Ravi’s Rants

In this era of the open web, it is hard to monetize information that you can easily get elsewhere.

Want to read about what’s going on with the presence of Iranian dictator Ahmedinajad in NY City? Just Google-News it up (yes, that’s different from Googling it up), and you’ll get all the latest relevant news stories you can handle, in reverse chronological order.

So why would people pay for accessing the NY Times?

Not too many would, and not for long, figured the NY Times - and finally opened up the gates.

It’s official: the “Adsense Model” is in.

Open up your content, make money from ads. This same model didn’t work for most sites just a few years ago, in what I call the “Pre-Adsense Era” in my book. But now, it can work for all sites - whether you are NYTimes.com with millions of impressions, or a LinkOverLoad.com with just tens of thousands of impressions.

Usually I never follow NYTimes links that show up in many of my searches, because I know that 4 times out of 5, I will hit a password-protected story. But today, knowing that they have removed the wall, I read a very interesting article about the new model of outsourcing, a glimpse of which I had gotten earlier looking over the shoulder of someone reading the NY Times paper on the subway.

If you want to charge for your content, make sure your content is not easily available, not easily validated, or that there is too much information that cannot be easily made sense of.

I found this amazing site yesterday through one of the feeds on LinkOverLoad.com. Awesome video coming right up…

Animoto basically turns your pictures into a fantastic MTV-style video, with some great soundtracks available on their site for free, or you can use your own audio - with your pictures almost flashing in rhythm to the beats of the soundtrack, with some great-looking special effects.

When I signed up, uploaded my pictures, picked a great-sounding track they had on their site (for free) and tried to create my video (remember, their software supposedly creates all of this in an automated fashion), I got this very friendly error message:

Hi there,

We’re sorry to inform you that we have experienced an error in the
production of your recent video, “Beautiful People”. Rest assured, we’re
on the case and we’ll have it rendered as soon as we can–but, depending
on the complexity of the issue, it could take a little time.

We’ll email you the moment it’s ready. Thanks for understanding!

…

That didn’t bother me, as they are still in beta, and still hammering out the rough edges. What did surprise me, is that they promptly sent me this email the next day:

Hi there.

We’ve finished your video, so it’s time for you to go take a look.
Head to:

http://animoto.com/play/…..

We hope you like it! Give us some feedback when you get a chance to
let us know what you liked and how we can improve. Remember, no two
Animoto videos are ever the same so keep making videos and see what unique
pieces you can generate.

…

I excitedly clicked over, and was simply blown away by the results (see video below).

Remarkable idea, great (almost perfect) execution, instantly viral! Pass this along…

Video from Animoto.com

Maybe quite a lot, and mostly not a lot.

“Huh?”, you say?

If you look at this “top bloggers” list, you may end up buying into the fantasy that blogging will make you big bucks.

Not every blog will make that kind of money. Actually, it would even be fair say, that less than a fraction (less than 1%) of all blogs will make big money. Maybe a little more than a fraction will make decent money. But 95% of all blogs will not make any money. Why? I think there are quite a few reasons.

In my new book “No Business Like E-Business” that is being released shortly, I quote figures from Guy Kawasaki, about his self-disclosed ad revenues on his extremely popular blog. Here is a snippet from the book:

Excerpt from “No Business Like E-Business”

Imagine blogging for a whole year, ending up with a very popular blog that has 23,457 subscribers, ranked #45 out of all blogs in the world, and earning (brace yourself) a whopping $3,350 for the entire year!

Now stop imagining - this stuff is real.

I’m talking about Guy Kawasaki’s blog (blog.guykawasaki.com). These statistics only prove my theory further, that:

1. It is very hard to get tech-savvy folks to click on ads the way the average surfers (moms-and-pops) do.
2. It is not easy making a living just by blogging.

I myself own a site targeted at moms-and-pops, and I made many, many times more than what Guy’s #45-ranked blog earned. And mine is a very small niche, and a lot, lot, lot less less popular than Guy’s blog.

Here are some key stats from his blog:
• 2,436,117 page views (about 6,200/day)
• 23,457 RSS feed subscribers
• Total advertising revenue: $3,350 for 1 entire year (= $1.39 cpm)

You’ve got to take these stats with a pinch of salt, because these stats could be skewed due to a number of things – especially due to improper optimization for Adsense (or ads in general). Like mentioned earlier, Adsense optimization requires a lot of continued experimentation and tracking – in other words, a lot of focused effort - in order to make it work, which I’m guessing Guy probably didn’t due for various reasons.

But then there’s the other school of thought that overrides common sense. If you read the actual article, you will see that most of them did not start the blog with the sole intention of making money.

The main take-away here is that blogging may not make you directly cash-rich, but there are a lot of indirect, intangible benefits of blogging that simply cannot be overlooked:

• Build your brand: Develop a group of regular readers who are more likely to buy stuff that you actually sell down the line. Brand yourself as an expert in your niche. You will sell more books, get more paid consulting gigs, and all of that will eventually snowball into…. selling more books and getting more paid consulting gigs.
• Looks great on your resume: Unless you are putting up personal pictures or talking about stuff that you did when you were drunk, it adds a lot of value to your profile, because not everyone is capable of writing, and even among those few, not everyone is capable of writing about a focused subject in a professional way
• Ad-revenue: When you eventually start getting a lot of traffic, there will be plenty of ad-revenue opportunities (mostly CPM types); don’t count on PPC revenue, because tech-savvy folks just don’t click on ads.
• Develop original content: If you sat down to write a book, you may get overwhelmed by the amount of writing that needs to be done, and the sheer amount of effort that needs to put in. Instead, just start blogging chapter by chapter, and you could eventually compile those into a book (or other product).
• Blog posts can be transformed into articles: Writing an article for the sake of writing one can be extremely boring and painful. Instead, write short and crisp posts, and over time, you can pick each one up, expand it a little, and convert it into articles that can get you some incoming links.
• More traffic: Writing great posts that are instantly digestible and usable, and submitting to sites like Digg and StumbleUpon can not only get you tons of traffic, but also potential new subscribers and maybe even sell more of whatever it is that you are selling.

- Ravi Jayagopal
Author, “No Business Like E-Business“

You know what is Blog-And-Ping. Blog-And-Bookmark is quite similar.

You first blog about something (hopefully) interesting, then once your blog’s ping service has done its work on the back-end pinging all of the various web sites and your post is live, then you go to work as follows.

Use a one-to-many social bookmarking tool like AddMe.com or Socializer. I use AddMe on my blog itself, but use Socializer when I am actively bookmarking my own posts. Also check out the one-form-many-bookmarks site OnlyWire.com.

Add a bookmark to your post at all leading sites starting with StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com and Netscape.com. You should do it manually for these sites, and use OnlyWire.com for automated submission to the rest of the sites.

I highlight StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and Netscape here, because those are the ones that send about 95% of the social bookmarking traffic that my blog gets. The rest of them add up to only about 5%, but pursuing them is still worth it due to the number of back-links (incoming links) you will get.

See the Feedburner statistics (screenshot) below for RavisRants.com.

Note the spike in traffic every time I do blog-and-bookmark myself. It not only brings in a fresh supply of visitors, but also increases my number of average subscribers (Feedburner only reports that number for one given day, as the number can vary from day to day). This is not only a great way to get first time visitors, but also to get some new feed subscribers.

So, don’t forget to blog-and-ping, tag-and-ping, and blog-and-bookmark every single time you post.

Google came to prominence with a “Hate Images, Love Text” campaign. Slowly but steadily, they ventured into “banner” advertising, then “video” advertising, then affiliate programs, and now they have purchased one of the biggest “traditional” online advertisement networks, DoubleClick.

Their huge dependence on their “advertising” model is both exciting and scary at the same time.

The machine is us…

Digital Text is no longer just linking information…

HyperText is no longer just linking information…

The Web is no longer just linking information…

The Web is linking people….

Check out the oldest domains ever registered.

It’s very easy to see the long-term big guns here. See if you recognize the others.

Here’s the full list.

Ravi Jayagopal / CheapDomains.ws