The Planning Cycle

No, I’m not taking a break from posting. I’m just taking a break from that topic, mainly because I’ve got something new I want to talk about.

I’ve had my finger on the good old blog-o-sphere for a while now. One of the big things thats going around right now, or at least was a little while ago, was the micro-blogs/micro-sites. Simple, little blogs that you update a few times a month, and are expected to make $5 a day/week. Now, I’ve thought about this, but it seems a little hard to me.

Lets take a look at the math: If the blog is making $5 a week (which is a good bit, don’t get me wrong), then you make around $260 a year. Not bad at all, especially if you’re running a number of these. There’s only one problem: you’re not looking at the costs. First, you registered the domain, thats $15, then you’re paying for hosting, the most reasonable of which is usually around $4 a month. So that means you’re down almost 20% of your profits in operating costs. Something seems a little wrong with that equation to me.

The concept generally is based on making websites that mostly take care of themselves, but if you’ve got constant bills, every month, that are eating up over 20% of the projected profits, it looks to me like you’ll be losing money in the long run. See, most blogs have up and down spikes. You’ll get a bunch of traffic, and then it will slow down. Then it’ll pick up again. With a micro blog like this, you’re probably going to see a spike every few weeks when you make a post, and then drop right back down. Its doubtful you’ll be making a consistent $5 a month, and even more doubtful that you’ll want to make a post when you check your ad revenue and see that for the past week you’ve gotten 4 hits.

Now, I’m not the kind of person to shoot down and idea and not fix it. Lets start with the assumption that you’re not going to be making consistent profits, that they’ll come and go, depending on traffic. If thats the case, a host thats requiring you to pay the same no matter how much your site is used isn’t doing you much good. You also need a massive number of these sites to make a good profit, and could probably use a few good ideas for advertising.

Here’s the setup that I’ve come up with, and what I plan on starting immediately:

First, I discovered Nearly Free Speech.Net the other day. I realized that I used, get this, less than 1% of the hosting I was paid for the past two months. My host was giving me 1 gig of space, and 100 gigs of bandwidth. I used around 50 megabytes of space and about 1.2 gigabytes of bandwidth. Not a lot. Nearly free speech has become my overall host, I haven’t moved everything there yet, but I will be. It took a little doing, but I’m now completely set up.

Here’s there cost breakdown: $1/Gigabyte of bandwidth, at least at the start. The more you use, the less it costs. On top of that, there are a couple of other charges: $0.01 a day for MySQL, and $0.01 a month per megabyte of storage. When you’re used to a few dollars for several gigs of storage that sounds like a lot, but think about it. Your average blog is less than 10 megabytes (this is 4 megs, and I could shrink it by getting rid of the default themes). A forum is around 30 megabytes, if you’ve got a couple of hacks and a custom theme. So, I’m running 3 blogs, a (currently) small website, and a forum for around $0.50 a month. Sure, I’m being charged by the bandwidth too, but I would have to use over 5 gigs of transfer to even equal my old hosts, and these guys are a lot better. Thats around 100,000 page views, or 100 different people downloading my entire website. If I’m getting that I’m making a fortune, and the $5 it costs in bandwidth won’t mean anything.

I know what you’re thinking. Great, he found a new host. What does this mean for me? Sure, its nice, but it doesn’t sound like its worth moving for, it just doesn’t. Thats where the micro-site concept comes in. Most hosts will charge you $10-15 for a domain name. These guys only charge $8. Thats great, because it puts registering loads of websites well within my grasp. Most people, when they say to go out and make one of these micro blogs, suggest making a handful and updating them regularly. My goal is to make at least 3 new websites a month. Thats $24 a month, well within my grasp. The guys at NFSN make it easy to handle all of it, its just a matter of clicking through a few buttons and telling them where to pull the cash from.

So what do I do with 3 websites a month? Make new content. It may seem hard, but it really isn’t. Do you like cooking? Register something for all the chicken recipes you make, and blog each time you try a new one. Then, register one for rice dishes, or deserts, or whatever it is you cook. Do you do any type of troubleshooting at work? Make a new blog for each type of problem. I do sysadmin work, so I’ll be starting an active directory blog, an exchange blog, a Windows XP blog, and Office blog… The list goes on. And every day I’ll have 1-2 problems to put on ONE of them. Instead of pushing to put up regular updates for a couple of sites, I’ll be writing a handful of blog posts every day, on various topics, and post them to whichever blog it happens to apply to. Apply to more than one? Its going on both. Slow day, nothing to write about? No big deal, its not a problem.

Almost everyone uses categories or tags on their blogs. I’m suggesting removing that process and instead using completely different domains for the blogging, each category gets translated into its own domain and blog, you’ll put posts on it when you feel like it, just post something every day.

Now, there’s only one problem left. We’ve got hosting that we only get charged for when we use. We’ve got an easy way to put content up on tons of different sites, and keep all of them updating. The only thing we have to do is keep them profitable, as long as they’re all bringing in a profit we’re good, and it was worthwhile.

I’ve got two main suggestions for it: Project Wonderful and Adsense (). You’ve probably used both of them, but not made a whole lot of money off them. Now, Project Wonderful is almost a requirement for this kind of blogging. In my time using it, I’ve found putting one of the two large ads, either a leaderboard or a skyscraper, almost always leads to a 2-3 cents a day earnings on them. As long as you can average a hit or two a day, which you’ll easily get if you post on it, you’ll be keeping the blog afloat purely on Project Wonderful ad revenue. While having a website that provides for itself is pretty cool, its not your only goal. You want a profit, and thats where Adsense comes in. The problem with adsense, and the reason it normally won’t make you a huge profit, is because your sites are too general. Sure, most people are into niche blogging, but they usually have at least 4-5 different categories they regularly post in. If each of those categories was its own blog, like I’m doing, the ads would be super targeted. Place them well, and any Search Engine traffic is almost guaranteed to be clicking on it, they found precisely what they wanted and the ad is targeted at specifically what you’re talking about. This means revenue for you, and you making a profit.

Now, this isn’t perfect by any means, and it certainly isn’t automated. My best guess it will take probably an hour or two a day to make all your postings. I’m very seriously considering writing a script specifically for this.There’s also the problem of payments. You’ll have to take care of those, and to keep your website up, I would suggest using Paypal, get an account set up. NFS.N accepts Paypal, and they’re really good about it. Project Wonderful, which should be supplying you with all your operating funds, also uses Paypal and works very well with it. I’m heavily considering writing a script for that too, something which runs once a month, transferring all you funds out of Project Wonderful to the Paypal account, and then transferring all those funds to NFS.N to pay for your hosting. The other downside is NFS.N. Its not like most hosts, there’s no CPanel, there’s no Fantastico, you’ll have to do everything by hand. You’ll have to add all your Blogs by hand, and you’ll have to get under the hood a little more. I’ll write up more complete directions next week, but for now I think most people can stumble through it.

What are you waiting for? Go, find a couple bucks, and throw it at NSF.N to start. Then its a matter of scrounging up about a dollar a day to register a new Domain every week to put content on. If you need some help setting NFS.N up, let me know, I’ll be happy to put it together for you and take care of the maintenance for a small fee.