widely as possible.

Lots of good content + a lot of eyeballs generally translates into a good, successful launch, but there are two factors that you have to cater for.

One, make sure you’re working in a profitable niche.

Two, make sure you have a ‘phase 2’ – a plan for what to do and how to manage your blog after the launch. It won’t be possible to maintain the same blogging rhythm as during launch, and you’ll have to find a solution that scales and not just eats up your time.

Bootstrapping Approach

Best if you don’t have much time or money. Simply start blogging, putting out 1-2 articles per day and posting them on your blog. Promote your blog but at this stage focus on the key activities – attracting attention of the top blogs, writing linkbait, getting links from trusted sources, etc.

The key here is to focus on what you can do with the resources available to you – so if you’re the only blogger and you can’t churn out 5 articles a day, don’t go down that road, it’s not sustainable or scalable. If you can’t spend 4 hours a day promoting your blog, ruthlessly eliminate all but the most important of promotion activities and spend just 1 hour.

Cut down using the 80/20 rule and focus on what’s really important – quality content, picking a good niche and promoting through the right channels.

A 7-Step Checklist to Launching A New Blog

This checklist is based on the strategies I used to launch my own blog, Soccerlens (see the DBT face off here).

1. Provide resources that can be linked to, downloaded, read, discussed, etc. Do this at the start, and if possible prepare them in advance.
2. Get initial links from high-PR, high-trust blogs such as Performancing and ProBlogger by participating in blogging contests and writing articles about your own blogging experiences. I’d add Marketing Pilgrim, Blog Herald and Daily Blog Tips to the list while Chris Garrett and Mark Ghosh do roundups as well. There are probably more that I’m missing – bottom-line, pro blogging sites are a good source of links.

   Think of all the people who’ve removed ‘no-follow’ from their blogs’ comments!

3. Establish and settle into a blogging rhythm as quickly as possible. Don’t fret about writing 20 articles in advance – just start writing them one by and one and put them on your blog.
4. Apply to be editor in Dmoz and BOTW Blog Directory for your niche’s category. If you’re accepted, build up those sections and add your site too 🙂 JoeAnt accepts applications automatically, so consider signing up there as well.
5. Make a list of the top bloggers in your niche and collect as much info as you can about them. Read their blogs daily and understand what type of stories interest them and what they link to. Then for each author, tie in their interest in a couple of your articles and ping them the URLs (without asking for anything in return). Your goal is to get them to be regular readers, links will come by themselves.
6. Remove all obstacles that prevent your readers from subscribing to your feed, from commenting on your blog, from sharing it with others, from linking to it and from finding things on your blog. This means not asking for ‘registration’ before commenting, showing your RSS feed (and email subscription box) above the fold, a prominent search box, a clear listing of site categories, social bookmarking icons (done subtly they look really good), etc.
7. Have fun and be yourself – without these two things, your best work will come across as ‘forced’ and ‘unnatural’. If your readers don’t see your passion in your writing, how are they going to respond? In kind, by not getting excited about what you’re writing and drifting away.

   Thanks Liz for teaching me this.

8. Bonus Tip: I used the thought of beating my competition as motivation to work harder. Fretting about stats isn’t an ideal habit but if it helps you make your blog better then it does have some value.

It’s ok to start slow and build things up, but it’s important not to lose momentum once you’ve built it up – nothing is worse than taking your site to the top and then getting lazy and allowing it to fall back down in rankings, earnings and readership.

Also Read:

Starting a Professional Blog – Choosing a Niche
Starting a Professional Blog – Qualifying your Niche
Blogging Mistakes – Launching on an Empty Shell
How To: Launch A New Blog The Easy Way
Planning A New Blog Venture
10 Business Models for Bloggers
10 Key Ingredients of A Great Blog
Positioning Your Blog
10 Step Plan To A Profitable Blog

If you have any questions related to search marketing, blog promotion, WordPress or blogging in general, ask me here.

How do you put a price on a blog?

The free valuation tools commonly available suck – you cannot place a value on your blog by counting links and PageRank and at the same time not considering actual revenues, site traffic and a dozen other factors that are relevant to blog valuation.

To be honest – there’s no perfect formula for blog valuation. What I can do is share the factors that I consider important (these may change depending on specific cases or on the buyer’s goals) and discuss one way of calculating the value of a blog. Feel free to jump in and share your own views here.

Valuation Factors to Consider

Niche Potential

Used to evaluate if a blog is making less or more than the average in that niche for a blog with that amount of traffic. If a blog is under-monetized then it gives the buyer leverage in the buying process. On the other hand, if the blog owner knows that his blog is under-monetized he can then focus on attracting advertisers and adding different revenue streams to his blog prior to putting it up for sale. Fatten the cow, so to speak.

If a blog is in a highly profitable niche this will have some impact on blog valuation, but this is only in relation to whether the site under-monetized or not.

Expenses

What does it cost to run the blog? Hosting, blogger time, promotion, administration – take everything into account.

Revenue Analysis

How much is that site earning?

How much did it earn in the last 6 months (month-by-month breakdown)? Take the average and that is a more realistic revenue estimate for the blog.

What are the major revenue sources? If it’s just one, it’s a risky proposition and the buyer invariably has an advantage in negotiations. On the other hand, if you have 3-4 or more sources of revenue and they all earn reasonably well, you have a very business and the price invariably goes up.

Traffic Sources

Does the blog have high search engine rankings?

How many feed subscribers?

Is there a mailing list / newsletter?

Is the comments section active or passive, and is there any value in the discussion (or are people just saying ‘this sucks’ and ‘that rocks’)?

Does the blog get mentioned regularly on other websites? Does this bring in traffic?

Premium

What is the site design worth?

What would the domain name alone be worth (think of branding, established reputation, etc)?

What is the content worth, if anything (search engine rankings and traffic matter here)?

Social Reputation

Some niches are more easily polarised than others (for example: pop culture and sports) and it’s easier to offend segments of the audience through them.

Is the blog recognised in its niche as a leading blog? Do fellow niche bloggers read the blog (a big, big positive)? Does the blog enjoy a negative reputation for past actions?

Anything positive is just bonus, but if the blog has a negative reputation it may become difficult to make it grow beyond a certain point.

On the flip side, how big a brand is this blog in its niche? Does it have media recognition? Is it recognised in non-niche circles as the leading blog in its niche (as Danny’s SearchEngineLand is)?

Blog Branding

Is the blog attached to the personal brand of the lead blogger or is it all about the content?

TechCrunch and MarketingPilgrim are two examples of blogs that were built on the personal reputation of their lead bloggers but have successfully moved away from personal branding and towards building the blog as a standalone brand.

If the blog relies strongly on the main blogger to relate to the community, it becomes difficult for new owners to run it with the same amount of success and as a result the price can go down.

How Do You Value a Blog

What are we going to do with these factors? I use a simplified valuation formula that works like this:

Blog Value = Premium + ((Monthly Revenue – Monthly Costs) x Multiplier)

The Premium is established based on the value of the content, site age, design, established rankings, community, etc. Revenue – Costs is a straightforward calculation.

The key difference where people have issues is the multiplier.

As Andy Hagans has discussed here, there’s a wide discrepancy between offline businesses and online blogs – whereas blogs often go for 1x or 2x their yearly profit, real-world businesses often go for 10x on yearly profit (plus premium).

The challenge here is to build defensible traffic, to have multiple monetization methods, to build a great brand, to have an active community and to make your blog indispensible to your niche.

The better you are at all of the above, the higher you can push that multiplier.

If your blog gets traffic exclusively from Yahoo, only earns from AdSense and is unknown outside your niche, it’s not going to get more than a 1x multiplier.

On the other hand, if your blog is the ProBlogger of its niche, you could name your asking price and easily charge a 5x or 10x multiplier.

A Few Problems

The problem with establishing a Premium and a Multiplier is that these decisions are subjective and as such the valuations of two experiences domainers will almost always differ. Because of this it’s always a good idea to have 2-3 people independently value a blog – whether you’re selling yours or looking to buy one.

Putting a price on your blog (and developing a blog exit strategy) is always a good idea no matter at what stage you are with your blog.

Have you valued your blog? If so, please share your methodology and what factors you considered most important.

Currently I’m in discussion with bloggers for starting four different blogs – and in each case, the author was stumped when I asked him the following question:

Where do you see yourself and your blog in 2 years?

This isn’t about setting goals for yourself – it’s about knowing what you want to achieve with your blog, and planning for your exit if circumstances require you to do so.

Why you should ALWAYS have an Exit Strategy:

• You might lose interest in the subject
• You may need the extra cash
• You could get a dream gig at another blog
• You might start a new blog / business that needs more of your time
• The niche / blog is peaking and you’d want to strike gold while the the iron’s hot (apologies for mixing metaphors there)
• You’ve fallen ill and can’t blog at the same pace / volume any more

Your reasons for leaving / ending a blog could be positive or negative – the idea is to be prepared so when the time arrives, you are prepared to hand the blog over to someone else, sell it off or further ‘automate’ it so that it takes less of your time.

Done right, you could stand to make good money from your blog in a couple of years.

7 Components to a Blog Exit Strategy

1. Don’t plan to quit

A contradiction – but the fact is that to make a blog successful you need to work smart and put maximum effort where it’s needed. If your heart’s not in it and you’re doing this with the big payday as your goal, you’re not going to get the desired results.

2. Get other bloggers on board as soon as possible

Whether you have to hire them, find like-minded friends or bribe them with fame and fortune, aim to turn your blog into a multi-author blog (or one with substantial guest contributions) asap, preferably as soon as you start.

This way the blog doesn’t become over-dependent on the voice of one person, and it is a lot easier to transition to new owners.

3. Multiple Monetization Methods

This is sound business advice as well as a must if you want to be able to sell your blog in the future – having a business reliant on just one source of revenue (such as AdSense) is risky. Find affiliate programs, sell advertising, sell products / services if possible and find alternatives to AdSense (TLA, Chitika, Intellitxt, Auction Ads, Amazon, etc).

4. Know your costs

There are many hidden costs of running a blog that bloggers often ignore. The biggest one is the cost of the blogger’s time – if a new owner was to come in and hire someone to blog regularly, how much would they pay them?

Other costs include hosting costs (if you are hosting multiple blogs on one server then your personal costs are averaged out but it might not be the case for a new owner), cost of paying your guest bloggers (even if they blog for free now) and the value of time / actual money spent in promotion / administration.

If you subtract all your costs from your revenues and you realise that you’re turning in a loss instead of a profit, it’s time to rethink your business strategy.

5. Treat your blog as a business

You’re here to make money, so don’t kid yourself – get serious and focus on those activities that will bring in advertising dollars.

And remember that without quality content and a strong community, advertising won’t come to your blog.

6. Build a strong community

Internet marketers are fond of saying that ‘the money is in the list’. The parallel in blogging is that a strong, active community around your blog is a monetizable audience and as such is very valuable.

Start a newsletter. Provide free reports to capture email addresses. Develop a community and establish multiple lines of communication with them.

7. Diverse Traffic Sources

If you have a sizeable audience then you are not reliant on search engines.

But are you reliant *just* on the community?

Having regular readers, search engine traffic, constant referrals from other websites – all are important components of building site traffic and you shouldn’t ignore any one of them.

The beauty of preparing for exit is that once it focuses you to develop a business model that is efficient, has optimal monetization and is capable of running without you being involved in day-to-day decisions.

While preparing for your exit, you’ll also have built a hands-off, self-reliant, stable and automated business.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

This article will show you how to place AdSense code (or any other ads) between posts on your WordPress blog’s main page – the same approach can be used to place ad blocks in your archive pages (including category and author archives).

I’m going to explain the conceptual part first (yes, I just like to hear myself talk) and give code examples later – if you want to skip to the code, just scroll down.

How-To – Basic Concepts

The basic concept (so you can port it to a blogging platform other than WordPress) is that you want to place ads after X number of posts on the main page.

Let’s say that you want to put ad blocks after the 1st post and the 3rd post – so you would then find a way to dynamically count the number of posts that are being shown and set it so that after the 1st post and the 3rd post.

In WordPress the main process used to show posts to visitors is called ‘The Loop’ (read this and this for more info). In programming terms it’s a while () loop that continues to show posts one by one until it meets a condition that tells it to stop (such as a WP setting that limits the blog to show the latest 15 posts on the main page) or if there are no more posts.

If we’re able to count how many posts the while () loop has already shown (by declaring a counter variable outside the loop and incrementing it inside the loop, and then using the value of that counter as a test condition), we can easily program our blog to show ads after a set number of posts.

That’s not where this stops though – you can also edit your theme outside the loop to put ads at the start and/or end of each index post (right before the previous / next post navigation), without any fancy counter stuff.

Ok, now for the code and the walkthrough.

How-To – Step-by-Step

Remember to bookmark this page for future reference if you don’t have time to implement this right now.

The following walkthrough will show you how to put ads after the 1st and the 3rd posts on your blog’s main page.

You can copy-paste the code below – but please remember that you might need to customise it to suit your theme / adsense plugin.

1. Log into the Admin area (Dashboard) of your blog and go to Presentation->Theme Editor.
2. Find the link titled ‘Index’ or ‘Main Index Template’ (or something similar) and click on it – the index.php file will now load.
3. Somewhere in your index.php file (if you use Firefox, press ctrl-F and paste ‘have_posts()‘ in it), there will be this line: .

   Essentially, this is the starting point of the WP ‘Loop’ which is used to display blog posts on your main page and often the archive, author and category pages as well.

4. Once you locate this line, add the following line before it:

   and the following line after it:

   This will help you dynamically count the number of posts that have already been shown by the Loop, so that when the first and 3rd posts are shown, we can trigger a command that allows us to show the adsense code.

5. If you scroll down, you’ll see the code for displaying individual posts and after that, there will be a block of code similar to this:

   At the very least, you’ll see a statement.

6. Right before it, copy-paste the following block of code:

   ' ?>

   ' ?>

   Please, please, PLEASE – repace the bit inside the php echo command (in this case, ) with your own Ad code. I’m using the Semiologic Ad Spaces plugin, which allows me to place a simple tag and indicator of which adblock to show in the template code. From what I understand, the AdSense Deluxe plugin does the same thing. If you copy-paste the AdSense code directly between the single quotes ” like the following example, that will work too:

   
   ' ?>

   I would still recommend using a Plugin here – it makes things MUCH simpler.

   You can also vary the numbers in the if statements to set things up so that the ads ONLY show after the 2nd post, or something similar.

   So instead of writing:

   You would write:

And here’s a bonus tip – on index pages, monetize the end of your index pages as well. To make that work, in your index.php file, scroll to the end and find the code that shows the previous / next posts navigation.

Right below it, add your AdSense code.

And remember, you can also display any other type of ads here – maybe you want to show Chitika ads, or affiliate ads, or even house ads promoting your forum. The monetization possibilities are endless.

Hope you enjoyed this post and for everyone who posted in the AdSense Placement Thread, I hope this helps you follow part of my advice – looking forward to seeing you guys optimize your ads.

Also read these articles by Chris Garrett:

• How to create Intelligent Blog Ads

  If you want to squeeze every last drop of revenue potential out of your blog without annoying your loyal visitors then you need to be a bit clever about the way you display advertising.

• How to create Intelligent Blog Ads – Part 2

  What can we do about recognising first-time readers versus regular readers? The idea is a first timer is more likely to click ads and less likely to sign up, while a regular reader is more likely to subscribe to your feed and also more likely to get annoyed by over the top advertising.

And if you have more questions on AdSense, let me know here.