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Anyone doing content-rich niche blogs + PPC? (9)

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I'm new to affiliate marketing, but over the past couple months I've opened my eyes tremendously to the amount of money to be made online, and how it all works. I feel like if you can successfully make money as an affiliate marketer, you will never see anything in the same way again. Everything I see, I wonder if there are affiliate offers for them, how I can drive eyeballs to it, convince them to purchase, and most of all, test, test, test. Then you start mentally growing the pot into owning the offer, owning the traffic network, or numerous other ways to make money with this industry.

So that being said, I've gone through and done the Appetiser tutorial. I've made banners, done pops, designed and ripped landers, and tracked, tracked tracked. But I've come to the realization that the "spread" isn't for me. I don't want to be the guy in between a traffic source and an offer when the elapsed time the viewer spends with me is about 8 seconds. Not because I don't like the concept, but because I don't like the grind. I've got a full time job (at a software company I started years ago), sell private label goods on Amazon FBA, and run a content-scraping site that generates about $500-1000 per month as it is. So what I don't need is something that I've got to spend 8+ hours a day on to be successful (because if you don't, I think you're going to be eaten alive). I'm looking at building something that can generate another $500-1000 per month net that I can then put on autopilot (meaning, train someone to look after, not have it rot).

Which leads me to the point of this rant. I love the concept of connecting with an audience and driving conversions. I love the realization that everything in today's society can be outsourced (or freelanced). And I've narrowed my goals down to creating a niche (small enough to grab _some_ organic traffic, big enough to be applicable to a large swath of the public) blog. This forum has opened my eyes to services like Constant Content and TextBroker for building original content. My experimentation in the grind led me to know of ad networks that fit right in with this model (Outbrain, etc) - before this, I'd have only thought there was Adwords and FB Ads. And of course, now I know an infinite list of opportunities to generate revenue (again, before I would have only been able to name Adsense and Amazon Affiliates).

That all being said, has anyone successfully monetized a blog, starting from scratch, with paid traffic (SEO is out, I want instant results)? How has your monetization strategy played out? I've thought about using something like Outbrain to drive traffic, but then what's my monetization strategy? So far, my thoughts have been "load it up with offers - mention Amazon products with affiliates, drive ecommerce sales on Clickbank, throw up some high dollar conversion opportunities like banner ads from Peerfly, and let's not forget Adsense." But then I start thinking about also throwing an email newsletter in the mix with some sort of modal window and building a list and marketing to them weekly (I've read virtually every post in the Email Traffic Source forum).

All these words above lead to only a couple questions:

• Has anyone tried to make money with a content-rich blog-type platform?
• Is the "Load it with offers" strategy a good one, or should I focus on one specific monetization strategy (such as email building)?
• Is the cost of traffic much larger than I can ever hope to make with offers? (I haven't run the numbers on Outbrain yet).

Any sort of guidance would be helpful, as my mind is full of ideas, 95% of which probably wouldn't do anything to generate income in practice. Whew, a lot of words. If you read them all, I can't thank you enough

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I started doing email marketing (opt in) all the way back in 2004, and along the way I’ve had several ill fated attempts at trying to get a blog going at the same time. The biggest success I had was pissing away $18,000 over six months with a beautiful layout, great content (mine, and other writers), banners to all my products and affiliate products, and traffic driven from my list, other people’s lists, and paid ads. You can witness it in all its glory here:

http://womenapproachyou.com/

You will notice the last regular post is somewhere in 2013, the date I finally decided to put it out of my misery. It did wind up leading to other things that were profitable, but even with the advantages I had (email list of raving fans and buyers to send to the blog), it was a waste of time. Other people may have had different experiences, but this has been mine both times I have been seduced by a blog.

I’ll explain the challenges with a blog, then explain why I do email instead. With a blog, you have to rely on people coming back to it over and over, and sharing it with like minded people. If you look at what’s being shared now on the internet, it is memes (rife with grammatical errors), graphics, farting cats, exploding Bernie Sanders photos, and Trump with his hair on fire. There is little “content” that is actually being shared, and the instant you bore a visitor (especially with real content), they will never come back. Also, a blog feels like a “public venue,” not a one on one communication like email feels like.

You are also dependent on people to nose around the blog, click on banners, text links, etc., diminishing the number of people that actually get to an offer that makes you money.

Email, on the other hand, gives you a way to direct people straight to a relevant sales pitch by calling out interested prospects via subject line and description. So, for example, if I write a subject line for a male fat loss offer that says, “How To Burn Away Body Fat Hour By Hour Giving You a Body Women Can’t Resist,” only the men who want to lose fat will open it, click on it, and get to a relevant pitch. Same thing with a get your ex back offer—“Recently dumped? Here’s how to get her to quickly come back and think it’s her idea.” There are certain segments of the list that, at any given time are interested in different things, and email allows you to direct that segment (which will be different tomorrow) to the appropriate offer.

Email also feels like a personal one on one communication—your close friends communicate with you via email, not by blog. If you send them something “cool” every single day, a certain percentage will look forward to hearing from you, and will tune in every day when they see your email show up.

Now, don’t ever make the mistake of thinking a list wants “good content.” As I have said before, those who worship at the altar of content soon find themselves in line at bankruptcy court. People don’t care about content, they care about entertainment. So, you must first entertain them, wrapping entertainment around content. I do that every day via commentary (sent in a morning email), always relating it back to the topic, but never forgetting that I am entertaining first, teaching second. I still have some subscribers who have been with me since 2004, and I always know when my email is getting blocked since I start receiving messages from them, wanting to know why they are NOT receiving my emails, and loudly demanding to be put back on the list. I have, in other posts, addresses how to entertain the list, weave in pitches, etc.

The short answer is this (and it is only my opinion, others may have had a completely different experience—there is more than one way to be right in this business): junk the blog idea immediately, and focus on email. Having done both side by side, I was able to piss away $18,000 on my pretty, picture perfect blog, while making up the difference (and much more) via email at the same time.

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Wow is all I have to say (well, not all, but still).

You have literally written a post that, to me, is worth thousands - seriously - in failed ad spend. With proof of your failed investment to boot. And some say STM is expensive!

I have, in the words of Mr. Wonderful, taken the paid traffic blog idea out back and shot it.

I think my mental flow was formulating this: Content network -> Blog (AKA a landing page, but disguised as a blog) -> Email. But the blog would have offers on it, so I guess maybe I thought it would have made some cash. Yeah, thinking this through more, I doubt it.

And I'll do what I didn't do before, examine the numbers. Looking up average CPC on Outbrain, I get about 25 cents. SumoMe just published a blog saying that the average conversion to email with their platform is about 1.06% (their top 10% does nearly 7%). So I'd need to get 95 visitors to secure one email address, being average as I am. So a measly $23.75 per email address - I don't think we need to go further down the funnel to see that the economics would only work out if I'm hawking offers with $8000 payouts!

So I still have a few ideas of businesses I want to do with my knowledge from STM. "Throw it all onto a blog" is no longer one of them. I do enjoy email copywriting - and have had experience doing it in my Amazon FBA business. I have an autoresponder funnel after purchase for 3 emails soliciting reviews, and I've been pretty successful at it (only a couple out of thousands ever told me outright to stop emailing them, and still no bad reviews from it). I include a "free gift" of how to use it effectively, I give an anecdotal story about the product, those kinds of "entertainment" content. I just need to find a better way to build an email list - which I'm sure I'll be able to find some great ideas on the Email traffic sources forum.

I still have a few other ideas percolating around in my head, some of which probably need to be shot:

• Creating an algorithm to aggregate social posts for exactly the type of content you listed before - farting cats, Donald Trump with his hair on fire - turn this into an auto-posting blog (with Mechanical Turk users having the final say). The true "set it and forget it" idea, and I've developed some of it out but running into general absurdities in the social APIs (apparently you can't get replies to a tweet directly via the API). Getting a repeat audience via PPC and social sharing, figuring out the monetization later (heh, probably why this idea should be shot).
• Buy apps on Fliptopia that have engaged users and figure out how to monetize it better.
• Buy websites on Flippa that have Adsense, largely organic traffic and no affiliate income. Drive paid traffic (if worthwhile) and add affiliate income somehow.
• 1. Build opt-in email database somehow 2. ??? 3. Profit!

So thanks to you pointing me in the right direction, I will now continue my quest to build an audience (and the money that comes with it) in a different way.

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1) Already exists. It's called reddit.
2) Buying website requires diff set of skills in my opinion. Be wary of pump & dump. Hello BOT TRAFFIC
3) no comment on that
4) welcome to STM

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@johna5150

How much of your time do you actually spend writing? Or do you hire writers?

Do you rely much on ARs vs. broadcasts? If you're using ARs and have multiple segments, I imagine you'd have to write a shit lot of emails.

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"That all being said, has anyone successfully monetized a blog, starting from scratch, with paid traffic (SEO is out, I want instant results)? How has your monetization strategy played out? I've thought about using something like Outbrain to drive traffic, but then what's my monetization strategy?"

You could try arbitrage, buying in cheap traffic and sending it somewhere else which pays you more - pocketing the difference.

An example would be a viral content type blog which buys in traffic via fb and features Adsense and Native advertising around your content (ideally spread over several pages to generate maximum impressions) - for example "10 Childhood stars who now look terrible - Number 6 will shock you!".

The hope is to get something to go viral, getting you more shares, and in turn, free visitors.

The trick is to use a theme which fools the visitor in to clicking your ads to see the next slide.

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Re: #1, true, but I think you can get some users hooked on curated content that fits a certain personality (I myself have a few funny- and meme-like blogs I check on occasion when I just want to laugh). Now is it monetizable? I don't know about that.

For #2, you're right - I think most of the shit on Flippa is garbage. But often times I see some good concepts (and niches) on there. In fact, it's what put me on this (wrong) path towards a content blog.

Thanks for your help. Definitely good to weed out the bad ideas from the good (if any).

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You know, I think you refined my mindset into an actual strategy. I was kind of going that way in the original post, but I got sidetracked by the potential for email building (which would be useless for this type of content, I believe). Offers are probably tough to convert in this strategy too. But the idea of simple arbitrage is probably the key here (and scalable if I can continue to find cheap, engaged visitors). Plus, if I can develop and refine an effective scraping algorithm (as mentioned in first bullet point of my second post), I might be able to make some considerable hands-off (content wise) arbitration income.

Thank you for giving me the hope to refine my original idea into something that could work!

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John is a badass, and his point is valid. That said, I've probably hit a million in gross profit on blogs by now, and we stumbled the whole way along, which I think means we could have done way more. So in reality, whatever style fits you, is probably best for you. If you want to do blogs, and stick with blogs, then you should be prepared to understand advertising as an industry, understand how ad servers work, whats coming in the future of advertising, how to work relationships with networks, etc.

Either that, or the blog just needs to be a veil for a highly split tested step of landing pages designed to get someone to convert on something.

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