Worlds Largest Community of Professional Bloggers

That’s what it says in our press releases, and on parts of the Performancing blog, and you know what? It’s true. We now have close to 2000 active members, all here to help each other find and perfect ways of making income from their passion, blogging.

It’s not the end of the story though. Many people have asked us over the last few months about our business model, and how we plan to monetize our website.

Whereas we’ve always been a little reluctant to give away the entire plan, I think the time has now come to fill in at least some of the details.

The Performancing Business Model

We’re still not quite ready to give away every detail. Despite there being a worrying trend among the digirati to shout their plans from the rooftops before they’ve even built and posted to a website, that’s just not for us. Performancing LLC is a business, and as such have invested what we would consider a lot of money in our model, and although the time will come when all will be revealed, that time is not now.

That doesn’t mean I can’t give you some idea of where we’re headed, and the thinking behind what we’re doing though. Im going to try and do that right now.

First a Little History

The original idea for Performancing was to build an ad network. Not another Adsense clone, and not another text link ads clone (my partner Patrick already runs the largest company in that market), but something we felt bloggers would really like, and that stood an excellent chance of success.

Somewhere during the planning out of that network came the idea that it might be better, if we involved the blogging community in what we were planning more. After all, if we really want you guys to like what we do, who better to help plan it?

Of course you can’t do that unless you have some folks to talk to about it, so we figured we would do the sensible thing, and start blogging on subjects related to advertising, making money, writing compelling copy and all other aspects of what we would consider “professional blogging”. By building up a community of like minded bloggers, bloggers like ourselves, that were interested in making money from their blogs, we would eventually have a great bunch of people to bounce ideas off of, and help us shape the money making end of this business.

I hope that makes sense. My point is, that we think YOU are the best people to decide what you want from an ad network, not us.

So, we started posting, and unsurprisingly, found some great folks that were willing to share their experiences and skills with the community to the benefit of us all. (dont think for a moment that I, Chris or anyone else here knows all there is to know about blogging, that just isnt possible heh..).

Then along came Performancing Firefox

Whilst dreaming up ways to get our site noticed, I came up with this small idea to build a neat firefox extension. A little harmless “linkbait” to help get a new blog off the ground, and noticed by some of the big kids.

That extension has become a monster! To this date, its the most fun thing I’ve worked on, and has gone a long way to prove my belief that involving the community in the production of tools and services for the community is a strong idea.

So Where Are We Headed?

Well, for starters let me clarify a few things:

• We will continue to post, and to encourage you, our members, to post, and continue to build the worlds largest community of professional bloggers.
• We will continue to develop Performancing Firefox, we love it ,and so apparently do you 🙂
• We will almost certainly not produce any revenue oriented products this year. For 2006, we just want to focus on the community, and the free tools we make available to it.
• Our free tools will remain free, forever. Your use, enjoyment, and participation with those tools/services will NOT be hampered in any way by the revenue generating side of our business.
• When we do start work on the revenue side of the business, it will almost certainly be advertising related, and you will definately have a say in how it develops.

The next step for Performancing is our next free tool/service. We are due to launch this month, and I know for a fact that it will just blow you away, seriously. Whereas Performancing Firefox was an idea we turned around quickly into a reality, the new tool/service has been in development for months, and is quite literaly stunning.

I can’t wait to announce, but as I said above, despite current trends, we’re just not in the habbit of making empty announcements or promises. We’ll show it to you when there is something to show.

After that, the Performancing blog will be about 3 distinct, but related topics:

1. Professional Blogging, as always.
2. Development and support of Peformancing Firefox
3. Our new tool/service

Toward the end of the year, we will start developing our revenue generating products. Again, I’d like to state that these will not interfere with your use and enjoyment of our free services and tools. They will be strictly opt in, and you can take them or leave them.

Clearly that is a little way off though, and the time frame is large part of the reason why I can’t be more specific. A lot can happen in a year, the competitive landscape could change entirely, and whilst we are concentrating on the community and our free tools and services we don’t feel it would be sensible to lock ourselves into any course of action that far down the line.

At this point, it just seems sensible to remain as flexible as possible.

Questions?

If you have any questions, or suggestions, we’d love to hear them! So do post a comment and let us know, we’ll answer anything we feel we can do without breaking our core philosophy of not blabbing before there is something to blab about.

In particular, I’d love to know what you guys would like to see posted on the site. What is it that you’d like to see happen here that we’re not already doing?

Thanks everyone, I hope that all makes sense and that it answers at least in part some of the questions that come through from time to time about the Performancing business model.