Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

As most of you know that have followed me over the years, I’ve gone off and on hiring writers to write on one ore many of my multiple blogs.  Over the year and a half however, I’ve basically done nothing on my blogs focusing most, if not all of my energy on my 9-5 (I’ll talk about what I’ve been up to in later posts).  But recently, I’ve been pulled, dragged, yanked, whatever, back into blogging.

I’ve hopped back in for several reasons. My blogs continue to get traffic, continue to get linked to, and continue to make money.  That and it was requested by one of the writers I hired a while ago to start my ideas back up and really give it a go.

This time however, I decided to be smarter than I had in the past. Previously I’ve payed generic writers to generate content for posts I’ve titled. This worked but produced kind of bland posts and didn’t last long. Next I hired bloggers, as freelancers, but had a hard time organizing and managing their writing. [Head over here to read about these and a few other ways to generate content for multiple blogs.

Other than having enough time to manage these writers, I spread their work and over multiple blogs about different subjects. None of the writers could feed off of what the other writer was doing and soon everyone became bored with the blog network.

So this time I needed a different strategy. I decided to put to use what I learned from doing things wrong and also what I learned from listening and reading what others had to say about the matter.

First, I decided I was going to focus on one blog. I wasn’t going to write on all my blogs and continue to spread my resources thin.  I live in Hawaii and was told by several people, once from Yaro Starak on a trip through Hawaii, that I should focus on this interesting niche. Done.

Next, I don’t have enough time to manage the site, build links, find advertisers, manage writers, edit, write, and develop a posting schedule. Instead I would need to bring on someone to take some of the day to day tasks off my list. It just so happened that I had someone looking and willing to do some of these task.  The person who wanted to get Aloha Update going again wanted to come on as an editor to manage writers, edit, write, and develop a posting schedule. Done.

Next, we would need to find writers interested in the topics and willing to help build a blog as freelance writers and not full-time bloggers. First task of my new editor, find writers. Over the course of a month she was able to find 10 writers wanting to write about the islands on a per post basis. Done.

While it’s only been a few weeks so I can’t say with certainty that this method will work down the road, we’ve been able to  generate at least two posts per day, keeping content fresh and building an audience.  Aloha Update now has regularly scheduled posts, writers comment on each others posts, and a genuine feel of community.

All this and I haven’t needed to make it a full-time job.

From time to time I’ve discussed on this blog managing multiple writers for my blog network, Blogtown Press. Mainly I’ve dealt with the odds and ends of finding, organizing, and paying bloggers to writer on one or many of my various blogs. Those articles are helpful but they haven’t really given tips on helping with the task of managing these writers through Wordpress.

Managing writers, even with wordpress can be a big task. While there are plugins that help you it’s always tough to sort through them all and find the plugins that help you the most. Well, I recently began to rekindle my interest with the internet, blogging, and building a business by paying freelance writers to build content and thought I’d begin to share some tips with my readers about how this process is going.

I’ll jump into the business side of things more a little later (recently I created an LLC for one of my blogs and hope to expand that blog into a full business with possible full-time employees.) But first let me pass along some information on a plugin I happened across. The plugin is Role Manager which allows you to set specific rules for the roles inherent in Wordpress and change how they act. While the codex for role management does a little bit to help you understand the roles capability, it doesn’t really give you full control over what these various roles can do. They’re predefined.

Well the Role Manager plugin lets you change that by providing an interface to manage the inherent roles. Also, which is probably the best part of the plugin, is that it allows you to create new roles and set options for them. For example, let’s say you have most of your writers setup as contributors but you want one of them to have the added ability to upload files, like images. You don’t want to give everyone the chance to upload files, because you might not trust everyone as much as this person to upload non-malicious files, so what do you do?

You can create a new role and set it to a contributor upload role, or whatever name you choose obviously. You can then have everything the same as the settings for a contributor but the new role will allow this special subset of contributors to upload files.

This is just one example but you can see how this wordpress plugin allows you to customize and better manage your writers and members of your wordpress site to be able to have more features than the defaults. This allows you, as an employer of freelance writers to give your writers more options without giving away all the accessibility of say, an Editor.

Content is king, you have to write content to get visitors, you have to write regular content… content, content, content. That’s pretty much the party line for any blogger worth his or her salt. Get more content, entertain your visitors and get more visitors.

It makes sense. Why else would someone want to visit a blog with two posts (unless of course they were the holy grail of posts.) However, generating content, especially when you have more than one blog, takes a lot of time. You eventually need to find other ways to generate content.

There are many different ways you can skin this cat. You can steal others content, which I would NOT SUGGEST, you can pull partial content via feeds, you can pay someone minimal to generate gibberish, you can pay full-time, part-time, or anytime writers, or get just freelance writers to write here and there. These are just a few.

My first of two suggestions is that you find a method that turns a positive cash flow (may be obvious but you’d be surprised.) At first you may lose a little money, but after three to six months, you should be able to generate more money from the blogs advertising that you spend to provide it with content. The more established the blog the fewer months it should take to turn positive. (Don’t forget to continue your link building)

My second suggestion is that you stay unique. Don’t hijack other content. Of course there are ways, which I’ll talk about below, to borrow other writers content but all of these can be considered illegal by someone out there. Also, in my opinion, this isn’t a good method to generate long term return. If you read my first post back from a blogging break you’ll notice that my blogs kept generating revenue. I attribute part of this to the fact that I had unique content.

How do you get that content is another thing…

Write it yourself. True, you could write yourself. But past 1 blog, this gets extremely time consuming to keep up good content. If you are going to go it alone, have a system for writing good content. Spend the weekend generating 3-5 heavy articles, articles that provide a unique stance on something. Then recap some news on your topic, maybe news from the week prior. This should give you a few articles to start the week with and have the heavy articles post one a day.

Then throughout the week you can catch the latest news, write a quick blurb with a link to some other blog posts or news articles, and start building content for the next week. With posts built from the previous weekend you should be able to take some time off and work on some other blogs.

Do this on 3-5 blogs and you should be able to sustain some quality original content by yourself. Just make sure to pick a few topics you like. Otherwise you’ll be spinning your wheels on topics that don’t matter much and you’ll loose interest writing easily.

Pay Generic Writers. When I say generic, I mean people looking to make a few quick bucks by pumping out low to medium quality posts on topics they are vaguely familiar with. A lot of times these turn out to be Wikipedia repeats with words shifted around. Although original, not the best content to bring to your audience.

You can find these writers on most forums. One great place to look is Digital Point Forums, a great webmaster resource if you haven’t been there already. They have a subforum specifically for content generation. Alot of times with these types of generation schemes you’ll need to provide ideas for content such as post titles. Your ideas will then get farmed to the cheapest group of writers. Sometimes you’ll find an individual on there but it seems that more and more are getting “outsourced.”

You’ll also need to buy multiple articles at a time to make it worth their while. This means giving a word count and you can be sure you’ll get really close to the word count you suggested. This isn’t bad but can lead to filler words and repeated ideas. Not to worry though. You can easily modify this type of content with your own ideas. You paid for it so if you don’t like it the way it use, use it as a skeleton, beef it up, cut it down, make it flow with the blogs basic content structure.

I find 300 words is a good starting point to ask for. You can easily add a few ideas to this basis and reach 500 word heavy articles or cut down a few sentences and still be above 200.

Freelance Writers. There are many many writers out there looking to get their voices heard. Or at least make money from their ability to write cohesive paragraphs. These writers put more time into their articles, usually writer on topics they are familiar with and in the process, write better content. They also charge a bit more for their content that is generated.

The are a plethora of services out there that act as job boards for writers like this. elance.com is probably the largest and most direct to freelance writers. Many people have used this service including the founder of digg to get his programmer. Guru.com also claims to be a source of thousands of for hire freelance writers from around the world, although I’ve never used that service. After those there’s always Craigslist.

This would allow you to get some great content and you may be able to find a good regular writer that may join your blogging team for a share in the profits rather than sporadic writing.

Hiring Bloggers. Finally, you can hire bloggers. You can hire bloggers to write full-time, part-time, for a salary, per post, per word, or to share in the profits. Unless they share your enthusiasm for blogging you’re most likely going to find bloggers that want to work per post. But keep searching because finding someone who wants to grow the blog as much as you and sees the potential for earnings to grow will post above and beyond any post limits you may set.

This is also a good way to find people who share a passion for your blog topics and will most likely be more interactive with the readers that leave comments on your blog.

Syndicate Content. I haven’t done much research on how legal this is and depending on which blogger you talk to it’s a practice that gets mixed reviews. Some like it because it generates more links to your blog. Others think it’s downright stealing content. I’m mixed. I need links so I guess I wouldn’t be too unhappy. But then again. I work hard on my content so I don’t want people jacking it either. This practice can also be called feed aggregation or aggregators.

Most content syndicators just pull snippets of the content but it definitely generates a lot of posts and content for your blog without you having to do anything. Since I focus on Wordpress the plugin I’ll refer you to on this is the wp-o-matic. It’s a plugin that does as it says in the title. Automatically create a Wordpress blog.

Conclusion. It really depends on your budget and what type of content you want. Each provides a little different feel for your blog and each has it’s ups and downs. I’ll stick to my main suggestions though. Write unique content, and try to turn a profit. It’ll be the best for long term sustainability of your blog, and your business model.

That’s right you read it correctly. I’m looking to sell a few of my blogs. I’ve had some people interested in buying several of the blogs in my blog network and I figure I could definitely use the money to fund other ventures that I’m currently working on.

Just some quick notes. The following blogs all make between $40 and $100 a month, I write nothing for any of them (aka all passive income). All have great domain names, have been around for over a year, are all PR4 and all need a good home. I just don’t have time to create content for them anymore.

I’ll write more about them later but here are the ones I’m thinking of parting with.

RumorPatrol.com
FinancingWealth.com
BlogSilver.com
SprintRants.com

Comment or contact me via email evossman at gmail .com

I’ve been doing a bit of researching on business models and plans for building an online media and entertainment company and stumbled across a few interesting articles about Weblogs, Inc.’s early days when Jason Calacanis was a pie in the sky dreamer it seems like.

The article was found from this reporting and deals with the critique of Weblogs, Inc.’s business plan. The critique was done way back in 2003 by Nick Denton when Weblogs, Inc was first starting out and Jason had big plans for how he was going pay bloggers with revenue share. (Nick Denton is the publisher behind Gawker Media.)

The article sites an early wired news article about the beginnings of weblog empires and how Calacanis want[ed] to take the industry (which was just starting and what he knew little about) and turn it into a money making machine.)

The articles are filled with doubts and rightly so. It appears Calacanis knew little about the blog world. However, as I’ve said in many conversations outside of this blog, a blog is just a fancy name for a newspaper or magazine which is just a media reporting medium and entertainment delivery system. Jason had been around for a while, through the bubble of the late nineties, starting Silicon Alley Reporter, and involved with the media and entertainment businesses and bringing them online.

Very interesting reads about all the early talk of what blogs could someday become. Even Jeff Jarvis of the great buzz machine had in on the talks of a weblog network when he spoke of Calacanis, Bubble Boy, and a crazy idea.

A lot of people, and I’m guilty as well, are jumping into the internet without a business plan in mind. They go in and even though they may claim to be an entrepreneur for sake of building clout with others like them (guilty again) they aren’t really building towards anything. They’re cloaking a hobby with words like entrepreneur, business person, start-up, mogul. Most phizzle off because they don’t have a good outlook for their business.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in trying to become an Entrepreneur is to have an outlook for the business you are trying to create. You may not have a set plan, and for those of you who can’t even plan what’s for dinner the next night those words will be like music to your ears.

But you need to a plan for the next month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and then a long term outlook. Of course these can change as you go along. There’s nothing wrong with having a fluid business outlook. You just need to keep to what you write. You need to stick to your plan as best you can.

As an example I’ll apply it to Blogtown Press:

1 month: Work on On-Site Search Engine Optimization and continue to get as many inbound links from directories as possible. (Or as time will allow). Build the internal workings of each page and have a sound backbone for search engines to find the information they’re looking for.

3 month: Continue to build the archives on all the blogs, and launch several new blogs. Within 3 months I see the Blogtown Press Blog Network consisting of at least 20 blogs. As they grow I will continue to try out new writers and possibly have several more writers working of Blogtown Press.

6 month: Although this depends on Google, work on all the factors that increase PageRank and try to achieve a page rank of 5 on at least 8 blogs. Having Page Rank will allow me to have more authority within the blogging community and especially look better for advertisers and increase my traffic. By slowly establishing Blogtown Press, at 6 months from now, I will become more of an authority on the subjects our blogs focus on.

1 year: Have a network of sites focused on Blogtown Press that brings in $5000 a month earnings. This is a bit lofty but you have to shoot for the stars. I say a network of sites because I am thinking about launching a forum shortly. I see Blogtown Press and it’s partners bringing in several network sponsors where I don’t have to go through intermediaries like Google and TLA (although I still love you guys). I would also like to be providing several writers with full-time gigs making several $100 a month.

From this business outlook I can now list at least 10 things I need to do to get me to each of those milestones.

Now you do a business outlook.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned in building my blog network is that I should really listen to what I read. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve browsed a blog post that says “Follow these steps to sure fire win SEO,” or something like that. Even if these bloggers were just writing what they read somewhere else I should have listened.

Over the past three months I’ve begun to organize and focus my efforts of SEO and you might not be surprised but, it worked. Not only do I have time working on my side (older domains do better) but I am actually seeing results with the keywords that I’m targeting. Some of my blogs are the number 1 Google search result for those keywords. Even blogs where all I was doing was link building instead of content creation. Tops!

Then one day I happened across a manual being freely distributed over a Digital Point. This isn’t a new eBook (at least I don’t think) but it’s a very detailed look at several methods to SEO. It gives tons of information that I wish someone would have printed out back when I started building blogs online and smacked me over the head with it.

I’ve written a little blurb similar to this over at Blogging on Empty and instead of redirecting you there to read the post I’ll just give you the direct link.

SEO Made Easy PDF by Brad Callen.

If I had to make a list of things that I would suggest you do with your SEO plan it would be the following.

Then just hammer on this. The book talks about determining where the top sites in Google search results have their links to but I found this to be difficult at first. I focused on good sites with a high PR that have been around a little while and seemed to do just fine.

Give r’ a whirl.

So the Blogtown Press blog network isn’t quite where I had hoped it would be 6 months after it’s launch back in November. But it has taught me a lot.

One of the main things it has taught me is that you have to be a go getter when it comes to the world of building a network of sites. You can’t sit around and wait for advertisers to come to you, wait for Google to make you rise in the ranks or make visitors visit your blogs. You have to do the steps to get them.

The steps that you read every single day from every other entrepreneurial blog regurgitating the same rhetoric, “link exchange, mind your PR, post regularly, stick to one niche.” You’d think I would have learned by now. But it’s taken me a year of learning from experience.

I know spend most of my free time at night and in the morning paging through Digital Point Forums looking for exchanges and deals to sell links on all the blogs in the network. It’s a lot of work and now I’m working at streamlining that process so people can find all the information at once.

In doing this I started to realize that I haven’t done that bad. I could have done worse. In my last earnings report I reported that Blogtown Press, including this blog, made roughly $350.00, showing that we’re making progress!

Also I began to work on a network page for advertisers to go to that makes it easier for them to see all the important stats about the blog network. Things like, PR, indexed pages, backlinks, uniques, RSS, etc. It’s all over at out new Blogtown Press Blog Network Advertising Page. Most of it is automated and as I work along I’ll figure out a way to automate everything.

But it gives advertisers a great snap shot of the network to see where they’d best fit their brands or products.

As I was doing this I noticed that the network now gets over 1800 unique visitors per day, has over 340 RSS subscribers (OK this is really low) and has over 1200 posts!

OK, the actual design of Aloha Update wasn’t automatic, but the way it’s setup creates quite a few automatic adjustments to the blog.

Wordpress Static Front Page
First off, I’ve decided to use Wordpress’ built in static front page to create a more news like, content in your face. It was tough at first because the addition is rather new to Wordpress and there isn’t much documentation out there.

If you are trying to add a static front page with a working inner page that shows all posts you need to remember that the page you setup as the “all posts” page needs to be run off the index.php file. If you don’t do this, wordpress pagination, ie /page/2/, will not work. At least it didn’t work for me. The other page, the static front page, can be created from a template page. Check out Aloha Update and our All Posts Page.

Adding a Drop-Down Horizontal Menu to Show Categories
The next sweet thing I did was add a drop-down menu using some javascript and a css/.js method I found over a A List Apart.

The menu drops down and reveals the sites categories which are organized based on the different islands of Hawaii. The cool thing is, the drop down menu is smart. It is able to recoginze which category you are in, be a single post or a category, or a sub category, of one of the main categories. This way, you don’t have to setup separate headers and nav bars for each category.

It took me a while to get it right and I’ll surely write a little wordpress tutorial for you all soon as in my searching I found a lot of people wanting to have this happen.

Added Tabbed Interactive Boxes
Next I added some tabbed interactive boxes as you can see on the front page where I list the images as well as on the inner pages where I list top things about Aloha Update.

I found everything I needed over at BarelyFitz Designs. This was probably the easiest to implement out of everything. All you have to do is cut and paste and FTP some files over and you’re done.

UPDATE:
Automatic Picture Formating
The last thing I did which is probably the most automatic thing and took a while is utilize the “read more” tag in wordpress, along with The Excerpt Reloaded plugin.

Basically what I do is within a post I first put a thumbnail image, then I put the more tag, then the noteaser tag, then the large image, and finish it off by adding an excerpt. This allows me to control what image shows up where.

On the front page I have the latest image show up as a sized version of the large image using the php “the_content(’ ‘, ‘TRUE’)”. Next within each sub tab of that same area I show the thumbnail image as a link to the page, then the title (also a link) and finally the excerpt as I wrote it in the post.

Next, in the image category I have it show the thumbnail image, and then when you go to individual pages you will have the full image and that full image will be link to the large image.

I’ll try and do tutorials of all these because I know from searching around that there are others out there that would like this help as well.

As I said in my last article, I’d like to try my best to help others build their blog networks, and in doing so I’ve put together a little list of articles that I think might help some of you work your way towards a successful blog network.

1-5: Should you Start a Blog Network

Darren of Problogger.net wisdom writes about why you should join a blog network. Knowing why others would want to join a blog might give you more insight while recruiting bloggers.

Then Darren turns right around and tells us all why you shouldn’t join a blog network. Again, you can use this to counter anyone elses doubts about joining your network.

As if you didn’t need more to add to your doubt about starting a blog network, here’s a little begging the question are blog networks worth the money.

The recently controversial (due to their name) problogging.com network asks the question to network or not to network.

Should you start a spam blog network? Before you do, maybe you should read this great article over at plagiarismtoday.com about the birth of a spam blog network.

6-14: How-to Articles on Starting a Blog Network

Building focus in your Blog Network - I’m gonna start off with that first article I wrote, because I think it’s one of the most important things to think about when starting a blog network. In this new world of “everyone has a blog”, you need to use your time wisely to move to the top of the list. You need to focus on one niche, then build from there. Once you have income, you can create more time by paying others to write for you.

I’ve always liked this post by Mark Cuban about Blogs that just write about other blogs. There’s a lot of them out there, some of the most popular, where I get information, are of this type. Should you use this model in your network.

Why not listen to the President of B5 Media about blog networks. He may have something worth following.

10 Questions to Ask a Blog Network within this article by Jeremy Wright will give you a big advantage over the next guy or gal if you always keep this in mind while building your blog network.

Mac Slocam of the fodder network lists 5 mistakes he made in his first year in a blog network. These are always big gems when you can hear mistakes others makes.

Richard at ReadWriteWeb.com talks about sticking with niches. Which is always a good lesson.

Here’s a list of 10 things for your blog network to take it through the Web 2.0.

Here’s a top 5 list about how to make your blog network standout.

Although not a step-by-step guide, this how to create a blog network article can get you started in the right direction.

17-32: Making Money from Blogging and Blog Networks

Making money from blogs is tough, and if you want to start a blog network with many blogs, focused on different topics, that’s even tougher. Yaro Starak over at Entrepreneur’s Journey has put together a killer series on looking at blogging as a sustainable business model and what it takes to be a professional blogger. Whether you manage them or are one these articles will help.
I - Blogging as a Sustainable Business Model
II - Can you be a professional Blogger
III - Advantages Top Bloggers Have
IV - Key Resource For Sustainable Blogging
V - Are there more Business Blogging Models

Here’s a few interesting articles on the mother of all blog networks, Weblogs Inc. They’re from Blog Herald and deals with payments from weblogs inc and the other is and extension of the first and is about the state of pay rates in blog networks. Although it’s from 2005, it gives you a little more info and keeps you going on your blog network.

Performancing has an old article about payment models for blog networks and can help you out if you’re trying to figure out what to pay bloggers on your network.

Another Good article about payments for bloggers come from Blog Herald and looks into what’s the best payment model for a blog network owner. Abe Olandres looks at B5 media and Weblogs, Inc.

David Peralty of BloggingPro.com explains how payed blogging works. He lists several possible options like funding it from your own pockets, revenue sharing and using other projects as a fund source.

David also has a great article with actually blog payment numbers $$$. This is really what everyone wants to see anyway.

Jon over at the ArtofMoney.com recently posted about needing $130,000 to start his blog network. Which if you don’t want to spend all the time in the world blogging, promoting, link building, etc, etc, you may need a good chunk of change to really make an impact in the blogging world.

John Chow blogs about his blogs income for a few months which is always entertaining. He also helps you learn how to best monetize blogs with and without Google.

Here’s a good Wall Street Journal article discussing blogs and can they make sustainable money. The article features Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis and JupiterMedia dude Alan Meckler. (Can you guess which one thinks they can and which one doesn’t?)

Rogers Cadenhead, of cadenhead.org, responds to a recent Toronto Star article in which they wrote a claim that only 100 of the 65 million blogs make money. Small articles, not as outlandish as you may think.

Here’s an old post about what to pay bloggers and how B5 Media caught heat during some fo there earlier rounds. Although there are enough blog networks out there and people realize you can probably make more joining a network (promoting, traffic, monetizing all takes lots of time), this article gives you more insight.

The blog-republic.com, a blog network itself, has some great articles about starting and maintaining a blog network. One, A Business model for small blog networks talks about how smaller networks might want to begin making money from their blogs.

33-41: The Bad and the Good about Blog Networks

The CEO of 9 Rules wrote recently over at his blog about Why Blog Networks Failed. It’s quite insightful and why not learn from what others fail at to help you succeed. This article also sparked quite a few other articles that I list here about blog networks failing. I included most of them cause you can learn a thing or two from each commentary on this wisdump post.

And here’s a rebuttal by VC’s. Tell us what you think about the VC money that’s now started to trickle into blog networks. Could it be that they actually do have a place in the business world.

Nate Ritter began a blog network related series about how to start a blog network that looks like it should have more in the series, (I but I couldn’t find them.) It’ll help you get those juices flowing.

The problogging dilemma, is there a dilemma? Do you blog your passion? If you’re starting a blog network you may want to start with blogging your passion because it’ll keep you going. But can you make money from starting a blog network about your passion?

How about one called why blog networks suck. Interesting points, good things to avoid? Warning though, sorry to send you to a site with a popup ad. (People still use these? that aren’t at sitepoint.com?)

A top 40 Blog Networks list to give you something to shoot for. There’s a lot of blog networks out there but making it to the top takes something special. Learn what these networks have that yours might not.

The popular SEOBook.com gave their opinion on why blog networks suck in that article. However, they did mention B5 Media as a prime example of “why we don’t need more networks” and that was before B5 raised $2 mil. None the less, once again, learn from the critics.

Although I don’t agree that “blog networks are fading,” having it pointed out once again that Weblogs Inc took 18-24 months to build some of their blogs readership can be relief when you hit road bumps.

Blog Networks in the limelight is an article that talks about money raised, networks that have failed, and networks that have succeeded. Good resource.

And there you have it. I hope these articles help you on your way to starting a blog network. I have followed a lot of the advice and need to learn more to help grow my blog network even more.