Can Bloggers Make Money? You Bet! But the Wall St. Journal Still Doesn't Get It

Also, Jason's metrics are skewed. I know dozens of bloggers making 500-1000$/month with less than 100K visitors per month - many on just 1K visitors per day.

Hmm...you point to your promotion and Hugh's promotion and suggest both "made money."

Let me raise a respectful question...

Did these programs make money for you and Hugh (as consultants) or did the programs make money for your clients? How did you ascertain the ROI for your clients? It seems to me that there would be significant confounding variables you would need to isolate to determine ROI of your promotions for your clients, particularly in light of the heavy media coverage of both promotions. To wit, your hard-earned media coverage was generated by a company press release and case study, not the presence of the client blogs.

And I respectfully suggest a second point. Blogs are not the best medium for raising a talented individual's visibility if they are done in isolation. They only become a strong medium if they include aggressive blog promotion, media relations, SEO, public relations, speaking engagements, and carefully crafted key messages.

An entrepreneur needs far more than a blog for self-promotion. If you build it, they will not come. Field of Dreams is just a Hollywood movie.

Cheers. Thought-provoking post!

Kindly,
Kirsten

Kirsten: Hugh's campaigns for Stormhoek and English Cut have both resulted in very substantial, documented sales increases.

Up Your Budget got one million unique visitors in four weeks. More than two thousand people registered to play the game and participated in the blogs. The purpose of the campaign - which was produced for less than the cost of a 30-second national commercial - was to test the waters for online promotion and demonstrate the impact of blog advertising.

"To wit, your hard-earned media coverage was generated by a company press release and case study, not the presence of the client blogs."

ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE. there was not a single press release, not a link from the budget site, not a single traditional ad in any medium. All of the promotion was done through blogs. It was all blog baby, and we got a .857% clickthru rate on blog advertising, generating significant traffic to the blogs. The balance of the traffic came from the many blog posts about the campaign, and from viral acceleration generated by players telling their friends.

"An entrepreneur needs far more than a blog for self-promotion. If you build it, they will not come. Field of Dreams is just a Hollywood movie."

You are preaching to the choir on this point. And you certainly misinterpreted my post if that's what you thought i meant.

A blog is a type of website. A tool. Writing a blog is one thing, building an audience for one is quite another. I have written extensively on that topic for the past many years. And I have said repeatedly that, generously, there are 10,000 blogs worldwide that are read by more than the blogger's immediate family.
BL

Hi B.L.

Thanks for addressing my questions. I get it - your goal was to restrict the promotion to the blogosphere. You generated many clickthrus from the 77 blogs that ran ads about the promotion. Beyond the click throughs, did the promotion generate incremental sales lifts for Budget?

And if you saw sales lifts, could sales have been influenced by the substantial amount of traditional media coverage you gleaned during the promotion, as traditional media mused about the efficacy of a blog-only promotion?

And didn't you also supplement the Budget promotion with keyword ad buys on Google and Yahoo (source: MarketingVox)? What were those click thru rates like in comparison?

There was no point of contention intended with regard to my second point in my comment earlier today- no need to be defensive. Our full-service integrated marketing agency, re:invention, has hosted our company blog for 4 1/2 years so hopefully by now we don't need to be reminded of the definition of a blog. I simply and respectfully intended to expound upon your post. I'll repeat my point.

Blogs are NOT the best medium for raising a talented individual's visibility IF THEY ARE DONE IN ISOLATION. They ONLY become a strong medium if they INCLUDE aggressive blog promotion, media relations, SEO, public relations, speaking engagements, and carefully crafted key messages.

Cheers. Here's to thoughtful discussion...

kindly,
kirsten

we did not measure, or seek, sales lifts. we sought a measure of how much traffic we could generate with a blog-only campaign.

the clickthrus on the google adwords was pretty dreadful compared to blog ads. i didn't handle those, their interactive agency did those ads. they had headlines like "WIN $10,000!" and people pretty much think that's a BS headline. hence low clickthru.

the edgier and more offbeat we made the blogads, the higher the clickthrus.

re blog promotion, as i said, you are preaching to the choir.
BL

Have to agree with BL, Kirsten. BL is not saying, and I doubt she ever has said, that blogs should ever be done in isolation. Nattering into the void style blogs miss the point and the opportunity.

As the number of blogs increases so does the need to carve an ever narrower niche - that is of course if your goal is promotion, work, sex or money. And, let's face it, that is not the goal of 99% of blogs.

Hugh Macleod is spot on when he goes on about how a blog is a great tool for making things happen indirectly. I'm a very low level niche blogger, but I still get at least one media enquiry a month as a direct result of my blog. And not the pap end either, NYTimes, Saveur, Food & Wine, BBC, MTV are some recent correspondents. As a journalist that's kinda useful. And totally screws any response or worth my old portfolio site had.