Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Does Free Content Help You Sell

Oct 22, 2007 3 Comments »

A few days ago I wrote a post on how the rock band Radiohead is selling its music albums by not selling. The band has provided the music for free and has left it on its fans whether they want to pay for it or not.

Many years ago when I was designing websites I created a free auto responder-based nine-day HTML course that people could receive every day by submitting their emails. In the final installment I asked them would they like to pay for the similar course. 95% of the respondents said they would be eager to pay if the course was well formatted and contained a little bit of more real-world examples. I was quite encouraged but now I don’t remember why I never got down to preparing a professional, worth-paying-for course. Anyway the point is that people are ready to pay if you provide them great value in a good package. Brian of CopyBlogger talks about how you need to sell information rather than providing free content on your website and make money in his latest report (you need to signup). Although I totally agree with the concept of selling knowledge and making money on the Internet making money by providing free content is not as difficult as it is made out to be. (He is totally right when he says that it is not necessary that an idea is going to work for you just because it has worked for the others.) You just need to generate enough valuable content: content that really helps people and content that is not available on other websites. And of course you need to generate the right buzz. And of course you need to have some alternate source of income while you are building up your content repository.

Making money off free content doesn’t always have to be about making money off advertising. You can make use of free content to generate lots of traffic for your business and to build your brand around your profession: even if you decide to sell information products from your website you need to generate lots of traffic first.

When you share your knowledge openly and freely with your visitors it establishes your authority and people begin to respect you and know you for your knowledge. You begin to get more business queries through your free content. I have seen many bloggers generating thousands of readers and then announcing their book writing venture on their blogs, sharing little tidbits of the books and talking about subjects revolving around the books. This helps them generate the positive buzz and by the time the book are released there are already hundreds if not thousands of eager readers waiting for them.

Coming back to generating free content in order to make money online; I don’t think that all the important subjects have already been covered. Don’t get discouraged by the fact that some very famous bloggers are already writing on the subject you want to write on. They’re known and well-respected doesn’t mean there is no scope for other blogs. Google gained prominence even when most people were using Yahoo! to search on the Internet.

When you do some research you will notice that most of these bloggers are famous because one, they write a lot and generate great content and two, they network a lot. Even if you feel that you have nothing new to add don’t let it stop you from writing. There is always an un-written, unique perspective that you bring in when you start giving your own take on a particular subject. Just start writing. An added benefit of generating new blog posts on the same old topics is that provided you optimize your posts, the search engines are going to rank your posts way above the already existing blog posts.

Most people don’t succeed on the Internet, not because their ideas are not innovative or not genuine; they don’t succeed because the required effort is lacking and the required exposure is lacking. Right content plus exposure plus lots of the right content can surely bring you success.

Technorati Tags: make money online, blogging, free content, blog advertising

Should You Purchase a Popular Blog Just Because It Is Popular?

Sep 28, 2007 2 Comments »

A popular blog — NorthxEast — is for sale and bidding is going on. I was just wondering if someone buys this blog finally, what benefits would it bring to the new owner. Currently its strengths are:

• An established brand
• Lots of RSS subscribers
• Some great posts by the likes of Leo Babauta.
• Steady traffic

A blog, especially of the NorthxEast kind, is an extension of the bloggers who write for the blog. For instance, it is not just a post, but a post by a blogger called Leo whom people adore, or at least have strong feelings for. Once with the new owner, will the content go through some change or will it have the same orientation? What about the writers; will the same writers still be writing the same kind of stuff.

And what about the monetary performance? I have no experience regarding this but with 75,000 unique visitors per month, $175 per month as revenue is a bit low I would say even by my own blogging standards. 75,000 visitors means on an average 2,450 visitors per day. Recently I started (due to a fluke of course) drawing around 1,000 visitors per day at Writing Cave and that started generating around $5-$10 everyday with just Google AdSense. Since I don’t write there regularly and promotion of any sort is non-existent the traffic has come back to 150-200 per day.

So given the high popularity and a bit low revenue generation of NorthxEast does it make sense to buy it just because it is very popular? It depends how you look at blogging.

If blogging is merely a business opportunity for you then you have a 50-50% chance of making NxE a success. You’ll need to keep the momentum and if your revenue sources remain the same then you’ll have to increase the traffic multiple times of its current number to make some decent money. You can also explore other revenue sources and you’ll need to sell your blog to the advertisers more aggressively. You can also change the nature of the content. Most of its content, although very well-written, I’m afraid, is not unique. For instance, Maki’s blog has very unique, useful content most of the time and people can implement his suggestions immediately and improve their blogging performance. By the time people — people who really click the ads — reach NxE they’ve already read the stuff and so go quickly through the post, comment if they want to, and move on.

If blogging is a passion for you and you want to leverage NxE’s popularity I think then too, if you have lots of disposable money ($5,000-$15,000 is lots of money for me) then you should go ahead and buy the blog. You’ll have a ready platform. Just be sure the quality doesn’t suffer. There will surely be a sudden drop in traffic but I don’t think the RSS subscribers will unsubscribe en masse just because the ownership has changed. Provide them good posts to read and they’ll keep on reading.

Apart from that, if you have money but no blogging passion, don’t buy it. You’ll just waste a nice blog, and the effort that has gone into it.

Technorati Tags: northxeast, blog selling, popular blogs

50 Most Influential Blogs

Sep 12, 2007 6 Comments »

What influences you is a highly personal choice but there are things, personalities and events that affect a multitude of people and that’s what encompasses the NxE’s list of 50 Most Influential Bloggers and I think all the bloggers in the list deserve to be there. My personal favorites are:

• Neil Patel — SEO
• Leo Babauta — Personal development
• Rand Fishkin — SEO
• Om Malik — Technology and gadgets
• Brian Clark — Copywriting
• Pete Cashmore — Technology, Internet, SM, etc.
• Darren Rowse — Earning money from blogging
• Gina Trapani — Personal development and life improvement

There are some other great blogs but I hardly read even these regularly. I don’t get to spend much time on blogging (I’m desperately trying to change that) and whatever time I get I prefer writing posts rather than reading other blogs and interacting on them (hence, lack of traffic).

Technorati Tags: influential bloggers, top bloggers, blogging

Do Technorati tags solve any purpose?

Jul 13, 2007 5 Comments »

Are Tags Working? asks Lorelle at The Blog Herald. I started using Technorati tags to increase traffic and I’ve been using them for many months now. Although I don’t have the right data to know how they have impacted my traffic (I hardly get any), I implemented them after reading numerous recommendations and I try to use the tags as appropriately as possible.

Tagging means assigning keywords to your posts so that when people search for those keywords on Technorati (if you ever use Technorati to search — I do) you blog gets found. The problem with these tags is, as Lorelle rightly points out, that anybody can use them with any sort of post, whether the tags are relevant for the post or not. This is a problem, but I don’t think it is a deterrent because now that I’m writing this, I do remember my stats often showing incoming traffic from Technorati. But then, if Technorati is pinged no matter whether you use the tags or not, what’s the use of using them and wasting precious space on your blog posts?

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: technorati tags

Automattic and Six Apart Compared

Jul 13, 2007 No Comments »

At Read/Write Web. Automattic is a company that developed and now promotes the popular blogging software WordPress. Six Apart developed MovableType. I used MovableType a few years ago but then started using WordPress because I found it a better, lighter alternative.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, movabletype, six apart, automattic