Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

As most of you noticed, I haven’t really been blogging on any of my blogs for the past 2 years.  I’ve been consumed by my 9-5 which hasn’t allowed me to write, link, promote, or stay in the web too much.  Back when I was going strong, blogging daily, linking daily, and build my blog network, I was net about $600 per month.  Not too bad considering I was still working full-time and would do all my blogging in the evening and mornings.

But, even with the dry spell, not doing much of anything, all blogs losing pagerank completely, I’ve still managed to make money.  Every month I get a little bit in my paypal account and bank account via various advertising agencies.  So how much am I making still…

I’m happy to report that I’m still netting about $300 a month!  That’s right, doing nothing, still making about $300 a month.  Not too bad, and it shows you that even if you’re spending all this time on building an online presence, it can still provide you with much needed income.

This is just another reason that I’m giving it another go.  Hopefully smarter and wiser by hiring and editor to help me manage freelance bloggers. As well as focusing my efforts on one blog. I’m hoping this new focus will allow the figure to grow, at much more rapid pace, and with less effor than I put into it before I took my break.

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.

It’s been a little over a year since I spent much time paying attention to my internet “holdings.” Since the spring of 2007 my blogs have pretty much been on autopilot. Every once in a while I would write a blog post, check in om my earnings, make sure I didn’t forget a domain renewal, and a few odds and ends bookkeeping wise. But that’s about it.

Well, since that time a lot has happened besides gas prices doubling. I’ve become extremely busy at my 9-5 job getting a promotion, a lot more responsibility and managing a lot more. I’ve lost pretty much all page rank on my sites. I’ve lost three earning parked domain names due to non-action on renewal. I’ve lost a lot of regular readers to this blog and some other high traffic blogs I run.

And somehow, through all that, I’ve managed to keep my income steady?!?

Yeah, that’s not a typo, my earnings from blogs stayed about the same. The great part is, income from both passive sources, Text-Link-Ads and AdSense, have increased. My overall earnings have stayed the same because I’m not actively selling ad space or reivews on my blogs. If I had kept up where I left off, my earnings would no doubt have been much higher. But then again, it wouldn’t be passive income now would it.

The past year has been a good break from the internet. Blogging, domaining, and the prospect of making money working for yourself is a very big motivator towards spending entirely way too much time sitting in front of your computer. And rightfully so.

Before I took my break I had learned a lot about blogging, investing in domain names, and becomming part of the internet entrepreneur community. This blog has been featured on top name blogs such as problogger.net for a php hack I did to save your YPN account, and also featured on Entrepreneurs-Journey.com several times for various articles I’ve done as well as a post on my link-baiting technique to launch my blog network.

With all that great promotion and words of encouragement, you’d think I would have stuck around. But sometimes you just need a break. My plan is to return slowly and build my blogging, domain investments and other online income to a steady passive income stream competing with my salary from my 9-5.

So how did your blogs continue to earn money?

I know I’ll get this question from a lot of people right off the bat. And don’t worry. I plan to answer this question along with many more over the next few weeks with regular posts to this blog. But, since I’ve been away, my prolific writing skills just aren’t what they used to be.

Some things to look forward to.

• Income reports on the previous year
• Updates to my domain name investing series
• How to file a patent series
• How to start a corporation series
• More on Starting a Blog Network
• and many, many more…

Thanks for those who’ve kept me on their RSS Reader and are surprised to see some updates from me.

Aloha,
Erik