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Rob: This segment of the Entrepreneur Magazine eBiz Show is brought to you by MorePhotos.com, your internet sales photo solution. We’re talking with Jim Kukral of BlogKits.com about making money through blogging.
Rob: So Jim, we’re following our passion, we’re writing about something we really care about. If I’m a corporation I’m trying to solve people’s problems, not tell them about my company or push my products. But what are some of the ways you can actually monetize a blog, from both perspectives, either individual or a company?
Jim: It’s actually very, very different. From an individual perspective there are two real ways you can do it. You can actively go out and put ads on your blog and sell sponsorships and Google AdSense and things like that and you do that by writing great content and by building a readership. The other way to do it for an individual is to passively build your income which is to blog as a thought-shaper, to blog as an expert, which then builds up your name and your brand in your community which then can help you get better speaking gigs which can help you get better careers, better jobs for your career. As a business it’s a lot different because, like I said, people don’t really want to hear you talk about your business. No one wants to read your blog that says what’s going on in your business. What they want is they want to hear from you. They want to hear what’s really happening in your business, what problems you can solve for them through your business, things like that. So there’s two totally separate ways of blogging.
Chris: It’s really a look at the man behind the curtain, isn’t it?
Jim: It really is. I think the best blogs do that. If you take a look at BobParsons.com, the CEO of GoDaddy, he writes a great blog because he’s giving out his advice and he’s interviewing people and he’s talking about great things that happen, not about GoDaddy really, but about him.
Chris: Yeah, and people want to know that. When you have a business, especially a recognized business, people want to know what is happening in the personal lives a lot of times of the people behind those businesses. And that builds trust too, doesn’t it?
Jim: It does. I always point out this example: I started one of the first of America’s corporate blogs about three years ago for a company I used to work for. And I was writing all this great content and I would write all this stuff and the one day I wrote this one entry about how all the fish in my fish tank died and I had fifty times more of the feedback from that one off-topic post than I did from all the other ones where I was writing about the business. And that taught me an important lesson, people really want to hear what’s going on with you, they really want to build a relationship with you.
Chris: Yeah, especially in ecommerce when you’re working with people that you never actually get to really see or meet. It’s not like going into a retail store in ecommerce where you’re talking to people and it’s hands on and you can shake hands with somebody and talk with somebody. So this is more of a way to get personal and learn a little bit about who you’re dealing with in order that you can fell comfortable with them, right?
Jim: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more.
Rob: Yeah, one of my favorite blogs is Chris Anderson’s blog that he used for The Long Tail, and I always thought that was a very interesting way to do that. For people who aren’t familiar with that, Chris Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired Magazine and he wrote a book of selling more of less and he actually used the blog to not only lead his thoughts, but also as a collaboration tool, let people basically contribute to his thought process and keep you a real kind of at the front of while he was writing the book.
Jim: Right, and I’ve spoken to a lot of publishers and a lot of agents and to that point, if you’re really pitching a book nowadays or if you’re really looking to do that type of thing, they’re expecting you to have a blog, they’re expecting you to have your own audience and to be able to go out and sell books on your own. So starting a blog and communicating just like Chris did and building his own community outside the publisher’s reach is a very important thing to do.
Rob: So how does it change from a corporate perspective? I was just at the e-tail convention in Palm Desert a week ago and a lot of the people who were talking there were saying, well, we are X brand and we really don’t have anything to blog about so we’re not going to blog at all. Do you think that’s a mistake?
Jim: Well I do think that there are some people who don’t have anything to blog about, however I do think that 99% of the people, if they really thought creatively and looked around, could find a way to blog about something. And again, you’re not writing about your business, write about yourself then. I mean, blogging is like having a group of friends. So maybe you’re just writing a blog for your top 10 customers because maybe it’s hard to stay in touch with them. So maybe you write a blog and once a week you update it with what’s going on in your life and your employees’ lives and you share that with your customers. And your top customers then learn more about you and they’re like, oh, this is great. They become your friends, they become your lifetime customers. So there’s always a way.
Rob: Absolutely. So let’s talk about some of the practical implications of this. What happens to blogs and search engine rankings?
Jim: Well, the very nature of how blogs are structured is conducive to what Google and the search engines want. They like the nice ability for everything to be follow the links here and a structure with archives. So first of all, Google loves that, so it’s actually very advantageous to put your content in blog form because Google naturally follows those links. So what I actually tell people is I don’t build websites anymore, I build blogs. And you know what, they may not look like a blog, but they’re built in blog software. Because then I can easily let my customers go in and edit their pages, the search engines love them, and it all makes sense.
Rob: And what about original content, because I’ve heard before in the past, for example, that if you’re taking other people’s content and putting it into your blog, then that really doesn’t do you any good. Is that true?
Jim: Yeah. What happens is there are things called splogs and people sell this software and what this software does is it goes out and you say, I need to find all the content information about being an entrepreneur, and this software goes out on the internet and finds that content and pulls it back and posts it onto your blog. That’s the wrong way to do things. You shouldn’t be taking other people’s content and reposting it as your own. Now, you can have a blog, and part of blogging is linking to other bloggers or finding stories from other blogs and then taking maybe a paragraph or some of their story and posting it on your blog quoting it and then linking over to that blog. That’s something I do every day.
Rob: Right. It seems to me that the general rule of thumb there is you’re enriching the content. If you’re either promoting an idea or giving a reaction to the idea or leading people to an idea, it seems to be the central kind of philosophy. Is that correct?
Jim: Yeah, I agree. I’ve always held under the idea that if it feels wrong it probably is wrong. The same thing goes for search engines and things like that. If it feels like you’re really doing something wrong, it probably is.
Rob: So I know there’s a more direct way to make money here with blogs and I guess that would be something like a pay per click situation. How do you use pay per click advertising to make money with blogs?
Jim: Well, it’s the same principle. If you’re an individual blogger and you’re writing a technology blog your big goal is to get readers to your blog, because once you have readers to your blog you have the ability to get them to click on Google AdSense ads or you have the ability to get them to buy things through your affiliate programs. So you can pay per click as an individual just trying to get people to come to your blog, so you would write pay per click campaigns that advertise to those readers. As a business it’s the same sort of thing, you want people to come to your blog to learn about your business indirectly, so you can just buy pay per click ads to get people through niche topics and keywords and phrases to come to your blog.
Chris: What are some of the other tools that you can use to monetize your blog?
Jim: Probably right now the #1 tool that most people use is Google AdSense which is a contextual system which means that you get a piece of code and you put it on your blog and then if you write a blog entry about paper, Google system sees that you’re writing about paper and tries to deliver ads instantly and automatically that are about paper.
Chris: Right.
Jim: So a lot of people use that system. There are so many other great systems to use. You have AdBrite which is a marketplace, AdBrite.com. You have Text-Link-Ads which you can sell text links on your site. You have blogads. There are just so many things you can do. Of course, BlogKits, the company that I run, there’s just many things that you can do. And the question is which one is right for you, that’s really the hard thing, because when you’re starting out as a blogger it’s really hard to figure out how you’re going to make money because you don’t have a lot of visitors. So that’s where companies like mine come in and then Google AdSense comes in. And as you expand the options change and you should always explore them all.
Chris: Let me ask you something, Jim, about Google AdSense, because we’ve seen this happen. When you’re out there blogging in a particular area, and with us at Worldwide Brands it’s product sourcing, we’ll have affiliates and we’ll have people that we know and we trust that are out there blogging and doing different things and not just blogging, but putting Google AdSense on their sites. And say, for example, they’re talking about ecommerce product sourcing, unfortunately there are a lot of scammers advertising on Google and we see those ads for scams popping up all the time in these people’s blogs and these people’s websites and so forth. So do you want to kind of keep an eye on what kinds of ads are popping up and maybe try to block some of those things? Because that’s just going to give you a bad reputation, isn’t it?
Jim: Well yeah, I mean, there is that concern that people are doing that type of thing. So there was an article in today’s New York Times that talked about a Google AdSense alternative company called Quigo and what they do is allow you a level of transparency to actually see where these ads are being placed. And then Google has some functions built in where you can kind of block out sites and things like that. But it’s definitely something to be concerned about if you are a large brand and you’re worried about people coming in on your well-built reputation.
Chris: Right.
Rob: And I guess along with that is always the comments conversation that always comes up with blogs which is to allow comments or not to allow comments within the blog. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit.
Jim: Absolutely I can. My big thing with comments is if you’re not going to turn comments on don’t call it a blog. I’m one of those very black and white left side of the conversation people that say if it doesn’t have comments on it’s not a blog, because the whole point of having a blog is that you’re talking with your customers or talking with your friends, not just talking to them. And that point can easily be overcome because every blog software out there now has the ability to moderate comments. So you can just click a little button that says, don’t publish it until I see it first.
Chris: That’s good. I like that because some of the earlier blogs that we had out there weren’t negative comments, but people would just post advertisements.
Jim: Right, and the second part I get to that is when they say, well, I’m worried about what people are going to say about the company. And you know what, I always turn that around. I say, you know what, they’re going to say it anyway. Whether or not they’re going to say it on your site, they’re going to say it on their blog or they’re going to say it someplace else. The question is are you going to control the conversation? Are you going to turn lemons into lemonade? Are you going to take their negative comment, turn it into a blog entry, and actually talk about it and control the conversation about your brand. They are not controlling you, you are.
Chris: Right. Very good point. It is time for another short break folks. Don’t forget you can listen to any of our past shows at ebizshow.com. We’ll continue with Jim Kukral when we come back. I’m Chris Malta.
Rob: And I’m Robin Cowie.
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