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Blogging reminds me a bit like cave exploration. Both were once unusual hobbies but have been gaining popularity amongst all sorts of people. Neither requires a lot of equipment or experience to get started. Plus, both blogging and cave exploring take creativity, organization and perseverance to be successful. Finally, perhaps most importantly, both involve finding an undiscovered space you can call your own.

However, there is one crucial difference between writing and publishing a successful blog versus exploring a massive network of underground caves. With caving, the end goal is finding a niche, whereas with blogging, you want to have a distinctive niche before you even get started. Easier said than done. Finding a niche for your blog can be as hard as searching through a dark, craggy, unknown cavern, but I guarantee having your own unique voice and calling is much more profitable. Here’s how to pick your way through the labyrinth of blog topics to discover a niche that is right for you. Read More

I recently went to a independent publishers only conference in San Francisco hosted by Sovrn (Lijit Networks). Sovrn is an ad network company that was purchased by the once mighty Federated Media. I remember trying to join Federated Media’s ad platform in 2010, but couldn’t get in because Financial Samurai didn’t have enough traffic at the time. I was looking for Google Adsense alternatives because Adsense wasn’t cutting it.

For the past several years, I’ve run a Sovrn skyscraper banner ad on the right side of Financial Samurai to help monetize some of the empty space. It’s below the fold, and I haven’t played around with the spot much since it first went on. It generates somewhere in the vicinity of $0.50 to $1 RPM, which is very low, but not to be unexpected for a banner ad below the fold. But I figured, making several hundred bucks a month to fill up white space is better than making nothing at all. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve been too lazy to test things out until now. We should always be testing!

One of the presentations at the Sovrn conference by Pagefair was about the rise of ad blocking. Supposedly, there are some 250 million people who’ve now installed ad blocking software to create a faster, better web browsing experience. The number is only going up with the new iOS mobile software allowing for more ad blocking functionality in Safari. In the world where everybody expects everything to be free online, this is another invention that might further push independent publishers out of business.

It’s very hard to survive off banner ads. Dooce.com, one of the original blogs that started 14 years ago has given up regularly publishing on her site. She doesn’t want to publish sponsored posts where she and her children pose in front of products because it just felt wrong to her. Instead, she’s turned towards consulting and speaking instead. Read More

The larger your site grows, the more inundated you will get with requests to highlight a product, company, or service. It makes sense given your sphere of influence has grown. And as your sphere of influence grows, so does your revenue.

But not everything has to be about making more money online. I write mostly because I enjoy writing and interacting with people. If I didn’t, there’s no way I would have gotten through the first several years earning minimal income. There’s also no way I’d keep going after six years on Financial Samurai if money was the main object because I’ve turned down multiple seven figure offers already.

Selling an income producing asset when rates are this low is a suboptimal financial move. Once you sell, you’ll scratch and claw to try and replicate your business success to no avail. Besides, valuations for online media properties are skyrocketing with the bull market. We’re talking 10X or greater annual revenue multiples now compared to 5X or lower before 2012.

Enough about the joys of blogging. If you’re a publicist or marketer, I’d like to provide some tips on how you can get influential bloggers to write about your product! This post is a way to help you, and also help us bloggers who get inundated with uninspiring requests every day.  Read More