Knowing When To Cut Your Business Losses - What I Did Wrong
For those of you not aware I have been paying several bloggers to blog for my blog network Blogtown Press over the past 5 months to see where it can take blogs. The writers have been doing great, building content, and building a readership at each blog.
Out of the 5 blogs I have writers writing for only one of those blogs has been able to sustain itself and pay for the writer. We even had a few months where that one blog went over straight pay and into percentage partner. With that said, I am sad to report that I have had to discontinue contracts for three of the blogs and keep one of the writers as a single post by post contract blogger.
I feel this is in no way a reflection on their writing but more a reflection on how well I have run Blogtown Press. From a hobby standpoint. I still make money off it, and without having those writers on those three blogs, yes I will make more. But calling myself an entrepreneur I have to realize when I’m just foolishly spending money without a plan, which this was doing. More as an experiment.
Although I still think of the content they’ve produced as an investment, that content is unique and will always be there, it wasn’t building to anything. I didn’t have a plan.
My number one problem was:
1. I was spread too thin from the beginning. None of the blogs had a cohesive tie to one another and no one blog was focused on as the pillar blog of the network. Therefore, we didn’t have a large audience to launch new blogs to and we didn’t have a reason for readers to come back.
Also:
2. I wasn’t spending nearly enough time promoting and getting links. I had writers but wasn’t spreading the word about what they were producing.
Now don’t get me wrong, traffic and revenue have both risen, but not on the blogs that I was paying people to blog on. (Except One) Just building articles, PR, and SE presence allows me to gain more advertisers and gain more readers, and thus, gain more money. But I wasn’t building a business system.
So I’ve cut back on spending and I’m regaining a focus on a new venture that has 10 times more promise, 10 times more focus, and 10 times more people involved! (You knew I was going somewhere with this, more to come in the near future, but be prepared.)
Moral of the story, cut your losses so you can refocus and build back up. Oh yeah, and don’t get defeated.
Comments
Comment from Erik
Time: May 3, 2007, 7:17 am
Hey Vern!
That’s a really interesting idea, I’m definitely going to head over and read some more.
Currently I’m working on a similar idea of my own here in the islands and would love to shoot you some emails to see what you think.
I’ll keep you posted.
Thanks for the advice.
E
Comment from Vern
Time: May 2, 2007, 11:07 pm
Hi Erik, I am doing something in Thailand that you might want to model for Hawaii as Hawaii is a smaller scale and in my opinion would work really well. The idea is outlined at some of my blog pages. It’s a travel blog network for Thailand. You don’t pay the bloggers ANYTHING. You offer to optimize their blogs for free. You set them up with blogger.com accounts which gives decent formatting. Have them send their emails as posts - but send them to the blogger secret post-email ID. But, don’t post them - have them arrive as drafts. You go through the drafts and correct errors in spelling and formatting. Adding pictures. Edit the pictures. You control the links on the blogs. You control all the ads - but the bloggers themselves make EVERYTHING from their own blog - their adsense ID is on the blog they author. They are happy to make some cash. You’re happy because you have a http://www.thaipulse.com type site setup that is the hub and the spot visitors go to see all the blogs. All your blogs are subdomains. blog.thaipulse.com; kosamui.thaipulse.com, as examples. You reap maximum benefit because all that traffic is spending time on your public pages at your hub and you’re making bank from the traffic. The sites are interlinked providing a good Google PR and they share traffic between each other - so everyone gets more traffic than they could otherwise. You could pay some bloggers for top content, but focus on getting GREAT writers to author the stuff. Anyway - it’s all written about in my blog.thaipulse.com site if you want to check it out. Start reading from about april 21st I think - when I declare the “Thaipulse Thailand Travel Blog Network”. Good luck man, and if you DON’T do it - I may yet be in Honolulu and do it. Let me know what you think of the idea. Vern