Treating Your Blog Like a Business

This post are my notes from the live session at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. Please forgive me if I misspell anything or if some of the notes don’t make sense, as I am trying to gather as much information from each speaker as I can.

Quick Facts on the Session

Topic: Treating Your Blog Like a Business
About: A blog isn’t a real business – it should be the front-end lead generator for an actual sales funnel designed to pour out money. This panel will cut to the chase on how to treat blogging like a REAL business rather than a glorified hobby. How do you build a lasting, scalable business from a blog? What revenue models work? What should you be outsourcing? How do you choose the right market to begin with? We’ll look beyond the blog and get down to business.
Speaker: Lisa Morosky, Nathan Hangen, David Risley, Jordan Cooper

Live Notes

Nathan starts off my saying that people think they are one blog away, one tweet away, from blogging stardom. Blogging is just a part of your business. Don’t think of your blog as a product.

Start thinking of your position as the CEO of your blog, not as an employee. You need to think about stratetgy, producatization, etc..

Instead of throwing ads on your blog, you need to have a product/service. If you just want to make money from ads, you are spending time and effort, just to get them to go to another website.

Your blog can make money off comments and retweets.
If you are not using your blog for lead generation, you are dead in the water
Build a list. Feedburner does not count – b/c you are only giving them a blog post

A lot of people don’t take the time to actually have a personal story to tell their readers. They only read posts that are more hypothetical.

Always give someone something to do after they read your blog post.
Having a membership program or product will help make more direct sales, instead of ads
Don’t think in terms of niche, think in terms of impact – Nathan

The panel talks about selling your personal brand vs a company brand. They say that it depends on what you are looking to do with your blog. If you want to build up brand equity and then possibly sell it down the road, then you want to go the company brand route. However if you are looking to market yourself and make a name for yourself, you want to stick with a personal domain/blog.

Make sure you are investing into tools and resources that will maximize your blogs impact. Things like hosting, premium themes, email marketing software, plugins and content are essential. Again, the example of I own a pizza shop, but they don’t need electricity. Are you in business or not? There are certain things you will need.

Things that you can outsource

Formatting blog posts
Scheduling Posts
Finding Images
Some content promotion
Anything that sucks up a lot of your time

Everyone’s business is different so there is not a step-by-step system for how to be successful. There is a blueprint, but not a guide that says if you do this, you will be successful as the last person that used this.

Adsense is the Blogger Welfare Program – Don’t use it as a business monetization model

Make sure you tweet this post with the Hashtag #bwe10