How Posting Less Makes You More Money

Posting less cuts costs. That is true if you write all your blog posts yourself or if you outsource the writing, it saves time and or money. Cutting costs means your profit increases and as we all know profit is by far the most important factor when selling a blog (or any business). However, posting less poses a risk of decreasing traffic and as a result earnings, which would obviously decrease profits. If you can get the balance right by lowing the frequency of your posts just the right amount to keep traffic, you will make more money from your blog each month and also sell for a higher price.

Why This Is Especially True For Blogs

One of the main deterrents for buying a blog is the high maintenance costs. If you can prove that you only need a couple of posts per month to keep your traffic your blog suddenly becomes of interest to buyers as who normally wouldn’t enter the blog market.

The type of blog also matters. On a flagship blog with a loyal readership it is far more risky to lower the posting frequency and less beneficial. What you are really trying to find out is the magic number of posts needed for keeping Google traffic to your niche blog(s), where there are only a few other small traffic sources.

How To Effectively Experiment With Posting Frequency On Blogs

If you normally post once per week and suddenly stop for a month that is a very dangerous experiment. I would suggest easing down the posting frequency in stages. If you normally post once per week, try seeing if you keep your traffic when you post every 10 days for a month. If you manage that I would keep it stable at 1 post every 10 days for another month and then try lowering again. If traffic decreased (or decreased too much) then raise the number of posts back up to once per week.

Conclusion

This is for primarily for niche blogs where the main traffic sources are the search engines. With a very young niche blog (less than 3 months old) experimenting in this way is too dangerous. However, with a 6+ month old niche blog with stable rankings it is a great way to make more money.

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Normal bricks and mortar businesses sell for a much higher multiple than blogs, usually because blogs are much younger and as a result have much less stable earnings. Often with a blog you find advertisers only to lose them again. The method that “if I can just get one advertiser to pay $100 this month I can sell the whole blog for $1000″ will be very rarely work. This gets more true as the numbers get bigger because buyers with more to spend tend to be smarter and understand the value of stable earnings.

This has been brought to the front of my mind due to a recent blog sale of mine which you can see here on SitePoint. The 4 months of stable earnings I had meant the blog sold for a high multiple.

Lesson

If you just manage to keep earnings the steady for just 1 more month you have increased your blogs value. Even if your subscribers, traffic, Pagerank all stay the same, 1 more month of earnings makes a big difference in the amount of money your blog will sell for.

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This is the second part of a two part series discussing the most profitable type of blog content.

In part one I showed that blogs can be seen to educate, inform or entertain the readership and I outlined the various advantages that come with monetizing news and resource blogs, which inform and educate.

Monetization Problems For Entertainment Blogs

A blog like this has a problem with monetization because the readership is so broad and un-targeted it can be hard to sell any certain product and AdSense clicks aren’t a good alternative as they would yield a low click through ratio and low earnings per click. Generally people who are bored go to entertainment blogs to kill time without a specific purpose, or if they do have a purpose is it to read/watch the blog and not to go shopping.

The Solution To Monetizing Entertainment Blogs

Entertainment blogs have a big advantage that they attract traffic like bees and so a great form of revenue is CPM ads, which pay by a rate per 1000 impressions and don’t require clicks. One of the best CPM ads are are full page Ads from Adbrite, which pay very well, sometimes up to $5 per 1000 impressions.

An example of a site that uses a combination of gossip and weird news stories to attract to attract a large mainstream readership is CitiJournalist.com. CitiJournalist takes the traffic advantages of news blogs, such as having a never ending supply of stories as well as the ability to use linkbaiting tactics more easily; and combines them with entertainment very successfully.

Conclusion

Profitability of blog content is all about the traffic to value of visitor ratio. With resource blogs an individual visitor is often more valuable but harder to attract, whereas on news and entertainment blogs an individual visitor is often less valuable but less costly to attract. Therefore all types of blog content can be highly profitable and ultimately it comes down to the quality of the content and how well it is marketed.

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This is the first part of a two part series discussing the most profitable type of blog content.

Some blogs are very much resources, they contain useful information to help people perform a certain task. Other blogs are news blogs, while others exist purely for the entertainment of their readers. In other words the blogs are there to educate, inform or entertain, but which content model makes the most money?

Deciding the answer to this question means understanding how money is made online, which is a very simple equation. Profit from a blog is equivalent to traffic multiplied by the value of that traffic, minus the costs of running the blog. Note I am simplifying here to help you decide which type of blog to start in the future, but looking at the different blog monetization strategies available for each type of blog can help reveal their profitability.

These blogs are all what can be considered different types of “Flagship” blog, as opposed to niche blogs.

Monetization Advantages For Resource Blogs

Resource blogs are filled with useful information, such as how-to guides and longer blog posts. They are there to educate. Examples are Zen Habits and Dosh Dosh. Their advantages for monetization include:

• Brand trust. Due to the authority of a resource blogs publications if they recommend a product a high conversion ratio is achieved, selling more items.
• Targeted readership. People read them to find out how to do something. Products can be sold by them to help the readers achieve their goal. With a news or entertainment blog the readers don’t have such a well defined purpose.
• Sensible launching platform for in-house products. Higher profit margins can be achieved by selling your own product, rather than simply selling others as an affiliate. On a resource blog with a strong brand and a targeted readership it is the perfect site to expand into selling your own products.

Monetization Advantages For News Blogs

There are mainstream news blogs and those that focus on a specific niche, but both have these monetization advantages:

• Big brand ad deals for big money with companies like Federated Media
• Long term sponsorships. It is not uncommon for there to be long 6 month contracts sponsorships, sometimes for a particular category of news. News blogs often run on sponsorships and due to the longevity of those deals their earnings are often more stable, making them sell for a higher multiple. However, there is a disadvantage that because of the 6 month contact the blog cannot increase the cost for that period even if it increases in popularity. That is why finding sponsors for different categories of the news blog and attaining them at different times is a good idea.

Part 2 will be coming soon. Subscribe to the RSS feed to have it sent to you

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1. SEO, social media and blogging consultancy. Consultancies are often launched by bloggers when their expertise and reputation have reached a certain threshold. Examples of bloggers who are also consultants include Patrick Altoft, Chrisg and Glen Allsopp. Setting up a basic consultancy is extremely easy to do (finding clients is another), by simply creating a new page on your blog with details about your services and previous experience you can get started with this.

2. Mentoring membership site. These are slightly more complicated to set up and so have a higher barrier of entry resulting in fewer being created. Examples in the blogging niche include Blog Mastermind from Yaro Starak and Teaching Sells from Brian Clark.

3. E-Book selling. Giving away an e-Book for free in order to build an email list is one thing, but publishing e-Books (not just selling then as an affiliate) that can be sold is another beast entirely. The barrier for entry here varies as there are different strategies available for selling the e-Book (such as using affiliate networks or selling it yourself). E-Book selling is a revenue stream many bloggers have not explored because the natural progression is to start a blog, then build an email list using a free offering. The abundance of free e-Books means a paid for one has to be exceptionally good.

4. Launching a clone of a popular social site for a specific niche. For example BloggingZoom is one of the more popular pligg sites for bloggers. Launched by Courtney Tuttle and Blogger Unleashed. An example of this in another niche is Health Ranker which was launched by Israel from FatManUnleashed.

5. Email courses. These are very easy to set up with Aweber and a paypal account. However, these are also quite rare because it isn’t hard to make the extra leap to a full membership site which unlike an email course can more easily can be sold at a later date.

Conclusion

All those options have been, or are currently in existence. There are plenty of other expansion options such as creating a blog network or adding a forum, but they are just different sections to the same Website.

The only other option is to innovate!

What other business opportunities do you see for blogs?

Photo by susanica

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2. Keep learning new skills. Perhaps the first online skill you learned was setting up a blog with hosting and your own domain, then it was learning your way around Wordpress, then SEO and other blogging skills. Perhaps the next skill should be web design or programming. Growing your skills adds more flexibility to your working day, making it more profitable and also more varied and interesting.

3. Always have something productive to do yourself. This sounds obvious but it’s a problem I’ve encountered during scaling my niche blogging network. Never leave yourself in the position where you have nothing to do because you are waiting on someone else.

4. Grow an email list. I’m sure you’ve heard top email marketers say the phrase, “the money is in the list“. They are right, an email list makes easy money compared to blogging. Not starting an email list sooner is the single biggest regret I have about blogging. It can seem daunting to get started with an auto responder and finding out how to increase subscribers, but it is all very simple and as long as your blog has a little traffic people will join your list - especially if you offer an incentive such as a free e-book. I strongly recommend starting your email list right now using Aweber.

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