Skip to main content

4 Foundations of a Successful Blog

At a recent book reading at SXSW I spoke briefly about a new chapter in the new ProBlogger book (due out next month) that is a case study of my main blog (4-5 bigger than ProBlogger) – Digital Photography School.
dPS is now just a few days away from being 4 years old and so with the new edition of the book Chris and I thought it might be a good idea to include a new chapter that examined how I’ve developed the blog so far.
The case study looks at 4 main aspects:
  1. how I launched the blog – the four foundations that I build in years 1-2
  2. how I built upon the foundations – what I focused upon in years 3-4
  3. how I monetize the blog
  4. the way I use email to drive traffic to and monetize the blog
In this post I want to talk briefly about the four foundations that I focused upon in years 1-2 of building my photography site.
I won’t go into great detail about each one here (if you want more the book is your best bet) but as my reading was interrupted by a fire alarm at SXSW I wanted to cover some of it here for those who missed the 2nd half.

Foundation 1 – Content

  • My #1 task in years 1-2 of dPS was building content.
  • The focus was content for beginners (this was expanded later).
  • My aim was for every post to solve a problem that a new camera owner had.
  • The content was all ‘how to’ related – practical stuff that helped readers do or achieve something
  • Quality of content was paramount – but so too was the idea of increasing the ‘quantity’ of content – I started with 3-4 posts a week but aimed to get it daily after 1 year.

Foundation 2 – Promotion

  • ‘Build it and they Will Come’ is an idea with some truth to it – but in the early days of your blog you also need to actively promote your blog – readers won’t just find it.
  • Define your potential reader – who are they? What are their needs?
  • Identify where that type of reader is already gathering online (and offline).
  • Participate in those sites where your potential reader is gathering – guest posts, building a forum presence, leaving useful comments, networking etc.

Foundation 3 – Community

  • People don’t just come online for information – they increasingly are coming online to find ‘belonging’
  • Readers want to participate, interact, join and relate – give them opportunity to do so
  • On dPS starting a forum was one way I did this however community was something I went out of my way to build on the blog itself.
  • Use polls, start discussions, run debates, ask questions, highlight readers work, invite people to promote themselves on your blog, link to your readers
  • When you build community you build an army of evangelists for your blog, create social proof and open many doors for growth and strengthening of your site

Foundation 4 – Capture Contacts

  • Most people who visit your site will never return naturally – even if they like your site
  • On dPS I prominently invite people to subscribe in numerous places
  • RSS is not always King – on dPS email subscription makes up over 75% of all subscribers
  • Email newsletters drive as much traffic as Google does on dPS
  • Email newsletters drive significant earnings (advertising, affiliate promotions and product sales)
  • Email newsletters build community and make the site more sticky and personal

NOTE: Monetization was not one of the Main Tasks/Foundations in Years 1-2

I did monetize the site from day 1 and dPS was profitable from the first month or two – but it was not my main focus. Rather I focused upon the above 4 foundations and let the monetization grow naturally as traffic and reader engagement grew.
In years 1-2 monetization was largely through 2 ad networks – AdSense and Chitika (aff). I did some low level affiliate marketing (Amazon mainly) but over 90% of the income in years 1-2 was from ad networks. Years 3-4 were when I increased my focus upon monetization.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document
1 comment
Read more

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th
Post a Comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a
Post a Comment
Read more