Why you need a blogging business plan
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 is 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.
I’m happy I had the opportunity to share a story with the readers here. It just so happens that I posted my monthly income report the other day so if you visit my blog you can see my income break down along with the current changes I’m planning for my business moving forward.
Getting back to this post, I really do think it’s important to determine exactly how you can make money from your blog in the beginning. You don’t have to execute that strategy at the beginning, but you need to have an idea of when you can start to make money.
Awesome blog post. Will turn my blogging hobby to blogging business plan.
This great article led me to Chris’ website and even more useful tips. I’m tremendously impressed, and grateful that you posted this… and that Chris is sharing such helpful tips, too.
Thank you!
Hey Chris, good to read your story here as I was not familiar with your blog before. Good points that you make. If you are serious about blogging you need to treat it like a business and that means planning accordingly. I do not know any business owner that would start a business without a plan, that is why it is surprising to me how many bloggers just start blogging with no startegy or plan. I have quaterly business plans and goals for both of my blogs and readjust my plan every three months. Like you, I also have other online properties that make me a lot of money so I am not rushing into monetizing my blog just yet. My blog, TycoonBlogger.com is about 18 months and I am still focused on the promotion stage and will focus on monetizing my blog in about 6 months. I am currently working on creating my first information product that will be the cornerstone of my monetization strategy.
Great Dan! Best of luck with your information product.
Good article, for a long term plan I like it, Myself I’ve just kicked off a shorter too long term blog plan. The luxury of multiple sites producing enought income to give me that time scale is not present yet!
Working part time on websites while still maintaining a full time day job is a difficult task. I had done this for years before finally being able to go full time with my business in October 2009.
Good luck!
The one thing that I always wonder about — how do readers react when you suddenly spring your monetization on them? If you’ve got faithful readers because you don’t have ads or sell products, how many do you lose when the ads start to appear?
I’ve started some of my blogs with adsense from the beginning. I had one person say that they were interested in the idea of my golf blog but would never read it because it has ads. Is this even a person I want as a reader? They’re likely to bail once the monetization kicks in anyway.
Or will the fact that they’ve become faithful readers make most of them stay on?
My question back to that reader would be – DO you use Google or Yahoo or Facebook or Twitter, etc… Show me a site that does not have a strategy to make money.
I actually asked them a similar question but never got a response back. I wasn’t too concerned since they are obviously not my target audience. They are part of the crowd that thinks everything should be free and that it all magically gets paid for somehow.
Some readers will always be annoyed by any form of advertising, but these people are the ones least likely to actually buy anything anyway so I would just recommend ignoring them
Nice post. In fact our blog is a BP result also and it is running as planed
Evand
Hi Chris,
Thanks for sharing, looking forward to learn from your blog.
Your 7 tips for Amazon is a good read and I gonna use that for my next project.
Planning is a vital factor in any kinda business and if we treat IM as a business then only we can succeed. I got a question though:
1. Is it a good idea to automate the blogs in the initial stage (in most cases compromising on unique content) and focusing on monetizing at the same time.
Thanks
I prefer to create good websites and do my best not to skip any corners in that process, so no I don’t like to ever automate blogs.
I must say that my blogging business plan is along the same business lines. Awesome post, definitely a needed refreshment on a true passion of what proper blogging should be.
My plan is very basic.
First, I need to develop a stable readership.
Then, increase traffic volume.
After that, I’ll monetize my blog to make it profitable.
Great post Chris with plenty of food for thought.
I subscribe to your blog following an excellent thread you posted at Warrior Forum about your Amazon techniques.
It inspired me to up my game.
Many thanks.
Great advice Chris,
Thanks! I am about to go check out your blog now.
J
The Cartoon Coach
This is very true. Making a business plan for my blogs has helped me greatly. Thank you
Absolutely.
Thank you very much chrish for the tip. I started 5-6 blogs this month without realizing what exactly am I going to do with them. I thought I’ll think about that when my blogs start getting visitors
Finding how much your blog is worth from the beginning is a great idea. It is the same approach I use with regular land-based businesses.
Great story bro, I think we all follow your steps, this is brilliant! Thanks