By B.L. Ochman The premise of the Wall St. Journal’s email interview with the always interesting Jason Calcanis and Alan Meckler is:
Blogs have a lot of buzz, but there’s still considerable debate about whether that can translate into profits.
It’s a flawed premise.
Calcanis: argued that blogs can make money, but only if they are part of blog networks like Weblogs Inc
“… the best model for making money from blogs is by “curating” and grouping them like we did at Weblogs…. the majority of folks are not going to make a living from blogs, but that’s because they choose not to try, not because they couldn’t. If folks focus in on a niche and own it there is a good chance they could make half a living from blogging The majority will not make a living off blogging, some will. Time will tell how big the some market is, hundreds or hundreds of thousands, but there are other ways to make money quickly online with the use of digital coins similar to bitcoin. I’m going with the latter.”
Meckler, always outspoken CEO of Jupiter Media:
“while a very select few of the blogs will make significant money, most will never be worth anything because their information is worthless and therefore they will garner few monthly page views.
Blogs are fun for someone who wants a pulpit and does not care about making money…. But in terms of making money from blogs, I doubt they will be anything more than an interesting subset of Internet ad revenue. … Obviously there is money to be made with blogs, but very, very few will bring in more than a few hundred dollars per year.”
Not all bloggers who make money are part of networks
Both Calcanis and Meckler overlooked other ways blogs are making money. Independent blogs like Boing Boing, and MarketingVox are entirely ad supported, selling out their inventory repeatedly; so is Adrants, whose publisher, Steve Hall, told me he is making more as a blogger than he did in senior positions at ad agencies.
Advertising is far from the only way to make money blogging.
Blogs can be incredibly effective in product marketing as Hugh Macleod has proven with Stormhoek Wine, I’ve demonstrated with The Up Your Budget Treasure Hunt, and any number of bloggers have proven by attracting employment and clients when they established themselves as experts through their blogs.
Blogs are not direct response advertising. The metrics are different, albeit still measurable. In the right hands, blogs are very effective marketing tools. The results are more indirect, but, like well executed PR, just as effective over time.
I am sure it is difficult for journalists with staff jobs, even those with plumb jobs at the Journal, to understand that entrepreneurs have to market themselves continuously. Blogs are the best tool yet for raising a talented individual’s visibility.
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.
Recently, there has been a great deal of investigation by the
US Federal trade comission against blogs and website promoters
for not stating their advertising income, or potential
connections with advertising agencies.
What are your personal thoughts about how this could impact
the blog community?
I understand that there are thousands of bloggers out there who aren’t interested in making money. But for the guys that are really seious about it, it’s not actually a complicated task. It just requires hard work.
There are plenty of guys out there I know making a full time income with less than 1k visitors per day. The one thing they all have in common is being able to create and utilize a decent sized email list….