Popular blogs are often read daily by a large audience. Reaching thousands of people, popular blogs can widely influence opinions and are terrific personal branding platforms as well.
These blogs can and often do make a lot of money. They produce regularly updated webpages which pull in large amounts of search or social media traffic. This converts into advertising revenue.
Flagship blogs also have large and loyal audiences and their attention can be monetized in various ways: creating and selling subscription-based access, info products, affiliate programs or joint ventures with other businesses/bloggers.
Since I love writing and making money online, I thought I could create a schedule of some sort and force myself to build large flagship blogs regularly for profit.
I thought about this idea for a little while and came up a plan.
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Create one flagship blog on the first day of every month and spend all 30 days developing and optimizing it. By the end of the month, the blog should be fully operational and only maintenance is needed: which means that you’ll only need to create content regularly while promoting the site.
When the first day of the next month arrives, repeat the whole process again by building and creating another new blog within the time frame of 30 days.
At the end of a year, you should have 12 flagship blogs and all of them should be fairly established with their core audience and regular readers. Depending on the niche and the blog’s popularity, each will bring in some steady revenue.
Put simply, this project involves the repeated use of 30 day blog production cycles to develop multiple flagship sites. The ultimate goal is to eventually set up a collection of blogs and make them into profitable assets.
Apart from multiple income sources, setting up multiple blogs allows you to experiment with a lot of things, in terms of marketing/promotion or monetization.
Playing around with each flagship blog will also give you experience-based knowledge, the type you cannot easily obtain through observation or a single blog.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can set up your 30 day blog development cycle.
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Having an overall idea of what you want to achieve is important because it allows you to set intermediate markers (daily pageviews/No. of subscribers etc.) which track progress towards these goals. Apart from having a list of attainable numbers, it is also important to create a time-based work routine: a weekly action plan.
The goal of an action plan is to divide your limited resource (time) into smaller chunks, thereby allowing you to spend a proportionate amount of attention on the tasks involved in developing a blog. For example, let’s break down the development of a flagship blog into a progressive four-week sequence:
Week 1: Setting up the Blog
Week 2: Developing a Strategy
Week 3: Marketing the Blog
Week 4: Maintenance and Transition
The points mentioned above are not comprehensive and there are a lot more things you can do within each phase. These are just examples of tasks that could be done within the time frame of a single week.
You should set up a schedule that fits your resources, availability and skills. For example, if you have money to spare you could outsource a big portion of the work and focus on networking and strategy development instead.
Try to cross-market topically related blogs as it will help to increase readership, especially if one blog grows faster than the others.This tactic could be done in the form of contextual interlinking or display ads.
Team marketing is also a viable option to consider. A strong and active network will help a lot in the early stages of your site. Working with others will also motivate you and will give you ideas when you are unsure of how to best market your blog.
If you set up blogs in related niches, you can monetize them by selling ad spots across all of them as a whole. Networked ads will provide additional exposure for advertisers and make it easier for you to price your ads at a higher rate.
Another revenue-generating strategy is to sell the blogs off once they are reasonably developed. In the internet marketing niche, blogs with an audience, some reputation and revenue can get a sale price of over $10K. Even smaller blogs with less than 200 subscribers are sold for thousands of dollars.
Blogs are fast becoming lucrative resale assets, much like cars or houses.
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This is probably the number one question on your mind right now. It is also the biggest problem that anyone who owns multiple blogs will face.
It is difficult to create and promote content for many flagship blogs. The easiest way to do so is to get other people to do the work. You can hire ghost writers and staff/guest bloggers and get them to create content on a daily basis.
Alternatively, turn the blog into a team blog, whereby each member will blog on your site in return for exposure or revenue-share. Key point to note: You don’t have to be the blogger in the limelight. You could always play CEO behind a multi-author setup.
Think of blogs as media businesses, and not just platforms for personal expression.
Indeed, outsourcing seems to be the only viable solution because the more blogs you set up, the greater your content deficit. The articles you publish are incredibly important for a new blog because it determines if you’ll attract a core audience that’ll subscribe, read or link to you regularly.
Active promotion of your content is essential. If your websites are profitable, you could hire a marketer to work on a profit sharing basis. This could even be a fellow blogger or friend. You don’t need to hire a professional company. Blogs are really easy to market, once you know what results to expect and what to do.
Social media marketing is an example of a blog-friendly, DIY promotional method that works well and is relatively easy to implement.
The costs involved in hiring writers and designers needs to be carefully monitored because you don’t want to overspend. Ideally, you want to break even for each blog within 3 months, which is possible if you are skilled in growing it.
Perhaps this schedule will work best for bloggers or entrepreneurs who already own websites which generate revenue. Take a portion of your existing revenue and use it to fund your new blogs. The startup process will always be a little bumpy but the payoffs will come, especially if your site provides great value and is well marketed.
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Procrastination and laziness are obstacles to success. If you have the skills and ambition, all you need to make money is to stop hesitating and start doing it. You can learn all you want, draft up the most detailed plans and network till everyone says they love you but it all doesn’t mean anything, if you don’t take action.
If you love blogging and want to make money from it, go right ahead and set up a blog. Some people will tell you its hard to make money blogging. I say ignore them. It’s possible. It’s not a pipe dream. And you can do it, if you really want to.
Experts are only people like you and me. They talk about what they know or have experienced. For every 100 unsuccessful blogs they see or come across, there a thousand more that are successful. Don’t let statistics determine your future.
It’s really all up to you. All it takes is a serious desire to succeed and a willingness to learn. Keep an open mind and experiment as much as possible. You’ll find out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to blogging and making money.
Here’s the deal. From the beginning of next month (December), I’ll push myself to create one flagship blog every 30 days. I might not last for an entire year but I’ll go as far as I can. If I didn’t challenge myself, I’ll probably be too lazy to build up these assets.
I like having the pressure of time bearing down on me and I’ll make sure that I work twice as hard to get everything set up and done in 30 days. No excuses.
This article was partly written to motivate myself and partly because I thought some of you out there might want to attempt this 30 day blog development cycle too.
So, any takers?
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