Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

Kevin Kelly, the veteran observer of tech culture and human behavior, has a great post on how to build a fanbase or, as we see it in the web world, a traffic base. He theorizes that the tipping point is when you have 1000 true fans, visitors who will spend at least one day’s wages each year on your products, services or advertisers.

This makes sense on a lot of levels when it comes to building traffic. A blog that has 1000 feed subscribers and/or email subs is almost certainly a successful blog, both traffic-wise and financially. This sets a reasonable benchmark for building site traffic, one that is a lot easier to imagine than trying to emulate the million page view blogs and sites we all see daily.

So how would you find and acquire your 1000 true fans?

Copyblogger has assembled a series of articles on keyword research and blogging that really constitutes a real guide to choosing a profitable blog subject. Unlike all the get rich quick info out there this is free and really practical- I wish I’d read it when I started blogging several years ago.

Domainers should really look at blog platforms as an easy way to get information web sites up on your domains. We’ve been stripping ‘bloggish’ stuff like comment streams, author names and date stamps off of WordPress templates, adding ten or twelve information posts in categories and launching them as websites on our domains. With the keyword approach in the articles above you can quickly build traffic and revenues on sites like these.

“Economic uncertainty. The best place to be when revenue is hard to generate is a pre-revenue company. Whether or not we are headed into (or are already in) an economic downturn, and whether or not that will impact advertising expenditures, many in the market are already exercising caution. In times like that, big companies start acting more defensively and give up more white space to start-ups. This is good for start-ups.”

Dave Morgan offers five more reasons for starting an Internet company now and they’re all good ones.

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.