Blogging as a Business
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opportunities in Blogging Publishing is changing quickly as more and more readers migrate from paper-based products to electronic media, whether it’s a computer, a tablet, a mobile device, or an e-reader. Change of this sort always creates opportunities, and in the last few years it’s become clear that professional blogging is one of them.
The last decade saw a generation of blogs grow from being side projects and hobbies, into sites with enormous readerships and real revenues. Very quickly blogging has become a legitimate publishing business, and today a survey of the top 100 blogs shows that with a few notable celebrity exceptions, almost all of them are backed by real publishing businesses.
While today the blogging industry has some very professional outfits operating, there is still lots and lots of room for the newcomer. To start with, there are very few household names in blogging. While most people might recognize and know names like Time, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, there are significantly less who know Gawker (http://gawker.com), TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com), Huffington Post (http://huffingtonpost.com), and PopSugar (http://popsugar.com), which are just three of the more high profile sites. There are still many, many people who don’t read online but who will eventually. These folk mean that blogging is an industry with a lot of growth ahead of it, and growth is good for business and good for newcomers.
Opportunities in blogging also arise from the many niches and topics that are still wide open. If you walk into any bookstore and look through the myriad magazines that line the racks, you’ll find there are audiences interested in reading about everything from sewing to tattoos, boating to cooking, movies to shopping. Can you name the blog to read on tattoos? How about a great blog about boating? Think you can find one?
Moreover, for every niche that is big enough to sustain a real paper publication, there are dozens more that are too small for print but big enough online. Where the distribution costs are small and even nil,
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Blogging as a Business
distributed groups can be clumped together to form real audiences, and bloggers have access to audiences that have never really counted before: the so-called “long tail.”
As was often touted during the dotcom boom, the internet is a great equalizer. The difference between one domain name and another is just a few keystrokes. And while you shouldn’t read too much into this (after all, people have to know your domain name to type it in), it is worth remembering that a new voice in blogging can quickly catch on.
Of course because blogging is so accessible, it’s a tempting first business to get into. There is a perception that it’s a zero-cost set-up, and in some ways that’s true. You can start a new blog with not much more than a domain name and a cheap-as-chips hosting account. This is certainly a claim that you could never make about, say, starting a magazine or newspaper, where the physical costs of making and distributing the product can be prohibitive.
What isn’t so obvious, is that to build a blog that is self-sustaining and eventually profitable, does require cash, and it can be a significant amount at that. For as easy as it is to start a blog, it is still hard to produce consistent levels of content, to acquire traffic and readership, and to ultimately generate revenue. While thousands of blogs may open their proverbial doors every day, the funnel of survival can be harsh and many fall into disrepair very quickly.
For hobby bloggers, the costs of operating a blog are hidden in the blogger’s own time. They do the posting, the marketing, and all the other chores of running a blog themselves, effectively eating the costs by doing it in their spare time. But make no mistake, those costs are there and if you want to approach blogging with a business mindset, you need to account for them all.
On the flip side, by looking at blogging as a business, you also bring the longevity that blogging needs to succeed. While hobbyists and less organized competitors fall by the wayside, your operation will keep chipping away, building audiences, growing search traffic, creating a bigger and bigger content archive. In many ways, blogging is an endurance race, requiring a lot of momentum to build up to become a true success story.
distributed groups can be clumped together to form real audiences, and bloggers have access to audiences that have never really counted before: the so-called “long tail.”
As was often touted during the dotcom boom, the internet is a great equalizer. The difference between one domain name and another is just a few keystrokes. And while you shouldn’t read too much into this (after all, people have to know your domain name to type it in), it is worth remembering that a new voice in blogging can quickly catch on.
Of course because blogging is so accessible, it’s a tempting first business to get into. There is a perception that it’s a zero-cost set-up, and in some ways that’s true. You can start a new blog with not much more than a domain name and a cheap-as-chips hosting account. This is certainly a claim that you could never make about, say, starting a magazine or newspaper, where the physical costs of making and distributing the product can be prohibitive.
What isn’t so obvious, is that to build a blog that is self-sustaining and eventually profitable, does require cash, and it can be a significant amount at that. For as easy as it is to start a blog, it is still hard to produce consistent levels of content, to acquire traffic and readership, and to ultimately generate revenue. While thousands of blogs may open their proverbial doors every day, the funnel of survival can be harsh and many fall into disrepair very quickly.
For hobby bloggers, the costs of operating a blog are hidden in the blogger’s own time. They do the posting, the marketing, and all the other chores of running a blog themselves, effectively eating the costs by doing it in their spare time. But make no mistake, those costs are there and if you want to approach blogging with a business mindset, you need to account for them all.
On the flip side, by looking at blogging as a business, you also bring the longevity that blogging needs to succeed. While hobbyists and less organized competitors fall by the wayside, your operation will keep chipping away, building audiences, growing search traffic, creating a bigger and bigger content archive. In many ways, blogging is an endurance race, requiring a lot of momentum to build up to become a true success story.
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10
So building a business out of blogging, like any business, involves investment both in time and money. The questions you want to ask are: What costs need to be accounted for? Where will the revenue come from? How long will it take? Along with these high-level business questions, you’ll also be wondering about the practicalities of running a blog as a business, planning direction, finding and hiring staff, creating content, and marketing.
In this book I aim to answer all these questions as well as to give you a practical, hands-on guide to building a business out of blogging. Like any business, it will take hard work, dedication, savvy, and a bit of luck. As someone who has built a number of blogs, I hope reading through my experience and methods will help you find your path to success.
risk and reward Every business investment comes with risk and certainly blogging is no sure thing. The risks in creating a business out of blogging include:
1. Choosing a Low Potential Niche Perhaps the biggest risk you run is creating the wrong blog. If you start a blog in a niche that has limited potential either because of the audience, the competition, or the revenue potential, then you create a significant impediment to success. You can shift the blog, reinvent it, invent a new way of finding revenue, trounce the competition somehow, or grow the topic’s audience ... or you can choose a niche with strong potential to begin with! We’ll deal with selecting a niche in the next chapter.
2. Not Producing a Popular Product Assuming you’ve picked a good niche to blog in, you still run the risk of producing a bad product. Maybe you hire the wrong staff, maybe you don’t figure out what sort of content people want, or maybe you get the frequency of publishing wrong. There are plenty of factors that go into a good blog. The best way to learn about them on an instinctive level, is to read and think about other blogs in your spare hours over a reasonably long period of time. You’ll also get to read about what goes into hiring and content in later chapters of this book.
So building a business out of blogging, like any business, involves investment both in time and money. The questions you want to ask are: What costs need to be accounted for? Where will the revenue come from? How long will it take? Along with these high-level business questions, you’ll also be wondering about the practicalities of running a blog as a business, planning direction, finding and hiring staff, creating content, and marketing.
In this book I aim to answer all these questions as well as to give you a practical, hands-on guide to building a business out of blogging. Like any business, it will take hard work, dedication, savvy, and a bit of luck. As someone who has built a number of blogs, I hope reading through my experience and methods will help you find your path to success.
risk and reward Every business investment comes with risk and certainly blogging is no sure thing. The risks in creating a business out of blogging include:
1. Choosing a Low Potential Niche Perhaps the biggest risk you run is creating the wrong blog. If you start a blog in a niche that has limited potential either because of the audience, the competition, or the revenue potential, then you create a significant impediment to success. You can shift the blog, reinvent it, invent a new way of finding revenue, trounce the competition somehow, or grow the topic’s audience ... or you can choose a niche with strong potential to begin with! We’ll deal with selecting a niche in the next chapter.
2. Not Producing a Popular Product Assuming you’ve picked a good niche to blog in, you still run the risk of producing a bad product. Maybe you hire the wrong staff, maybe you don’t figure out what sort of content people want, or maybe you get the frequency of publishing wrong. There are plenty of factors that go into a good blog. The best way to learn about them on an instinctive level, is to read and think about other blogs in your spare hours over a reasonably long period of time. You’ll also get to read about what goes into hiring and content in later chapters of this book.
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Blogging as a Business
3. Competition Every business has competition of one sort or another. It might be other blogs or it might be traditional media. If your business grows beyond blogging, then it might simply be other service providers. Competition vies for audience, for revenue, and ultimately for dominance. Even if you scope out a niche very thoroughly and deduce that there is little competition, you can never account for the competition that is sitting in a garage somewhere plotting and planning their strategy for domination. Aside from thorough research, the best defense is to be on guard all the time, to always be looking for ways to be the best, and to think about ways to differentiate your product from your competitors.
4. Running Out of Capital The simple reality of business is that in the beginning you will burn through your cash with little or no return. Later in this book, you can read about three case studies from my own experience where you will see that each blog took many months of losses before hitting break even, and that one set is in fact still burning through cash!
To combat this you’ll need to make sure you have a reasonable amount of capital to begin with. You’ll also need to look for ways to get some revenue as fast as possible to help slow the losses. You’ll need to constantly evaluate whether you are on the right track, whether you can save money somehow, and how much longer you can last.
5. Market Conditions No one can control the broader market conditions. At this point in time, blogging looks to be a good bet with lots of growth potential and more and more advertising moving online. Whether this is true, whether it lasts, who knows? The most important thing is to keep your finger on the pulse. Stay up to date with tech blogs, advertising blogs, blogs for bloggers and publishers, and stay informed. If you feel a change in market conditions coming, adjust your business plan to compensate. If you think there are lean times ahead and you are low on capital, pull back on your plans. Conversely, if you think there’s a boom coming in a particular niche, then you might ramp up to take advantage of it.
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1
While blogging is not without its fair share of risks, there are also plenty of rewards. First and foremost is the satisfaction of running a successful publication. Watching your readership grow, seeing comments and discussion happening on your site, hearing from readers who enjoy the site, and seeing link-backs from sites you respect are all incredibly rewarding.
On a monetary level, a blog business can grow very large. One of the earliest blogging companies, Weblogs Inc, which included powerhouse blogs like Engadget (http://engadget.com) and TUAW (http://tuaw.com), sold for a reported $25m to AOL in 2005. Another high-profile sale occurred in 2007 when environmental blog Treehugger (http://treehugger.com) sold for $10m to the Discovery Network.
While a big sale to a listed company isn’t on the books for every blog, it’s certainly possible to do well purely on operating profits and revenue. In the case studies in this book, you’ll read about two blogs that I’ve worked on which have been fortunate enough to hit profitability and turn over enough cash to grow other businesses and to expand themselves to bigger revenues and larger audiences.
In fact, later in this book we’ll look at how a blog can not only become very successful in its own right, but can also become the engine that drives new businesses such as blog networks, apps, services, or products like books and job boards.
a sketch of a Blog Business
What does a blog business look like? Who works there? How does it operate? While every business is unique in its operation, it’s possible to sketch out a broad set of roles to get a picture of what a blog business might look like, what staff will be needed, how workflow might be organized, and how a blog business might actually function on a day-to-day level. We’ll expand on this sketch in later chapters to flesh out a fully function model of blog business.
Roles
There are some roles that must be filled in any functioning blog. They are:
1. Writing The most basic function of a blog is to generate content, so someone is going to have to write that content day in and day out. We’ll discuss writing content in detail in Chapter 5.
2. Editing For a professional blog, some sort of editing will be essential to create a consistent standard of quality. We’ll cover editing in detail in Chapter 5.
3. Managing Writers and Contributors Writers and contributors will need management to ensure their work is in on time, their questions are answered, and they get paid. We’ll cover site management in more detail in Chapter 4.
4. Marketing Until a site is a well-known destination, there is always work to bring readers, to generate buzz, and to build the blog’s brand. We’ll discuss generating traffic in Chapter 6.
5. Monetization Generating revenue requires planning and work, whether it’s chasing up ad payments, comparing affiliate programs, developing products, or implementing some other monetization plan. We’ll discuss building revenue in detail in Chapter 7.
6. Accounts Like any business, your blog will need good accounting and tax records. The bigger the business gets, the more important these will become.
7. Web Development and Server Admin Thanks to blogging packages like WordPress, you can often get by with very little web development. Nonetheless, even the most basic blog requires someone to set up the server, configure the software, and make
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sure the site doesn’t fall over if your traffic should spike. We’ll discuss finding and working with a developer in Chapter 4.
8. Web Design and Branding A serious blog business requires some web design. Although themes can be pretty impressive, your site will need its own brand to stand out. We’ll discuss branding in Chapter 3, and working with a designer in Chapter 4.
9. Management and Direction Coordinating the business is the job of the business manager. From early questions about topic and editorial calendar, to hiring and managing staff, to strategic direction and competitive analysis, this is in many respects the make-or-break role in the business.
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