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Why you need a blogging business plan
By SEO Advisor | June 5, 2010
I’m Chris Guthrie and I’ve been a full time internet entrepreneur since October 2009. Before that I was building websites in my spare time while going to a full time job and now I run a blog called make money on the internet where I teach others how to earn money online based on my real life entrepreneurial experiences. In the course of running this blog I’ve received comments and emails from readers asking for advice on a variety of topics but one of the things I find most people lack if a clear plan for their blog or website.
Why you need a blogging business plan
If you are just blogging for fun – great! I hope you enjoy the hobby and meet a lot of people from doing it, if on the other hand you’re blogging because you want to earn enough money to quit your day job then you need to develop an actionable plan. Here are a couple questions you need to ask yourself and truthfully answer about your blog:
1. How much is my traffic worth?
2. How much work will it take to be the best or among the best in my niche?
3. How do I get more traffic?
4. Do I have enough traffic to even bother monetizing my blog yet?
5. Can I make enough money to quit my job by blogging about this topic?
You can apply these questions to any type of website – not just a blog. I never stopped to ask myself these questions while running a very popular video game website back in 2006 and despite the fact that I was getting over 500,000 page views per month the website never earned more than $1,000 a month. Contrast that to today and I have blogs that have less than 100,000 page views per month that earn more than $1,000 a month. The problem is that I wasted that time on a website where the earnings potential was very low based on the visitor demographics. Had I truly sat down and figured out how this website would make money I could have recognized it would be very difficult to monetize and moved onto something else.
The point I’m trying to get across is that you really need to first determine if the blog your building has the potential to earn a lot of money or if it doesn’t. If you’ve determined that the blog your building does have the potential to earn you a lot of money then you need to come up with answers to the rest of the questions and plan out what types of traffic levels you’ll need to produce your desired income level.
Here is a rough example of a blogging business plan I have for my blog:
I know my traffic is worth enough money because teaching people how to make money is a high value niche (if you actually know what you’re talking about) and people will pay for good information. I won’t offer advertising or create / sell any product on my blog until I have over 10,000 daily RSS / newsletter subscribers. I plan to hit this number of readers in just 12 more months. To do this I will need to post incredible content like this on a continuous basis. After I get 10,000 readers I should be able to sell a product $100 product to at least 10% of my readers which in turn will make $100,000. (Think 1,000 True Fans). Or at the very least I can open my blog up to advertising and earn mid four figures a month via banner advertising and promoting other companies products within my blog posts.
I don’t care about earning any money on the blog now as I already earn money from my other web properties so there is no rush to sell advertising or create and sell a product. Besides, I think the type of people that read my blog appreciate this style of content and it only helps to further differentiate myself from the other bloggers in this space.
I could list off all the ways I’ll drive the traffic and get the readers to my blog, but as you can see from the above I have thought through the possibilities of how to earn money with this blog and have a plan of how I will go about doing it. If you haven’t even loosely planned out how you intend to make money from your blog or if it’s possible to make enough than I urge you to take some time to think it over.
What do you think? Have you put together a blogging business plan? If not, how do you plan to earn money from your blog?
This has been a guest post by @ChrisGuthrie who is a full time internet entrepreneur. If you’re interested in learning how to make money on the internet or ways to make more money you should subscribe to his blog.
Topics: Internet Marketing, Network Marketing, Network Marketing | No Comments »