Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

If you have content on your domains and don’t offer an RSS feed you’re missing a huge opportunity. RSS feeds are rapidly replacing email lists which have been a  powerful marketing tool, especially if you do affiliate marketing. To take advantage of RSS you have to develop sites that have their content updated frequently, i.e. blogs.

This is, in essence, the opposite of parking. Parking is a totally no maintenance way to monetize but the trade-off is extremely low revenues. It is the classic ‘throw it at the wall and see what sticks’ marketing, aka shotgun marketing. User-generated content sites like blogs are the opposite- they require regular content upgrades, preferably daily. However they also have the potential to generate significant revenue if you chose the right subject (and BTW, domaining and SEO/SEM are not the right subjects- this blog doesn’t make money from those AdSense units down there).

The problem with the blog network model is time- it takes a lot of it. The answer is to invite guest bloggers and or paid writers to write for your blog. You find them on Craigslist by running a free ad. You pay them peanuts because writers are notorious for undervaluing their services. $5 a post? Why not? You only want them to post once a day and not on weekends (total waste- traffic dies on weekends. I guess we read blogs at work…), so $25 week to keep a steady stream of content.

Consider this cost as arbitrage. You pay $xx dollars to get traffic which you convert to $xx+ via ads and affiliate programs. And you’re building traffic and reputation which increases the value of the domain.

Back to RSS. Prominently display the RSS feed subscription offer and include a link to this video which does a fantastic job of explaining why regular folks should use RSS to change the way they surf. The reason you’re pushing this hard is that once you’re in their feed reader they will return over and over and return business is the lifeblood of any business. Remember, getting traffic is expensive so you really want to keep the traffic you get. When you go into your site Analytics (and if you are not using Google Analytics shame on you- it is free and a fantastically useful tool) look at the New Visitors number. If your traffic is steady but you have a high number of new visitors it means they’re not returning. Aggressive use of RSS can help change that.