Darren at Pro Blogger posted this a while back. I didn’t stumble upon it until I was doing some more researching on Blogging Experiment.Ben was using a scoring method in order to make sure he did enough daily to promote his blog. I started thinking about that as a very effective way to market a blog and make sure enough work was putting in daily.

Basically the gist of it is you award yourself points for doing certain aspects of maintaining a blog. 10 points for a post, 5 points for a comment ect. It seems like a great way to stay on the ball. I will be posting my Daily Scores in a page I have created called, simply enough, Daily Scores. I will also update this as needed.

UPDATE:

I have found the score card I will be using, it was located Confessions of a Housewife. It is an effective scoring system.

This is something.

I used to sit around trying to think of ways to use my music and band promotional skills to make money in other ways. I wish I would have thought of this about 4 years ago when my band was one of the top users of Myspace.

Needless to say, the article brings up an statistic that is of high interest to me.

Her website, Whateverlife.com, is generating between 40,000 and 70,000 dollars a month in ad revenue. Her alexa rankings are pretty good, but her site still isn’t really THAT popular in the scheme of websites.

What if you could create a concept that would make you, oh, lets say 10 percent of what she is making.

Would YOU be happy with an extra 4-7k a month?

I spent the better part of the last decade in the music industry honing my marketing skills and when I switched over to web marketing, I wondered how many of my skills would transfer over. I was happy to see that promoting a blog is really no different than promoting an independent band. It takes time, hard work, a little know-how and most importantly, good content.

Blog vs Song

The number one factor in band marketing is a good song. Image, fan base, web presence, and stage performance are really secondary when it is broken down. A good song is a good song, and THAT is what makes a band worth while in terms of financial success. You may not like a band like Fall Out Boy, but you cannot deny their ability to write musical and lyrical hooks. The exact same thing could be said for a blog. Regardless of topic, the content has to be thought provoking, well written, and the blog layout needs to be smooth. Just like a well crafted song. If you have this, you have the first element needed to have a successful blog.

Radio vs Digg

Before the time when the internet ruled music, there was a lovely medium called radio. When I first start doing band promotion, in the late 90’s (the ice-age), the key to marketing your music was to get it on the radio. You would start small, maybe trying some local high school or college radio stations, and hope that you could get your music played on one of the local programs on the bigger stations in town. The key determining factor was the listener base. If the song was good it was requested more often. The more a song was requested, the better chances it would make it into regular rotation and therefor, earning more royalties. The exact same thing could be said for a blog. Services like Digg are similar to the old radio. You have an article published, and if it is good enough, it will make it to the front page, or ‘regular rotation’ of Digg. When this happens, you will have a lot more traffic to your site and you will begin to see your profits increase, just like how radio impacts a song.

Promotional Photo vs Wordpress Theme

Promotional photos are usually the first thing noticed about a band after their music. It might be on a flier, poster, website, advertisement, or countless other places. As the old adage goes, Image is everything if the content is good. Bands that look like bands tend to have more fans, garner more attention, and present a great ‘first impression’ for those people who are trying to learn more. The exact same thing could be said for blog marketing. You could have the secret to eternal life, but if your blog has a million and one advertisements, horrible spelling, and a color scheme straight from a Commodore 64 it will not be a popular blog. And popularity is the key to revenue. So even though content is king, the image and presentation is right next to content as far as importance goes.

The Plan

One key element that I noticed working in the music industry is that you might meet the best songwriter you have heard in years, and he has no idea what to do to make his music heard by large amounts of people. He has the look of Harry Connick Jr, the guitar skill of John Mayer, and he languishes in a basement club playing to 20 people. This happens in the blog world all the time. Someone has exceptional content and a great layout, but they have no plan on how to promote their blog. Or, if they have a plan, they usually set unattainable goals. Brandon Boyd of Incubus once said if you make small goals and reach every one of them, you will make it to the level you want to be at. Make small goals and succeed.

Hard Work

Once you have the content, the image, and the plan, blog marketing and band marketing become the same exact animal. It is all about the hard work. There is no such thing as a one-hit wonder. Even the musicians who have ‘one-hit wonders’ had to make a calculated effort to get to that level. The equivalent to that in the web world could be a website such as Elfyourself.Com. Even though the website came out of nowhere, generate huge volumes of traffic and delighted millions of people, it was a well-crafted idea and the plan was executed perfectly. Some bands work for 10 years to get their one hit. Some work 2 months and have 10 hits. Either way, they had to have the content, the image, the plan, and then executed the plan with hard work.

I know this has been debated before and I am sure it will be debated again. I have decided to switch from Blogger to Wordpress and I immediately thought of everything I had read from practically every single blogger:

Wordpress will smoke Blogger.

I agree. I love the features of Wordpress, I love the how easily it can be customized and I love how you can switch themes at the drop of a hat.

But it got me thinking, is Blogger completely pointless? I don’t really think that that is the case.

I think Blogger was a good tool to help me figure out if blogging is something I wanted to do. There was no domain involved, there was no hosting, heck, there wasn’t even any database work. They had some simple, yet effective promotional tools that helped generate some (although not a lot) of traffic to my blog.

So while I am happy as a clam to have moved to Wordpress, I would like thank Blogger for showing me the way!

I spent the better part of the last month evaluating my finances and future goals of my ‘cyber‘ business. I ran some simple tests with this blog over the past two months, to see if a blog could actually create revenue. Just by posting ‘relevant’ content to current events I was able to generate a small, not substantial, amount of income. I did no promotion, no advertising, and didn’t really work on trying to make money. I just put up some Google AdSense ads and that was that.

Since this is my ‘flagship’ blog I am making changes to the layout on content for the new year.

The plan is simple. This blog will be here as my reporting / ad generating facet of my internet business as well as business industry related posts. There will be theories, metrics, and all sorts of good information on what worked and what didn’t work on my blogs and on my websites. I will also be posting daily about other blogs and the ways they are generating money, and doing sponsored reviews of other website. I hope to keep it entertaining as well without diluting the site too much with a ridiculous amount of ads.

Basically, you are going to have a front row seat on how to start and maintain a content based blog and business. The posts here as well will be focused on monetizing, and generating ad revenue. I am a novice, so you will see many failed attempts at generating revenue. Hopefully, you will be able to steer clear of my mistakes.

I will continue to post my personal musings on a soon to be announced blog, but I just feel the domain ManVsBlog.com is too good to give up on the money making side of things. So get ready for the massive changes.

2008 will be a good year for ManVsBlog! Hope you all stick around.

I have spent the last few days contemplating this exact same question. Is it worth the time and effort to promote your blog in an effort to make money. I have seen this question posed many times, and I thought I would put my two cents in.

I want to be a writer. That is what I want to do.

I also want to pay my bills being a writer. I am pretty sick of working at a help desk.

I spent 10 years in bands attempting to do the same thing. But people didn’t put the evil to the ethics like they do when talking about putting a simple ad on a blog. We would go around the country, handing out free Cd’s, begging people to take a listen hoping someday we will see nice royalty checks from doing something we love. And likes 99 percent of musicians, I never saw a cent. But bands don’t really have the chance to put click-through ads at their merch tables.

So I made the decision that I am going to take as much time and effort to market my talents. Using this blog as an attempt to earn a living is one of those.

I think the key is, if you are a good writer, you deserve to make money while you provide your readership with content they enjoy. It takes a while to come up with something to write about, articulate it so people understand and enjoy it, and then refine and edit. It’s not like writers just show up, start typing away and in 20 minutes they are finished with their daily activities. My blogs (I have several) take about 4-6 hours to complete. That is a lot of work for free, obviously.

Ethically, if you are profiting off your opinion I think that is acceptable.

I recently ran across a website that I think is outstanding. It is called bloggingexperiment.com. Here is a gifted writer using his talents to make money. He is not short-changing his readership, and he is working his tail off to have a well thought out website and concept. And while I do not have the expertise yet, I intend on following a similar path to build this website, over time, in to a similar money making venture.

Cheers!

I have decided to start a blog. The motive is two fold:

First off, I love writing and I have since I can remember. Even as a child, I would attempt to write my own columns. Sometimes for others amusement, sometimes for my own.

Now days, you can easily post a column on-line. It doesn’t make it interesting, that takes talent. But at least the tools are there. Last week I decided I would much rather write for a living than sit behind a desk picking up phones calls. So I came up with this concept based off of my favorite television show, Man vs Wild.

I will be posting columns 4 times a week. Hopefully they will entertain you. In addition to that content, I will be posting basically anything I feel like. Maybe a news story will tickle my fancy. Maybe a review of the newest Ipod. Maybe a rant about how awful I think the Chicago Bulls are this year.

Secondly, I am going to try to use this avenue to generate revenue to pay my bills! But instead of recycling content from other blogs, I intend on using my wit, writing ability, and business sense to turn this blog into a nice little business. So if you enjoy any of the content please visit a sponsor link. They help keep the blogosphere running.

Cheers!