DoshDosh has an interesting post on his blog recommending building Flagship blogs. The concept he lays out is interesting, but I’m not sure how practical for most people. The concept involves creating a Flagship blog( as he calls it) every 30 days for a year.

The idea is to build up a blog and follow a development cycle on a monthly rotation. If done properly then after a year you would have 12 blogs in various niches that could be sold for a profit. The idea sounds reasonable in terms of it could earn the person a lot of money, but there is also a lot of risk in such an endeavor.

First you need to find all the domain names for your various niches. That part probably won’t be that difficult for most Internet Marketing types. Chances are you already have numerous domain names registered that you have not built out into sites yet. I know I have a few.

The main time constraint is content. Now if you have plenty of money, you could contract out the content, but if all your content is contracted out how is this really a blog. A blog should have a unique voice. Readers are attracted to this as they always know what they are going to get. Now there are exceptions, sites like Engadget come to mind, but these are few in between. This endeavor could get very expensive in a hurry. If you want subscribers to a blog which is a must if you intend to make money off advertisers or to sell the blog eventually. Buying unique blog posts could get very expensive.

Then comes the whole process of advertising your blog. This could also get very time consuming. I suppose if you had a great deal of great content and then paid some high profile bloggers such as John Chow to review your blog, then this may take care of launching you into the blogsphere and you may gain some subscribers. Of course this is always a risk as people who subscribe to a blog such as John Chow’s probably are not interested in your blog on other niche topics that may not cover making money. So for this to be effective, you will need reviews on other sites within your niche. This may not be easy to obtain as a lot of people won’t pimp another blog the competes with them for SE rankings. Of course I’m sure you could pay them enough money and they would do it.

Blogging is a time intensive task and unless you have hords of cash( which is probably not something everyone has) then it would be very hard to make this work out to your benefit.

Of course you could take DoshDosh’s idea and use it to build one or two blogs and do it in a development life cycle that allows more time. Say you push the cycle out to 3 months or 6 months, then that would give you time to properly perform all the needed tasks in a time frame that meets your needs. AS you build revenue through this process you could reinvest your profits into outsourcing the time restrictive tasks. This would allow you to build more blogs and eventually reach the level of Flagship blog building DoshDosh mentions. The important thing I got out of the article was that you should develop a plan for blogging. This will help you maintain a consistent schedule and as a result build a better blog.

Technorati tags: blogging, building blogs, John Chow, Engadget, internet marketing

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I wrote on my views about Article Marketing and why I don’t think it works the other day. Matt Ellesworth from ArticleSnatch.com made an interesting comment on that post which prompted me to make an update to my original post. Matt makes a good point about when it makes sense to do Article Marketing. If you have hundreds of articles on your hard drive with nothing else to do with them the perhaps it would make sense to just post these out on the Article sites in hope of building backlinks. So if you have hundreds of PLR articles on the same or similar topic for a site you wish to promote then you could put those out on the sites.

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TechCrunch has posted some statistics for Social Networking Sites and how they are doing in terms of traffic and users. There is some interesting information in the report. I’ve used this types of sites to drive traffic to various sites for a couple of years now and they can be effective for generating traffic. As a rule the traffic from these locations do not tend to stick around long, but its not always the case.

I’ve noticed that every time I make a well thought out submission to one of these sites to promote a various blog post, I always pick up some subscribers. The key is to not spam the Social sites, but to provide content that fits in with the interests of the particular social site. I only submit related articles to this site which match the interests of the people there. I’ve found as long as I spend enough time reading various hot topics on the social sites I get a better feel of what to write when I submit one of my articles that will generate the clicks to the full article.

This takes a decent amount of time to learn, but once done properly it can really help your blog to grow. I don’t claim to have this down to a science, but I do know that certain topics seem to do better on certain sites. For example almost everyone knows Technology type posts seem to do a lot better on a site such as Digg than ones on Marketing. At the same time Sphinn is focused more towards marketing and will produce better results for Marketing articles. Netscape or Propeller will do better with human interest type or weight loss articles. Propeller has shown to do fairly well in quite a few niches and I still get traffic to certain articles that where submitted over a year ago from this site.

The key to making effective use of Social Sites for generating traffic is to match the social site to the niche you wish to promote. The more time you spend as a member of the social site’s community, the better feel you will have for what they want to find out about. It may be a little work and take some time, but the payoff can be tremendous. Remember the Golden rule when submitting to Social Sites “contribute, don’t spam”.

Technorati tags: social networking, traffic generation, techcrunch, subscribers, sphinn, digg

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