How People Are Really Making Fortunes With Blogs

In today’s case study, I'm going to focus on exactly how someone turned a small investment into seven figures; and as he's continued to build his business, it now brings in eight figures in revenue a year.

Meet the Owner

This particular blog owner now runs an extensive network of influential blog websites. I interviewed him in depth for this site. He generally does not have the time, or the interest for interviews, and I only managed to pin him down due to a very tenuous family connection!

His company (it's a private company so I don’t have the exact financial numbers) now makes between ten and twenty million dollars a year in sales. And this obviously keeps him very busy!

How He Got His Start

His blog network started very modestly: He made a personal investment in his new business and started one blog in a hot subject area: the latest gadgets. He didn't start with much. Just a good topic and a writer who wrote his content. (You can hire writers quite inexpensively. A blog writer may be part-time each day, writing just two or three blog posts daily for example.)

The owner of this blog described to me that practically no money was made for the first year, and that nothing really happened over that period. However, it lay an important foundation for the future, especially since new blogs are often ignored by Google. A site takes a while to get known both by readers and by other blogs (which then will often link to it). Plus, of course, Google is less keen on new sites than more "mature" sites.

His Secret to Generating Big Traffic Fast

So, as this first blog was developed, the site owner started to understand how the blog world worked. Over time, people started linking to his site and he started getting some search engine traffic. But it didn’t take off particularly strongly right from the beginning. It took time.

And then he discovered a way to get traffic to help put his blog on the map: Controversy and exclusivity. Get an exclusive -- get a scoop if you can -- and put it on your blog. Be the first with this piece of information and hundreds if not thousands of sites (especially other blogs and maybe even news sites) will link to you.

And actually, in the interview I had with this business owner, he talks about how he went about getting some exclusive scoops and how some of them brought tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of visitors to a single page, even within one week!

Critical Business Decisions

So after a year, once this new blog started taking off, he then started reinvesting profits into a second blog. And he continued to reinvest profits over the next few years into more and more blogs.

The good from the bad: Some of the blogs didn't work particularly well, if at all. Perhaps they broke even but they didn’t gain the kind of reader traction he was looking for. So for those blogs, he had to make some difficult business decisions. He decided to either sell them to other blog owners who could perhaps make better use of them, or in some cases, radically cut down on the postings to those less successful blogs.

Expenses and revenue: Now, since this blog owner was doing very little of the writing himself, one of the biggest business expenses was writers. And in the blog industry, the biggest source of income for the business is of course advertising.

As I write this, there is a global economic downturn and that has greatly affected how much companies spend on advertising. However, this blog owner has found certain market areas are still quite active for advertising and resilient to the downturn -- particularly TV and film advertising.

Pushing beyond the norm: Another decision he made that had a big impact was trying different ad formats beyond the standard ones. He suggests coming up with some unique advertising methods so then you can charge more per thousand views. (Industry note: the advertising term "CPM" means "cost per thousand").

As well, he advises that you don't just rely on AdSense or other advertising networks but have your own ad sales team selling advertising space the traditional way (taking clients out, etc.), since you make more that way. Obviously this may not be achievable for every size of business, but something to keep in mind as your blog network grows.

How Much Do You Want to Make?

So far...

 

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