Just What Is Pro-Blogging?

Judith: Right. Now we’re going to do focus of the week. I’m not sure that you’re prepared for this, but we might have to do some editing around this, but this is what I would like … This is what I would like to talk about, and this is how I’d like it to go approximately.

Nicola: Okay.

Judith: Sarah told you, didn’t she, that when she handed in her notice that what she wanted to be was a pro-blogger.

Nicola: Yes.

Judith: And told me. I went, “Oh, yes, I like that idea as well.” And what I’d like to talk about is the model for that, which is the woman that you interviewed at Sarah’s introduction. What’s her name?

Nicola: Jeni Hott.

Judith: Yeah, I’d like to talk about her, and then we can link to the interview. And I’d like to talk about the three articles in that email that you sent both me and Sarah, and then I would … and my reply to your email, and the thing about paying someone to do it. And then I want to talk about the Patreon email that they sent me over the Christmas holidays. So you’re going to have to do most of the work here. That’s the [inaudible] to which you may or may not be prepared. Can you start by telling us about … Is her name Sarah Hott, did you say?

Nicola: Jeni Hott.

Judith: Jeni Hott, yes.

Nicola: Well, I can start further back from that because there has been a number of people who espouse pro-blogging as a way of making a living, starting with [crosstalk], including Pat Flynn. And in fact, Pat Flynn did a niche-site duel. If you do a search for niche-site duel, D-U-E-L, then you can find a case study that he did where he started researching a new niche, and he went through a number of options, and he talked about why he chose the one he did. And he ended up doing food truckers, because food trucking is … There’s a massive groundswell of people selling food from trucks in both the UK and in America. They go to different malls and parking spaces and things like that.

Anyway, and he knew that food truckers would not have much business sense. Anyway, he ended up doing a whole content site about food trucking. He started it from scratch, and he made it into a very successful business. And that’s essentially what we’re talking about here, is a niche site where it’s very content driven.

Judith: Can I stop you there? Can I just stop you there for one second? I just wanted to make a distinction, which is that Pat Flynn and Yarrow both didn’t stop where I think Sarah and I might, i.e. they then leveraged all of their pro-blogging into a business that pays them in other routes as well. I don’t think that’s Sarah’s plan, is it? It’s to make a living simply from blogging.

Nicola: Well, okay, so in order to make a living simply from blogging, you have to have a site that’s niche, and in Jeni Hott’s case … In fact, if you search J-E-N-I H-O-T-T, you will find an article. In fact, I did an interview with Jeni Hott on Business Success Factory, if anyone’s interested.

Judith: That’s what I’m saying. No, we’re going to link to it.

Nicola: Yeah, yeah, okay, good. Okay, well, we’ve got a number of resources to link to.

Judith: Yes, we have.

Nicola: And she took herself off to Mexico. She realised she didn’t want to work for anyone else. She wanted to work for herself. She took herself off to Mexico, and she sat and she created content for a health site. Now, when I say created content, she, A, wrote fresh, original content, which is important. But I think she might have also gathered content, curated content from other places for the site, because the thing that these content sites need is a lot of content.

Judith: Yes.

Nicola: And we’re not just talking … And it’s got to be consistent. It’s been proved that Google rewards consistency and thus it was ever so.

Judith: Yep.

Nicola: So if you start by putting up 10 articles a day, you’d better carry on putting up 10 articles a day, and if you’re going to tail it off, do it very, very slowly. But Jeni says that you get to a certain number of pages, and she never did mention the exact amount because obviously she’s got a course that teaches people how to do this, and Google rewards you with your page views.

I’ll give you a good example. The Writing Club World site I’ve started is going to be largely user-generated content because people will be uploading their stories to it. The stories will go into a top 10, and that will constantly be changing. So it’s about things that are constantly changing. User-generated content is always more popular with Google, so forums work really, really well. You’ve got to keep a lot of content, and you’ve got to keep it going. And then you make the money by having AdSense around your content, whether it’s in a block of little text tabs, or whether it’s in a long display thing down the sidebar, or if it’s something at the bottom. And again, that’s now in itself.

There was a bunch of people I knew, the Vernons particularly, who in up to 2006 made an awful lot of money by churning out these little niche content sites with lots of content on them and covering them in AdSense. And the AdSense, as I say, it becomes an art because you find out which positions on the page get most clicks on your ads, and you’re trying to pick niches that are trying … They were trying to pick niches where the cost-per-click was high, so lawyers and doctors and things like that, because you get paid a percentage. Nobody knows exactly how much, but it’s roughly 50% of the click that someone’s prepared to pay for. So it’s a content site driven by advertising, and you get paid. So obviously, the more pages you’ve got with advertising on, the better it is.

Judith: I have a question already. Can I ask it?

Nicola: Okay. Yeah, absolutely.

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Is It Worth Reviving Old Blog Content?

Judith: If I’ve got 1,450 blog posts on my website and 1,000 of them are quite old, can I put AdSense on the old ones that nobody reads anymore? Or if you put AdSense on, is it all on or all off?

Nicola: Well, there’s absolutely no point in putting AdSense on pages nobody reads, because you’re never going to get any traffic to them.

Judith: I’m not saying they don’t. What I’m saying is I don’t want it on my current content. I can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be on my older content.

Nicola: You could do that, but you [crosstalk].

Judith: Can you do it by a cutoff date? Can you say, “Yes, once my blog posts become a year old, put AdSense on all of them”?

Nicola: There must be a script that would do that.

Judith: Yes, okay.

Nicola: But I can’t see that you’re going to get [crosstalk].

Judith: No, I know you can’t. I know you can’t, but I can. That’s the question really, is whether you can put AdSense on posts of a certain age and not on more current stuff.

Nicola: Okay. For one thing, 1,400 posts is a tiny number when it comes to big content sites.

Judith: Well, yes it is and it isn’t, because one of your articles you sent, that I want to discuss in a minute, the most attractive is the business model is around having 365 good ones.

Nicola: Pillar content?

Judith: No, we’ll get to it in a minute. We’ll go into those three articles that you sent, because the first two are the big version, and the third one is 365. And when I read version one, I thought, “Well, I can’t do that.” I read version two, “Oh, I can’t do that.” “365, oh, yeah, I probably could do that.”

Nicola: Well, you’ve got to look at the date of those articles. I was sending those articles-

Judith: No, no, no. We can do all of the things that you recommended. Let’s not get into the detail yet. Keep talking.

Nicola: Well, that’s pretty much it. I mean, I have tried on many, many occasions to create niche content sites, and my problem is, if I’m not interested in it myself, I can’t … I cannot do it.

Judith: Yeah, I agree. I agree.

How Much Blog Content Do You Need To Make Money?

Nicola: Jeni Hott was able to push through and create a massive amount of content … And she’s been Google certified as being a million-dollar blogger. So Google has given her awards and things for being someone who earns more than a million dollars a year from her AdSense.

Judith: Well, let’s talk about that for a moment, because actually those articles that you sent me through to have a look at, which we will link at as well for anybody interested in this, the first one was, I think, not a huge sum of money. The second one was $3,000 a month. They were very livable sums of money if you were Sarah, for instance, setting off to create an income of your own through a niche site. I mean, actually, it’s a tall order, but they’re not a million dollars, is my point. It was 30-

Nicola: No, no, absolutely no. The first one was 10 grand a month, wasn’t it? And the second one-

Judith: Yes, the second one was three grand a month. Yeah, exactly. Yep.

Nicola: See, I think you’ve got to take those articles with a pinch of salt. You’ve got to look at when they were written, because Google’s algorithm has changed massively, but the other thing is that it’s hard to do something yourself if you’re not interested in the topic.

Which Topic Should You Choose For Your Blog?

Judith: I agree totally. Do you remember when we all learned to do sort of pure internet marketing where it was about getting any book written about hiking or something, and then … None of us could do that because we just weren’t interested enough in knitting and hiking and dogs and all sorts of things like that. But if you were … I mean, I don’t know what Sarah’s niche will be. Probably her raw foodie type of yogurty stuff. I’ll tell you why it’s hard for me, is the tech bits are too dull.

Nicola: What tech bits?

Judith: Well, in your list when you sent me the three emails, you summarised down at the bottom you’ve got to do this, this, this. They are boring. All I want is … I don’t even want to make it about a niche. I just want to blog about anything I’m interested in, and I don’t think that’s a business model, is it?

Nicola: Well, it is if you structure your blog posts in a way that Google are going to reward you with traffic. I have several blog posts that bring me a lot of traffic. In fact, the majority of my traffic comes from three blog posts, because they are structured in a way in what’s called pillar content. If you do a search for Six Figure Mentors, which is a modular marketing company that teaches people how to become internet marketers and supplies the tools for that, then you will find that my review of that is constantly in the top three on Google for a search-

Judith: But you see, well, you’ve done that. You’ve been very strategic.

Nicola: I didn’t mean to be actually. What I did was I wrote a thoroughly independent review, and I just did it properly, and I found after several years that that article was bringing the majority of the traffic to my website. But what I haven’t done was monetized it in any way. I didn’t have Google AdSense on it. I didn’t have a sign-up box on it. I didn’t have any affiliate links on it. So I went back and I put all those three things on it.

Judith: And how did you wake up to that?

Nicola: Because I was looking at my Google analytics one day, and I was looking at my most popular pages, and I saw that that one and there was another called My Top 10 Instant Marketing Mentors, and those two were bringing the majority of the traffic to my website. If you’ve got a website, go and look at your analytics and go and look over the last year. Set the timeframe to bigger than you’d normally look, like the last year, and see what your most popular blog posts are, because that will give you a clue about what your next blog post should be about.

Judith: If you’re blogging strategically in a way to make money or to …

Nicola: To attract traffic. And I’ve got a fabulous tool for you. It’s called … One second. It’s called …

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How Do You Come Up With Ideas For Blog Posts?

Judith: I’m writing down here … Listen, I’m writing down here …tool.

Nicola: … answerthepublic.com. It’s a weird, weird website, but …

Judith: Yeah, this is where you lose me. Boring…

Nicola: No, honestly, you’ll love this one. It’s visual. So answerthepublic.com, and it’s got this weird man on the front, and you have to ignore him because he’s a bit strange. He just acts like he’s looking at you and things. But if you just go down to the box where it says enter your keywords, so for example, you could put in business or even better, successful business. Or what would you say was the main key phrase that you use?

Judith: I don’t know. I’d have to ask Charlotte because she does all of that that brings these people to me via SEO. I don’t know. Oh, yes, I do know. I’m lying. I think I’m Business Mentor London.

Nicola: Well, yes, but that … And that is what people might be, but they might be looking for business mentoring. They’re questioning. And then you scroll down, and it’s quite un-intuitive, this site, since it’s been made by techies. You have to scroll down to get the results, and they don’t show immediately, but what it does do quite nicely is show you a visualisation of what people are typing into Google and something else. So what is business mentoring? What does business mentoring mean? What is business mentorship? What is a business mentoring programme? So those are what-

Judith: Oh, that’s interesting because one of the blog posts I’ve written in the last week is what is the difference between coaching and mentoring.

Nicola: Yeah, exactly. Then why business mentoring is important. What is business mentoring? Blah, blah. So this isn’t quite good enough, but you put in a number of searches around the question business mentor, business mentoring, business coaching perhaps.

Judith: Yeah, I think it is …

Nicola: And you end up with a list of questions that people are actually asking on Google.

Judith: And we’ve got one, or we haven’t got one? We have got a question, or we haven’t got a question, and they’re asking?

Nicola: Yeah. Well, what is business mentoring is the first thing people ask. And then what is a business mentoring programme? So what you do is you structure your article on your website, and these would be the subheads of the different parts of it. So you’re looking for an article that’s about 1,000 to 3,000 words. It’s got a number of headlines, sub-headlines within it that are around the topic how does business mentoring work. So it’s telling you basically how to structure your article and what questions to answer.

Judith: I understand. Now you love a nice … I forget what you call it … a framework

Nicola: I do, yes.

Now Pro-Blogging Sounds A Bit Boring

Judith: And I don’t, you see. That just feels like a straitjacket to me. But this is an important point because a professional blogger, Jeni, or let’s say Sarah, is going to have to get into the … is going to have to wear this straitjacket.

Nicola: What I suggest you do is that you write a blog post as you would normally. So let the creativity flow, and then I would then come back and put the subheads in at the certain points of where you’ve written about something that’s relevant to the headline.

Judith: And that’s where I said to you, “Could I pay somebody to do this?” You know, you summarised it down at the bottom. Have you got that email handy? If not, I’m going to open it.

Nicola: Yeah. No, I haven’t got it handy.

Judith: No, I’ve got it handy. Yeah, I’ve got it handy. Because you summarised those three articles that you sent us, and you said … Here we go. Each of your post articles should be targeting a key phrase and have some key elements to be found in Google. And then you give us five bullet points: simple writing and at least 800 words long; a key phrase in the title, one or more of the subtitles, first paragraph, last paragraph, tags, alt tag on the image. Three, multi-media: if you embed a relevant video in the post it seems to help. Four, some occasional pillar content; long posts of around 3,500 words. And five, deep links to other relevant articles on your site.

And I wrote back to you and said, “I could pay somebody to do that with all of the old content.” And you went, “Oh, no, it’s not quite as easy as that. We’ve got to update stuff and don’t change dates or something.” You lost me on the dates thing, but the point I want to make here is you’ve got to be … It’s not really … It’s a very businesslike way of making money, not a particularly creative way of making money. That is what I would say.

Nicola: Well, I think a lot of the pro-bloggers would disagree with you, because what they did was they just started writing content around their topic. I mean, think of all the pro-bloggers who do travel blogging, for example. They go and just write articles about where they’ve been, and those articles naturally have lots of words and phrases. And the other thing is Google looks for things like … If you’ve got an article about riding saddles, for example, they’re going to expect you to use links, [inaudible] index and key phrases like the stables or curry combs or brushing your horse or plaiting tails. There are lots of phrases around your core phrase.

And when you think about it, when you’re writing an article about something that you’re naturally passionate about and creative about, you probably do this without even thinking, you’re including lots of relevant key phrases around your key phrase, and Google is going to reward you for that. What I’m saying is that after you’ve written your article, you need to just go back and tweak it a bit so that Google knows better what your article is about. And then occasionally you need to write these big pillar articles, which again you tend to do quite naturally.

Judith: Yeah, I’m not worried about pillar articles. I could easily do that. I’m worried about all these boring structural bits, and I’d like to pay somebody to do that. That’s what I’m saying.

Nicola: But the problem is that you have to do a little bit of research first. Otherwise, you’re not going to know how to instruct these other people on what key phrases are your key phrases, et cetera.

Judith: And they don’t come out of the content of the article?

Nicola: Well, they might.

Can You Outsource The Work Of Creating Content For Your Blog?

Judith: I think I could have a VA that could partner with me very nicely on this.

Nicola: Yes, yes. But okay, so here’s the thing, right? Your VA hasn’t got a blooming clue what key phrases you’re trying to get your site to write about.

Judith: No, but if I get a VA and I have a three-way conference with whatever Charlotte’s using for the SEO, then we can agree between us. I’m not thinking of a moronic person. I’m thinking of somebody who understands this a bit.

Nicola: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, that might work.

Judith: I don’t really want to do this myself. I just want to write really. But I am drawn to the idea of it, and then the detail puts me off. Now, that’s not the same with other areas of business, interestingly, so I just think it means it’s not the right one for me. The brilliant thing about Sarah is that she is quite techie, and she does understand things like this, and I don’t think it would be boring for her, and she is a good researcher and that sort of stuff. Let’s take her in theory. In theory, and because she was inspired by Jeni Hott and understands much more … Not only does she understand techie better than me; she’s actually able, more able with tech better than me. So she is well placed if she can bring herself to do it. And going back to that article, which I think this is the best one, your email, I mean, how just 365 blog posts or less, it should say or fewer, is all you need to become a successful blogger.

Nicola: Well, it’s all you needed back in the olden days to become a successful blogger.

Judith: Do you think that’s quite old? Well, let me click on it and see how old it is. Hang on. Because, you see, then you can do one a day effectively, which is a very workable workload for somebody like Sarah.

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Is It Important To Blog Consistently?

Nicola: Let’s talk about when you did one blog post a day on a topic around being a business person or a business mentor or coach.

Judith: I don’t think it was on topic to that extent. It was written by a business mentor, but I didn’t write about business for 365 days of the year. I couldn’t. Actually, that’s what was useful about the man yesterday. I’ve forgotten most of what I know about business until people ask me, and that’s why I wrote these … This week I have written … Well, I’m leaping ahead, but I have written two blog posts on topics to me that are really dull that I’ve written about a lot. But the reason I wrote them was because a colleague, a client, asked these questions, and nobody reads your website anymore, so you might as well carry on posting current, you know, rotating the same approximate 10, 20 topics all the time because people don’t … Except for Google, nobody reads the old stuff.

Nicola: Yeah, and the other thing that you’re doing by rotating the core 10 or 20 topics, which actually could come out of your research on Answerthepublic, is that you’re making your website not only have much more content, but it’s much more tightly-focused, relevant content, which tells Google overall what your website’s about. So you’re loading up the-

Judith: But then I’d have to put AdSense on in order to be a pro-blogger because actually doing what you’ve just said just brings me more of what I’ve got already, which is how I’ve used blogging in the past, which is to bring clients.

Nicola: To attract clients. Absolutely.

Judith: Yeah, but that’s not what this model is all about. It’s about making money. And that’s why I was making the distinction about Pat Flynn and Yarrow because they’ve leveraged it into people paying them for other things, whereas Jeni Hott and Sarah and, in theory, me are just making money writing.

Nicola: Yes, and the difference is that the people who just make money writing make money because they have a lot of pages on their website that are written around a key topic.

Judith: Well, interesting. In this article, the third one, the one I like best that I definitely will link to, the 365 blog posts, is only dated February, 2018, so not all that old actually.

Nicola: Or it might have been written in the olden days that’s been brought up to date.

Judith: Maybe, maybe.

Nicola: And this new date.

Judith: Maybe.

Nicola: I hope that it’s still a valid business model, and I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be.

Judith: No, I agree actually.

Nicola: All you need to do is make sure that when someone arrives at … because you’ve got to think of each blog post as the front page of your website, because when people arrive at it, that’s the first thing they see. And as you’ve proved, people do not go off and look around the rest of the website. So you need to have … In fact, from a business point of view, this is an interesting conversation, because it means you need to have everything you want people to see on that page, that front page …

Judith: I do have that.

Nicola: … that they arrive at.

Judith: I do have that because a blog post is just … I’ve got the same headers, footers, sidebars on every single page.

Nicola: Yes, which is what blogging actually began as, as an easy way to make a website that would have the same headers, footers, and sidebars.

Judith: Indeed. Absolutely. And that’s how sort of WordPress hooked us all, wasn’t it?

Nicola: I know. There are people … I mean, I’ve been looking, as I’ll tell you in the next section, I’ve been looking on Upwork, and there are people who describe themselves as content writers who will apparently write you original content about … And that’s the thing that just makes my heart sink, is the thought of writing over and over again on the same topics.

I don’t know how people could do that, but apparently, there are people out there who will write you original articles, who aren’t spinning. You know, that whole spinning thing where they just take someone else’s article and spin it into a new one. I mean, they actually do go and write original articles about the topics you give them. I don’t know how they do it, but they do it. And apparently, you tell them the key phrases, and they will write an article around your key phrase with all of the ancillary phrases that go with it.

Judith: And do you know what? I think there are places where that works. For instance, that might work … I know you’re not in the market for this, but that might work on writingclubworld.com or whatever it’s called.

Nicola: I am in the market for that. That’s exactly what I plan to do.

Judith: Oh, do you see? Because people proposition me with this every day, and I ignore them because they’re offering it to me for Judithmorgan.com, and I don’t want anybody else’s voice on my eponymous website. Now, if I had a niche site or a cross site or a hobby site or another site on the side, I might consider other people writing the content for me once [crosstalk].

Nicola: Yeah, and that’s my plan, is to hire someone to do it. In fact, my next VA will fill up her spare time doing content for Writing Club World. And the thing is we know this works because when I put Writing Club World up, I put it up with about five articles about writing clubs and writing groups, and within a day, I was getting traffic from Bing, and within two days, I was getting traffic from Google. So obviously, they come over, and they index your site, and they index your articles, and those weren’t even original articles. I borrowed them from other sites. I credited the other sites. I linked back to the other sites. I didn’t put the whole article on, or I just put the first few paragraphs. So that’s another thing, is you can get-

Judith: Well, we definitely know it works for traffic, don’t we?

Nicola: Yes. What are we talking about here? We’re talking about a website that’s got lots of pages that attracts traffic. Then click on the ads on the page.

Judith: Yeah, that’s the difference.

Nicola: And the point we haven’t made yet is those ads are going to be relevant to the content of that page, and that was the clever thing about Google AdSense, was they started feeding ads through that reflected what you were writing about on your page. So it looked like it was part of the page, and it added value to the viewer.

Judith: Yes. And the interesting thing about this, and it’s a bit like the conversation I have with a lot of clients, which is if you’re brand new and you’re starting at something, self-employed, you’ve got to pick something that’s going to interest you for, I honestly think, a decade, to be honest. Because you and I have been blogging for two decades, right?

And so there’s a cumulative value to the content you are creating. If you’re going to create a niche site and … So you’ve got to pick something that’s going to interest you for one to three years. So what is it that you’re interested in that you could write about and you would never lose interest? Well, actually currently, because we talk about this a lot on this show, we would never lose interest in anything about writing

Nicola: Here’s a couple of things that came up to me when you said that.

Judith: Okay.

Nicola: One is that not everybody likes to write, and you can actually have a very effective business website without a blog on it at all. I would suggest that you do-

Judith: Which would be what video?

Nicola: Well, no, the … Okay, so here’s another thing. You can actually just go and find videos on YouTube that are relevant to your visitors, put them onto your blog post, embed them into a blog post, get them transcribed, and put the transcription down below, and there you go. There’s blogging without you having to write a word.

Content Curation For Blogs, Versus Creating Original Content

Judith: So now actually you’re a content person. You’re a content curator.

Nicola: Yes.

Judith: You’re a manager of content, not a creator of content.

Nicola: Yes.

Judith: Now I think that’s more feasible for quite a lot of people who probably don’t … who are quite techie and probably don’t think they are writers.

Nicola: Yeah, because … And the reason you’re going to win with that strategy is that nobody else has transcribed that video, and you’re the only website in the world with those written words on it. So you-

Judith: Can you transcribe somebody else’s video, or are there copyright issues?

Nicola: No.

Judith: Okay.

Nicola: No. No, copyright issues. They put it on YouTube. It’s a public platform. There is an embed code on YouTube. Everyone knows that other people can embed your videos. You can actually turn off the ability for other people to embed your videos, by the way.

Judith: Okay, okay.

Nicola: But nobody does because they want their videos to be seen.

Judith: So how would you feel if my business model, for example, was just an embed of all of your videos that I had paid for the transcription of? You wouldn’t be pissed off about that?

Nicola: I might be mildly pissed off, but I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

Judith: No, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Yeah.

Nicola: What I might do is come to you and say, “You are using my content to create your site. You’re paying for the transcription, so it’s only fair you should get the transcription first, but I want copies of every transcription.”

Judith: And what if I said … just ignored you?

Nicola: Well, I wouldn’t be able to do anything really. I’d have to-

Judith: No.

Nicola: I wouldn’t be able to do anything.

Judith: No.

Nicola: I wouldn’t like you very much, but [crosstalk].

Judith: No, I know. I know, because we don’t like it when other people copy our stuff very much, do we?

Nicola: No, but we can’t stop it.

Judith: Nobody does. It’s not just you and me. Nobody does.

Nicola: I would agree because my videos would be getting an awful lot more plays than they would otherwise.

Judith: Yes, they would. They would.

Nicola: And in the videos, I’d make sure that the strong call to action would be to come and visit my website.

Judith: Yes, absolutely. Okay. So in summary then, pure pro-blogging is about a niche site and Google AdSense.

Nicola: And lots and lots and lots and lots of relevant content.

Judith: Okay, although it might only be 365 if you do it right.

Nicola: Yeah, or if you can think of a way that it’s going to be user-generated content, which will be rewarded by … This is why forums like Reddit do so well with traffic, because that’s user-generated content. If you can have a forum on your site, which is where I’m going to go eventually with Writing Club World, is I’m starting with content. Then I’m going to go to a forum. But you have to get forums going. You have to moderate them, and you have to get them going, and you have to get a critical mass of people using them, or they’re just like tumbleweed, ghost towns.

Judith: Yes.

Nicola: So you’ve got to get a critical mass of traffic going before you could do a forum. But then once you’ve got a forum with user-generated content, it’s a happy day.

Judith: It does it itself.

Nicola: Yeah. The original model for Writing Club World apparently had millions of page views and 6,000 active members. It was the millions of page views that attracted my attention because when you put Google AdSense on millions of page views, you’re making an extra passive income there, which can go over very well.

Judith: Well, that’s what it does in this one … Well, one or the other of these I’m going to link to in this article, is that it breaks it down. If you want to make $3,000 a month, you’ve got to make a hundred and something quid a day, and in order to do that, if you make $1 from each click, you need 194 posts or something. It’s quite mathematically [crosstalk].

Nicola: I liked that about the article.

Judith: Yes.

Nicola: It broke it down in … Like, when we used to talk about property investing and things like that and passive … Yeah, it really did break it down and make it sound achievable.

Judith: Yeah, yeah.

Nicola: But there’s lots of ways to do it. But what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to be interested. You’ve got to start, and you’ve got to realise it’s going to take a while to build up, and keep going.

Judith: Well, that’s like any business.

Nicola: Yes, but people don’t think that. They think if they put a website up, it’s all going to happen and they don’t have to do anything after that.

Judith: Well, maybe they do, but I think we’ve made it quite clear that that’s not what’s [inaudible] over here, haven’t we?

Nicola: No, absolutely.

Judith: Yeah, cool.

Nicola: Anything else you wanted to cover on this programming here?

Judith: Oh, yes. I just shut my email now, which is a shame. I was going to tell you about a really useful email that I received over the Christmas holidays from Patreon, Patreon, because this is another way of being paid to blog, being paid to … Yeah. Let me just tell you what they sent me. I’ve got it here. It says, “Ready to get started on Patreon?” And the reason it’s addressing me like that is because I’ve started a profile ages ago, but I haven’t finished it off. I haven’t published it.

Nicola: I’ve had the same email. I haven’t had time to read or action it yet.

Judith: It’s a really interesting thing because not only does Patreon have something called Patreon U, which is not my favourite thing, but basically it’s full of useful information to go and help you do this right, but it offered me four things in here, at least two of which were very compelling. The different business models. I can link to this post as well. The different business models that you can use to make Patreon work, one of which I think works as a pro-blogger. I’ve clicked on it.

But let me go back to the article, the thing they sent me. It does a step-by-step guide to get you prepared for launch. There’s a very scientific calculation that projects how much you might earn and a bunch of tips on different benefits to offer your patrons. Well, they’re the four things you really need to get your head around, but you could make $3,000 a month if 600 people paid you $5. So the Google AdSense thing isn’t the only way. I think you could be paid to create content on Patreon. And it’s getting quite mainstream now, whereas when we first knew about it, it was all a bit obscure.

Nicola: Yes. And the thing about Patreon, I think, is that you can actually use them as a payment gateway.

Judith: Yes.

Nicola: So if you opened a membership site, for example-

Judith: Absolutely. Well, and the different business models article that says a membership site is one of the prime ones. In fact, it says … Sorry. I beg your pardon. Let me just finish. Seeks membership-based business models you can use on Patreon today. Woo-hoo.

Nicola: Yeah. No, it’s good. I think definitely people should go and have a look at it. The call, so Andre Chaperon called someone, they’re interviewing the lady … the Creative Penn, Joanna Penn. They’re interviewing her soon because apparently that’s one of her main revenue streams on her very, very high-traffic, very, very high-content website called thecreativepenn.com.

Judith: Which … Sorry. What’s … Patreon is … What are you saying?

Nicola: Patreon is one of her main business models. She’s an expert on Patreon.

Judith: Yeah, and interesting you talk about one of her main business models. If you get it right, you only need the one.

Nicola: Well, that’s right, but she also has …

Judith: She’s another leverager. Yeah.

Nicola: Yeah, she’s got lots of courses for writers, which are very good apparently. So yes. The thing is you get into the fun of it, and then why stop there? So you’re looking for something that you can just do one thing and stop and that will be enough, but most people, when they get to the point of success, they just think, “Oh, what else can I do for fun?”

Judith: Yes, yes. I’ve never really got that. I think once you’ve made it, maintain it, but put your feet up on the desk and have a life now, because I don’t want to sit anymore in front of the computer than I have to. But I think, for the purpose of this discussion of becoming a professional blogger, you should look at Patreon these days, not just at the old ways of doing it.

Nicola: Yeah, absolutely.

Judith: Yeah, that’s my point I wanted to make. But I will link … In the show notes I will link to everything that we discussed that’s useful for those that care.

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