Ahmed Bilal

Whenever I think about starting a new blog or to start blogging on an established blog (like when I came onboard Performancing), there’s a strong feeling of apprehension and … fear.

What will I write about? Will anyone read it? What if no one comments? What if the blog doesn’t work? What if I run out of topics to blog about? How will I beat my rivals?

It’s a nightmare, I tell you.

The worst thing you can possibly do – and probably the biggest mistake I’ve made while blogging – is to not start earlier.

To quote someone wise (I’ve forgotten who said this):

The best time to start something was last year. The second best time is right now.

So the best bloggging advice you can get is – start blogging.

However, starting blogging blindly is not enough, so you need direction and focus. And that’s where my second biggest mistake comes in:

No end-game.
Do not – and I cannot emphasize this enough – do not launch without having some idea of what you want out of the blog and if necessary, how you will make your exit.

If it’s your personal blog, forget what I just said and go blog about your cat. But if you want to make money from blogging, have an endgame, an exit strategy in mind.

Being focused on the end result helps you disregard most of the non-essential stuff that you shouldn’t be doing in the first place – you’ll be focused on bringing in results while enjoying your blogging (assuming that you’re passionate about whatever it is that you’re blogging about).

And the best part – if you do these two things, you will sidestep 90% of the starting anxiety and jump right into the excitement of starting and growing a brand new blog.

This article was originally written on 17 Jul 2007 for Performancing.com.

99% of wordpress themes, sponsored or not, are crap and unusable.

It may offend you, but that’s reality. You’re not going to be able to go to WTC or the WP themes site OR any one of those large lists of WP themes and find a ‘quality’ theme in 5 minutes.

It takes time, and mostly it’s a situation of reaching an ‘acceptable’ compromise.

So what’s this about?

In the last few days it’s been fun to sit back and watch the trash talk fly towards WP because of their ‘decision’ to not promote sponsored themes through the themes.wordpress.net platform.

A few things that I want to point out, stuff that most people have missed at the start:

• The blogroll links are attribution links to the developers who had a hand in creating and developing WP. It’s quite similar to the ‘designed by’ theme credits you see on WP themes.
• The theme crediting links are NOT the problem. It’s a ridiculous equivocation, and if you’re going to do a rant on it without reading up on the background you’re going to come out of this looking like an ass.
• I think Matt Mullenweg truly believes that the move is good for the community (Mark Ghosh IMO did it because the sponsored themes pissed him off – he has every right to do so as he’s in the thick of it and must get tons of spammy submissions every day). You may disagree with him, but he’s serious about it (and there is a lot of support for banning sponsored themes in the WP community).
• There’s a serious problem of definition – when Matt talks about sponsored themes he’s talking about the trash that the people at themes.wordpress.net and Mark Ghosh at WTC are seeing. When we talk about sponsored themes we think of one link that’s removable in the theme. There’s a clear difference – see this article for an example.

Sponsored themes is an advertising model, and like all advertising models there will be some people looking to make a quick buck by peddling crap. So is the case with many, many sponsored themes.

My personal view on themes is that there should be a manual review – a quality review – of all themes, sponsored or not, and that WTC and themes.wordpress.net should filter themes based on quality, not advertising models.

Are you going to seriously tell me that promoting sponsored themes will cause WP a problem with Google? You’ve got to be joking.

Matt’s taken the low-effort option on this, and once the furore passes we will invariably see one or two sites coming up to challenge WTC and the WP themes site.

Bottom-line – banning sponsored themes tends to ban a few good themes as well, while it does nothing to improve the quality of the existing setup, which is full of trash (99%).

If you want to do something for the good of the community, don’t promote trash, promote quality. Be the filter for us instead of hosing us with long lists of unusable themes.

Eventually though I think this has a lot to do with how the open source community treasures keeping free things free (or not-for-profit) as opposed to any serious objections to a single sponsored link that is removable if you choose to remove it.

Logically, if you produce a theme with sponsored links that can be removed via the interface, that should be ok for Matt and Mark. But I doubt that it’s about allowing removal – their base emotional reaction has been to the advertising model, not to how its implemented.

Props to both Matt and Mark, I realise how tough it is for both of you, especially since you’re at the center of the whole theme submission game, but could you please be proactive instead of reactive and prune themes on quality?

More reading:
Sponsored themes – Mark Ghosh (9th April 2007)
On Sponsored Themes – Matt Mullenweg writing at WTC (12th April 2007)
No sponsored themes on WTC – Mark Ghosh (10th July 2007)
To do sponsored links or not? – James at RealityWired.com (11th July 2007)
No more sponsored links what a bunch of bullshit – Shoemoney (11th July 2007)
When the powerful pontificate, I puke – Ryan Caldwell (13th July 2007)

This article was originally written on 15 Jul 2007 for Performancing.com.

Selling a blog may seem a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be so difficult or stressing. Perhaps what you need is the right system to assist you in selling your blog.

There are 3 basic steps to selling a blog:

1. Collecting Blog Stats – This is stuff that buyers will ask for AND information that will help you establish what your blog is worth.
2. Blog Valuation – Sellers often put too high a price on their blogs and this puts buyers off, but by knowing what to count you can quickly come up with a price range that will be acceptable to you and the buyer.
3. Finding Buyers – Your target audience (buyers) will depend on your niche and how popular your blog is. Knowing how to go about finding the right buyer can mean the difference between selling at the right price and coming away feeling shortchanged (or not selling at all).

So let’s get started.

1. COLLECTING BLOG STATS

   The first thing you must do is to collect some basic information about your blog – and at the very least dump it in a folder and prepare a .zip file that you can email to any prospective buyers (or site brokers).

   So what information do you need?

   • Monthly earnings (including breakdown of how much each revenue stream (AdSense, direct ad sales, Kontera, TLA, etc) earned) for the last 3 months minimum (6 months is better). At this point collecting screenshots as proof of earnings would be a good idea as well.
   • Monthly traffic (unique visitors – in Google Analytics they call them absolute unique visitors) for the last 3 months, minimum (once again, 6 months recommended). Screenshots required here as well, although you could also provide access via your Google Analytics account.
   • A brief summary of site audience and demographics – who are they, what do they do, how much do they regularly spend in this niche (and what for).
   • A quick summary of your search engine rankings, especially for any keywords considered valuable in your niche.
   • Site age (not just domain age).
   • Key backlinks – if you’ve got multiple links from DMoz, a link from BBC, links from top blogs in your niche, other press coverage, etc – make a list.
   • Site expenses (per month) – apart from domain, hosting and marketing costs, factor in the cost of your own time as well as of any bloggers that work for you / contribute.
   • Feed subscription stats
   • Anything extra that a site owner must know and could raise / decrease the price of a business (bad reputation in the niche, low earnings per click for the niche, new features that have been developed but not marketed, etc).

   All this will take 15-30 minutes to put together.

2. HOW MUCH IS YOUR BLOG WORTH?

   There is one universal rule in any transaction – the buyer thinks that he’s paying too much, and the seller comes out talking about ideas and potential and complains that the money offered is too less. Both sides are right, from their own perspectives.

   So do you work out what a blog is worth? Note that if you’re going to run a public auction you will also need to decide a ‘BIN’ price (‘Buy It Now’ price) and starting bids.

   How to value your blog? There are different ways of doing so, but a quick n dirty formula would be like this:

   Blog Value = 2 x Estimated Yearly Revenue + Blog Premium – Running Costs

   That’s a ridiculously low multiple – in the real, offline world businesses and stocks sell at a 10x multiple, not a 1x or 2x multiple. The reason behind such low multiples online is because sites usually have a lot of risk attached to them – they may be too dependent on the blogger’s personality, on one single revenue stream, on a fading gimmick, etc.

   You can ramp up that multiple by developing the site’s brand (and not your personal brand), by developing multiple revenue streams, building a blog that doesn’t rely solely on search engines for traffic (and has a active community) and timing your sale so that the blog hasn’t peaked as yet in terms of its niche attraction.

   What is ‘Blog Premium’? It’s a lump sum designed to cover the value of the domain, the content, the blog design / code and any extra value based on the community surrounding that blog.

   Here’s a quick tip for setting a BIN and a starting bid: use different multiples for both of them. For example, I’d use a 4x multiple for the BIN price (a price I’d be comfortable selling the blog at) and a 2x multiple for a starting bid (low enough to get people started on the bidding).

   In the end, remember that a) you’re probably asking for too much and b) you’ll be lowballed to the 7 hells. As my namesake says – you need a thick skin, so deal with it. Not every blog sells according to the expectations of the seller.

3. FIND BUYERS

   How do you find buyers for your blog? If your blog is a leader in its niche, most times you can get away with doing a post on your blog and offering the basic info, and you’ll have a stream of emails from interested buyers.

   It doesn’t happen like that most of the time, so you actually have to go out and do some legwork.

   There are four routes to selling your blog:

   1. Announce it publicly – on your blog, on sites like Performancing, on domain auction forums like SitePoint, etc.

      If you do it publicly, brace yourself for public criticism of your blog from people who have no or little interest in buying your blog. They may be right (in which case you need to get back to work and fix things) or they could be merely misinformed – but criticism will definitely come. Even your readers could attack you (verbally) for selling out.

   2. Approach blog networks – it helps if you already know someone, but IMO if you have a good idea and offer something that the network does not already have, you’ll definitely pique their interest.
      The problem that may arise here is that blog networks will probably want to ‘hire’ you as well – which may work for some people but for someone like me I’d rather have a clean break from my blog than sell out and then keep writing on it. If you already have guest contributors you can approach one of them to take over the blog.

   3. Talk to people who you think might be interested – quite often you’ll find that even if they’re not interested they may know someone who would be interested. Depending on how your social networking skills are in your niche, you may have a lot of success using this method to find the right buyer for your blog.
   4. Hire someone to sell your blog for you. To be honest, if you can bring in an expert who will find buyers and negotiate a good deal, why not go for it? Yes, you’ll have to give this person a cut of the deal, but as long as you factor that into the price, you’re good to go.

   There’s no substitute for experience here, so my advice is to a) read up as much as you can about selling blogs and make sure you get advice the first time you sell out or b) hire an expert to manage the process for you. Option B works well because you can learn a lot from a broker, although your blog will need to be of a certain value to be worth a broker’s time.

   At the end of the day, if you want to get the right price for your blog, you need to understand how blog buyers think (and if you’ve bought a blog or two, that experience is even better).

   I’ll cover that in 3 Keys to Buying a Blog, but for now I’d be interested in hearing what you think sellers do when planning to sell a blog. Anything I’ve missed?

   I’d also be interested in hearing your personal blog selling experiences, as I’m sure several people here have bought and sold blogs.

This article was originally written on 9 Jul 2007 for Performancing.com.

As Ryan mentioned earlier, buying a blog can be a nerve-wracking process if you’re doing it for the first time and especially if you’re strapped for cash and are looking for a ‘good deal’.

The first blog I bought was over-priced and I knew it. I still went ahead though and bought the brand and for the ’street cred’ I’d get in that niche. This purchase taught me three very valuable lessons about buying blogs:

• Make absolutely certain that you have time to run the new blog or find someone beforehand to run it. I didn’t do either, and as a result that blog was neglected.
• If the blog is not making money, do not spend your savings on it. You should have a definite plan of recouping your investment in a set period of time – don’t jump in with a vague notion of ’slapping on AdSense and TLA to make some cash’.
• Make sure you have an exit strategy that will allow you to make a profit (after taking out the expenses (including value for time spent on the blog)… ). If you don’t, then you may have a dead blog or if it’s a big-money purchase, then you’re fucked.

To summarise, you need to focus on time, money and the exits.

If you don’t have the time, don’t jump in.

If the site isn’t making money, don’t pay that much for it.

If you don’t have an exit strategy – good lord, what the hell are you going to do when you have to cash in?

Let’s look at each of these three in more detail:

YOUR TIME IS MORE VALUABLE THAN YOU REALIZE

It took me a long time to realise this (no pun intended), and since then I’ve been preaching this to anyone within listening range.

A lot of people think of starting new blogs with the intention of working on it ‘as soon as they have more time’. Similarly, you find bloggers buying blogs for the same purpose.

It’s not worth it. You’re much better off investing your time in one or two blogs in highly-profitable niches and building them up rather than buying 5 blogs and trying to blog on all 5.

I like Ryan’s and Raj’s style of buying blogs – you have a writer lined up beforehand or right around the time you buy the blog so that a) there’s no time lost in transition and b) you don’t need to worry about writing on ‘yet another blog’.

Writers / hired bloggers cost money though, which brings us to the next point.

NO MONEY = NO PURCHASE

Make your life easy – if the site’s current revenues are not enough to fund the cost of hiring a blogger, new hosting, new theme design (or whatever extra work you want done on the site), then don’t jump for it. If you can’t take the blog as it is and earn a profit from it, find another target.

Yes, you can always ‘work’ on the blog and raise it’s earnings. But that’s the future and its uncertain. In general though, you want to buy a profitable business – it’s easier to run if it’s bringing in a profit and there’s less stress for you.

Yes, there are exceptions to this rule. You might buy a brand (like I did, like AW did with Threadwatch, or like SPM did with Performancing), or the blog might be ridiculously under-monetized (e.g. a gadget blog with 20k daily uniques and no Chitika / AdSense / Auction Ads on it). Those are exceptions, hard to find and they stay on the market for a very short time.

Most blogs that you’ll see going up for sale fall into two categories – they either lack traffic to earn serious money OR they don’t have direct advertising yet. Both require time to bring in (although depending on your personal experience you may find one or both easy to manage).
And for the sake of your sanity, do not spend money on an asset such as a blog without an exit strategy.

WHAT’S YOUR END GAME?

Are you buying a blog to flip it (build and sell it off for a profit in the future), to build a business or to bring in a small but stable stream of income?

The 3 approaches require different amounts of time and financial investments, plus different evaluation techniques.

If you’re buying a blog to flip it or building a business, you’re operating with the intention that you have time and money to invest into growing that blog. In that case, #2 can be relaxed, a bit (but don’t take on a white elephant with the outrageous hope of selling it for a cool mil), however you need to be very strict about #1 (how much time you’re going to spend) and you have to have your targets clearly mapped out and written down. In fact, you should have a complete road-map for both strategies before you make the purchase. And have a backup plan, just in case.

So if you’re buying to flip, have an alternative plan to build the business in case you’re stuck with it. If you’re buying to build, have a plan to cash out if the time and offer is right (or if you need the money / time).

If you’re buying a turnkey business that just brings in a regular income with minimal maintenance, make sure all your ducks are in line.

WHAT’S NEXT

I realise that there are several topics discussed here that need to be talked about in more detail – I’ll be covering them in the following articles (with help from Ryan, Raj and David – as all 3 of them are more experienced in this area than me). Next up is a discussion on blog valuations.

For now, I’d like to hear your experiences on selling / buying blogs and if you have any tips to share, please do so.

This article was originally written on 9 Jul 2007 for Performancing.com.

90% Content is packaged for short-term gratification, not long-term value (for the reader).

The post you are reading will (hopefully) spark some ideas in your head – against or for the arguments I’m putting forward here. It will (ok, wishful thinking mode here) start a discussion here in the comments and possibly around the blogging community. If I’m lucky, this post may even be read by people in a week’s time.

But what about after a week? Most posts (insert incredibly authentic-looking statistic here) are forgotten in a week – the high churn-over of content means that we don’t get the time to stop and let the ideas sink in for long enough that they have a positive impact (even though that’s just the first step and not enough to create real value from content).

One of the challenges we face online – parallel to our insane habit of NOT writing timeless content – is that most of the time, our work is forgotten, dead and buried 7 days after its written.

How can you make your content persistent (if that makes sense)? It’s not merely a question of writing linkbait and getting on people’s bookmarks and getting links. Sooner or later, most information is forgotten and it’s left to search engines to unearth them.

If what you are publishing is valuable information, that’s a terrible waste.

I don’t have the heart to trawl through the archives of some of the top SEO bloggers around, but the sheer value in those archives is amazing, and the fact that most of that content is forgotten is diabolical.

I’m aware that this has probably been discussed before, but in my point of view the only way to solve this problem is by developing alternate content delivery channels that bypass the linear context of blogs and news and the daily RSS grind and deliver usable information to readers whenever they need it (without making them resort to search engines, which can be hit and miss in these cases).

There are several approaches that can be used – ‘blog series’ are one, compiling reports on topics (by aggregating posts on relevant subjects) is another.

But the bottom line is this:
Most content delivers far more value to the publisher than to the reader(s).

Fresh and popular content (flagship or link bait, take your pick), with the right distribution, brings a lot of gifts for the publisher – RSS subscribers, newsletter signups, ebook downloads, new readers, links, recognition, etc. Search engine rankings bring in long-term traffic and ad clicks.

But what does this content deliver to the reader?

In most cases, nothing.

The reason I get so frustrated when I read Chris G’s excellent post on blog branding is that I have 3 options for that post, and none of them do me any good:

1. I can hire Chris on that basis and help me with my blogging project (I cant afford him)
2. I can set aside time to brainstorm about ways I can build my blog’s brand and setup a framework that can avoid these mistakes that Chris talks about
3. I can bookmark the post (maybe comment on it and say something witty) and return to it later

The first time I read it, I was in a hurry, tried to do #2 but couldn’t figure out what to do first, so I stuck it in #3 and moved on.

Well, I did return to it today and was struck by the same frustration of not having the time right now for #2 (yes, I know Chris, I’ve read this) because it’s a big lump of a project, there’s little segmenting or any help provided in explaining how I can do one thing at a time and make it work for me.

If you’ve read Getting Things Done you’ll probably have some advice for me on how to tackle this situation (of breaking down a complex project into simpler tasks, figuring out what the next immediate action is and to go and do that). But this isn’t about me.

It’s about the IT manager sitting in (insert politically-correct nation of your choice here) reading your post and scratching his head, wondering how the hell is he going to make this work.

People want – NEED – simple steps. That’s why how-to guides, when they are properly done, work so well.

If this sounds like link bait to you, you’re there, but not completely, because link bait is just a step in content’s evolution. It solves some problems (providing easy to follow advice) but misses out on content delivery and the problem of making such content persistent.

In fact, this situation is harming publishers as well.

Content monetization, in it’s current form, is under-cooked.

There was this post doing the rounds earlier this week about ‘prolific bloggers’ and how there were bloggers who had written more than 1000 posts on their blogs.

Impressive milestone (although I think 5000 posts is a more accurate milestone if you want to judge things like these), but it got me thinking about how under-utilized and under-monetized those hundreds and hundreds of posts were.

Yes, Darren Rowse gets plenty of traffic to his archives, through search engines and blog referrals.

But monetizing your archives through ads and affiliate deals is like taking pennies for locking the golden goose in your attic and forgetting about it.

Content – as it is used right now – is just a means to deliver targeted ads and make affiliate sales. There is little being done to reclaim the enormous value lying in the archives of thousands and thousands of blogs.

A blog post must satisfy several conditions to deserve being read in the first place. It must be relevant to my needs, immediately actionable, easy to follow and genuinely useful.

And even then, it will be forgotten in a week and the author is left relying on periodic mentions, search engine traffic, referrals and bookmarks to get more eyeballs to that blog post. When you have over 1000 posts in your archives, you are bound to leave this phase on autopilot.

This article was originally written on 8 Jul 2007 for Performancing.com.

What do you do on your blog on a public holiday? On holidays (like 4th of July), there’s a (more…)

Many blogs use the related entries plugin (or it’s equivalent) – along with anti-spam plugins and smart URLs it has become an integral part of a blogger’s arsenal.

I’ve recommended the plugin myself a countless number of times but yesterday while working on one of my blogs I started wondering if, in some cases, showing related posts would actually be less effective?

Consider this – the most common spot to show related entries is at the end of a blog entry. However, that spot is also a prime advertising spot, that’s where you put the comments and if you want people to digg/reddit/delicious/stumble/etc your post, that’s where you put your social bookmarking links as well.

All that clutter means that when the reader reaches the end of your article, he doesn’t have just one thing to do – he’s presented with an array of options. More often then not, I’ve found out that the fewer choices you give to the reader in terms of what to do next, the better results you will get.

So for example, if you’re looking to maximise your AdSense CTR, don’t put other ‘exits’ – outgoing links – around the ad block. If you want to maximise comments, emphasize the comments section and reduce the clutter between the post and the comments area (i.e. ads, plugins, other links).

I’m thinking of replacing the ad block at the end of the post with a graphic ad promoting a forum, and while I’m OK with losing the extra revenue I don’t think that the ad will be that effective, especially with the related articles, the social bookmarking links and the other fluff that comes in at the end of the article.

Is this a case where you should a) ditch the related entries plugin or b) shift them to the sidebar, or as an aside inside the post itself, or something like that?

For a couple of years now I’ve taken it for granted that you ‘must show’ related entries at the end of each post because ‘it’s good for increasing pageviews, SEO, etc’.

On a successful site that already has good rankings and a good visitor to pageviews ratio, do you still need the related entries plugin? And if yes, what’s a good place to put it (apart from the end of the post)?

This article was originally written on 7 Jun 2007 for Performancing.com.

Robert Scoble writes:

One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right.

Hugh McLeod responds:

The time of the A-List is dead. Thank Christ. Not a moment too soon.

Brian Clark follows up:

Value will always be key. And I think you’ll find that the migration of pure social chatter off of blogs and onto social networking applications is a good thing for the rest of us who are looking to build businesses powered in whole or in part by blogs.

(more…)