In part one we looked at John Chow and how many people try to gain his attention by creating links to various posts saying Hey John look at me I’m special. In part 2 of the series we will look at Darren Rowse and Problogger.net
Now I personally enjoy reading Darren’s blog a lot better than I John Chow’s mainly because Darren does not venture from his theme as much as John does with the endless Food posts. Although thinking about John’s Food posts does tell you something about his voice. You expect a certain amount of these types of useless posts and sometimes they are even a welcome distraction from the endless chain of review posts.
So we should probably look at how Darren makes money. Now I did not find a recent post from Darren on exactly how much he made off his blog lately, but it really does not matter since we all know he makes a decent amount of change from his blogging efforts. Darren has always said he earns more from his other blogs than from ProBlogger but for this we are just going to think about Problogger.net. If you look at the above link closely you will see that every one of the links in the How I Make Money Blogging post is an affiliate link. So it would be safe to say the Darren makes a good amount of money from Affiliate programs too just as John. Since Darren has craved out a niche as the number one resource online for bloggers and many of these bloggers are just starting out, its probably safe to say that he signs up quite a few referrals for these programs and earns residuals from every person he attracts to those programs.
If you pay attention to his right sidebar you will also figure out that links are for sale. The actual price for the links is not listed as I’m sure they are a function of the B5Media network that Darren is associated with, but I can assume its as much if not a lot more than what John can get for his links. I could sign up for B5Media and find out exactly, but I have no intention of buying adspace from them at the moment, but they do state that the minimum buy for a graphical ad is $1000 bucks. I would guess that Darren makes a little more than John in this area.
Of course the entire point of this post is not how much money these two guys earn from their efforts, but how they can show you how to do that same thing when you find your own voice. Then you won’t need to stand up and scream please look at me. I would argue that doing that now is a waste of your time and energy which would be better spent on other endeavors.
Lets take a look at some other numbers from Darren and John. The both have a decent technorati rank. At the time of this writing John enjoys a Technorati rank of the 45th most popular blog on Technorati and an authority of 5,532. Darren beats John out a little bit with a technorati rank of the 15th most popular blog and a Authority of 9,013. Well its actually a good bit higher since once you get this high up on Technorati its harder to obtain each position.
The other number that is important for us to look at is the current number of RSS subscribers each blog has. John posts his subscriber count as 14,314 and Darren again beats John out with a subscriber count of 36,208. These are great numbers and I’m sure any one would be happy with that many subscribers. I know I sure would. Now this is starting to look like a John gets squashed by Darren post, but its not. We could find similar consistencies looking at any of the high visibility blogs on a wide variety of subjects.
Now we come to the point of this series. These are the two most important numbers for you to consider with your blogging efforts. Everything comes from your technorati rank and the number of RSS subscribers you have. If you can improve these two numbers enough all the other items with blogging take care of themselves. Money will come and traffic will come. You can’t fail if you build these numbers properly. And that is where your voice comes in.
When you stand up and scream hey look at me. whether the target is John or Darren or someone else you are helping to build their rank not your’s. Now I’m not saying that you should not link to the big blogs, you absolutely should link to blogs that have the potential to bring you new readers from the trackbacks and comments these links produce. But once you get the readers you need to convert them into subscribers. By the way feel free to subscribe at any time 
Now back to the bloggers I talked about in part 1 and the main reason I envisioned this series. I was on a forum where a suggestion was made that it may be a cool feature is the Entrecard was in your RSS feed. Yes, I was the one who made the suggestion. Well it did not receive much support. One blogger even stated that they wanted the visitor to come to their site. Now I understand the reason for wanting the visitor on the actual site and not the feed. If they are on the site then there is a chance they will click on an ad and earn some short term profits and that is exactly what this thinking is Short term thinking. I for one would rather have a person that reads my content again and again, than one who comes once and decides to click a single ad, never to return again. Subscribers are a much more lucrative option than those single ad clickers. Even if a subscriber never visits my site as long as they are a subscriber then they are very valuable. Since we have already determined that a large part of Darren and John’s income comes from link sales and affiliate programs, then it would stand to reason that the number of subscribers is related to the number of sales they make with Affiliate programs
Anyone that has done any amount of Affiliate Marketing will tell you that earning money from Affiliates is directly related to the number of times you show the affiliate link to a visitor. Since most bloggers tend to include affiliate links in posts you will still obtain revenue from those links. Well as long as you show them to enough people who may be interested in the product for which you are an affiliate. This is one of the reasons I want as many subscribers as possible and I don’t care if they never actually visit this site. I used to think just like the blogger mentioned earlier. Where I wanted ever person that reads my content to visit so perhaps I could make a couple of pennies off Adsense, but I now realize that was not very wise. John even tells you this in one of his posts on how to improve your RSS subscriptions. One of the interesting things about that post was that John tells you RSS feeds are hard to monetize. They are hard than an ad on a site, but if you use Feedburner to manage your feeds( Something you should really do) then there are tools available their to help you monetize it. There are also quite a few Word Press plugins that will help you with this process. Of course I don’t advocate monetizing your feed at all. at least not until you have a really respectable number of subscribers and have generated some buzz for your site. The main reason is because you need this number to grow and having ads on your feed may turn off some subscribers. The idea is to grow this number, which causes a snow ball effect and leads to more subscribers. Ask yourself would you rather be on a list with 5 people or 5000. Perhaps you are a non-conformist that does not want to go along with the crowd and be totally different. If that is the case then you need to stop blogging and start doing something else with your time.
Growing a subscriber list is also one of the main contributing factors to the amount you can charge for links. This number is considered very closely by advertisers who wish to advertise on blogs. Would you rather spend 5 dollars for a link on a site with 5 subscribers or 200 for one with 5000. Blogging is a numbers game. Its simple reasoning the more times something is seen the more likely percentage of those views will generate some sort of revenue. So the one thing you can learn from the A-List bloggers is to grow this list as big as possible. Make it very easy for people to subscribe. Of course your content has to be compelling enough to make the people want to give you their time to read more of your writings so while you make it easy also make it interesting. Just copying the ideas of other blogs won’t make it interesting. For example if John writes on eating a purple headed octopus and all you do is to stand up and say hey John look at me, I saw your post on eating a purple headed octopus and I wrote about it too, then that is not going to be very interesting to most people. Perhaps they even leave your site and go over to John’s to subscribe. Of course you do need to mention other bloggers in your posts as that is an intricate part of blogging, but you must add your own twist to every post or you won’t have your own voice and be interesting enough for people to subscribe.
Tune into tomorrow for part three of Finding your own voice where we talk about Technorati and how you need to really grow that number to the highest rank possible. You may want to subscribe to ensure you don’t miss part 3.
Technorati tags: finding your voice, blogging, rss subscribers, john chow, darren rowse, problogger, technorati, trackbacks, wordpress plugins, affiliate revenue
