Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

Well today is a day of joy for me, as I can finally say that I’ve made the very first sponsorship deal for Bloggst. As I’ve mentioned several times in interviews and here on my blog, my plan for monetizing Bloggst relies mostly on selling direct advertisements, as opposed to using various ad networks like for instance AdSense.

In my experience, while this method initially requires more effort from my end, it has far more potential in terms of profits. It also helps you expand your network of contacts, which I have found to be one of the most crucial elements of making money online. Once you have a few advertisers on board, so long as you provide them with a nice return for their investments, you will find that this is not only the most profitable way of monetizing a website, but also the most enjoyable by far.

The sponsor I just agreed with for Bloggst is called Inblogit, a blogging platform that is sort of a hybrid between WordPress and Blogger, in the way that it lets you create your own blog on your own domain with full control over it, but the content is still hosted on their centralized servers. As a part of the deal, I also agreed to do a review of the product, so keep an eye out for that if you want to know more about it. Obviously a very relevant product for the members and readers of Bloggst, which is another pro of selling your own ads yourself. You have complete control over which ads are displayed on your site.

I’m sure you’re all wondering how I managed to snatch this deal, seeing how I’ve yet to even put up an “Advertise” page over at Bloggst. Well it was as easy as when I found their site, I immediately recognized their product as something that could be of benefit to our members at Bloggst, and then emailed them a quick proposal. After receiving my proposal and looking through Bloggst, they saw the same as I did, and decided to bite. From there on, we just worked out the details.

Let that be a little lesson on how easy it can be to sell your ads. Find products and services that are relevant to your visitors, and contact these with a proposal to advertise. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no, and if they do, you can proceed on your list and ask the next company in line. Now I’m contemplating setting up an AdServer, just so that I can give my advertisers detailed stats of how their campaigns at Bloggst are performing, but I think I will put that off until I get some more advertisers on board.

This first deal is a huge source of inspiration for me to keep working and pouring all my best efforts into Bloggst, even though things have been growing quite slowly lately, because it shows that if I just keep doing what I’m doing, I will eventually be rewarded. It was just what I needed right now to get the motivation back. And I’m happy to announce that if I manage to land only one more sponsor this month, I will already be ahead of my monetization goals for Bloggst for the month of June

Now I really need to get back to the books. Exams are coming closer every minute, and I’m still far from well prepared!

Almost a week since my last blog post. No excuses really, but stuff and other stuff are interfering with my online stuff. I’ll admit, it would be great to be in a position where I could put all my efforts into my online projects, and while I obviously do believe it would help me be “successful”much quicker, I’m really quite happy with the way things are right now. Sure, I have to spend a bit too much time on a “real” job to stay afloat, and I have to spend a lot of time at University preparing myself for exams, I really don’t mind. Maybe one day the time will be right again, and I can prioritize my online projects ahead of some of the other things in my life, but who knows? Maybe I’ll never be just that successful online again, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve had a blast doing what I do!

I got a bit sidetracked there I suppose, seeing how this post is going to be another Bloggst update. Things are going pretty well over there actually, despite the fact that I’ve, like I mentioned, has been limited a bit lately with the amount of effort I’ve been able to put into it. The live blog directory has drawn quite a bit of attention, and I’ve already got a large backlog of at least 20 blogs I’ll need to review. I plan on going through all of these applications tomorrow afternoon to get rid of the backlog though, so if you’ve applied and haven’t heard back yet, don’t worry.

What amazes me though, is people’s inability to read. Seriously, it’s pointed out quite clearly on that page what should be included in the application, yet most people just include a link to either the feed or the blog, and that’s it. If these are people that I’ve never seen before, I don’t hesitate to just delete the applications. If I recognize the name from the community though, I’m inclined to be a bit more lenient and check out the blog and see if I can easily categorize it myself. There’s lesson to be learned here though, if you’re applying for something, read the guidelines and make sure you include the requested details. It’s bound to increase your chances of success!

Next, let’s take a look at the numbers to see how things have been growing. We just recently passed 3,000 posts, and I’m really happy about it. By all estimations, we are well on track for reaching the set goal of 5,000 posts by the start of June. I’m starting to realize though that reaching 500 registered members by the start of June might not happen. Even though growth is pretty good, at the current rate we’ll probably end up at around 400-something by that time. It’s never fun to not reach your goals, but that just means you have to evaluate what you’ve been doing, and see how you can improve.

What’s good is that I still have well over a month to turn the trend, and get us back on track. Recently I’ve experienced a bit with both StumbleUpon and Technorati’s WTF, and so far I’ve had great success with WTF. As a result of our efforts with it, the visitor numbers have steadily increased over the past few weeks from averaging between 300-400 visitors per day to about 500-600. I’m quite happy with this, and hopefully I’ll be able to keep the positive trend, and see the numbers increase further in the coming weeks.

I’m starting to realize that it will be some time before I get to see the results I want from search engines, especially Google though. I’ve read up the Sandbox and PageRank recently, and it seems I can’t expect much from the coming PR update at least. And with the site still being placed in the sandbox, I’ll still be seeing limited results from Google in the coming months. This month we’ve gotten around 500 visits from Google searches, and pretty much all of those are specific “long-tail” searches. By the time the site gets out of the sandbox, and gets a better reputation in Google, I firmly believe that we’ll experience steady growth from Google traffic.

What’s important in the meantime is to keep working patiently on keeping up the activity, and building quality content and trying to generate more incoming links. This is the most effective way to get the site out of the sandbox as quickly as possible, and hopefully as a result of it, we’ll get a decent result from the next PR update at least. The only reason I’m actually concerned about the PR is because I know it matters when I want to sell ads, and as I’ve already mentioned, I hope to generate most of the income through selling ads myself, as opposed to the placeholder AdSense ads I have up right now.

That’s almost it, but just incase anyone is wondering, I can mention that we’re well on track to reaching the set goal of 100 subscribers to our feed by the start of June. In fact, we’re already over half way there, so that should at least be able to reach. What’s important here, is that I’m able to keep it updated with new articles frequently, or else we’ll quickly lose subscribers. That’s it! And as you can all tell, it’s important for me when it comes to Bloggst to follow a very transparent “business model”, and such if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Not long ago I just announced a new feature over at Bloggst that I believe will act as a great assett for those of the members who wish to give their blogs some extra exposure. The new feature is dead simple really - I add the feed of a blog to the Bloggst feed aggregator, and everytime the member updates his or her blog, the feed aggregator automatically inserts an excerpt from that post as a thread in a certain forum, with a link back to the original post of course.

This is a feature that I’ve been planning on implementing since I started serious development of Bloggst. Right now, it’s a little “halted” by the fact that the community is still in its starting phase, but I will be expanding it as the site grows in size and activity. The most pressing things that I want to add is to categorize each blog, so that the members can easily find blog posts regarding the topics they care about. I also need to work on promote this feature a bit more. Right now the latest blog posts show up on the front page and in that specific forum, but I want to make it a bit more highlighting, and it is something I will probably be working on as early as tomorrow.

Like I said though, I am really excited about the introduction of this feature, and I hope that as many bloggers as possible will sign up and take advantage of this opportunity. If you sign up early while we’re still in the starting phase, the likelyhood of being admitted quickly is greater than it will be once a large queue of applicants starts to form! Oh and I almost forgot, if you want to participate with your blog, take a look at this post that I made outlining the all the details.

While I’m on the subject of Bloggst, I thought I’d might as well give you some updates regarding how it’s progressing and where we currently stand in relation to the goals I mentioned in a previous post. Things are still going alright. Registrations have slowed down a bit in the past week or so, but that’s mainly because instead of working on promotion I have been working on the actual site. We recently got a bit of link-love from several prominent blogs though, so the registration rates have picked up a bit again this weekend actually. I expect that once I get the new feature properly set up, and it catches some attention through the blogosphere, we’ll have no problems matching the 500 registered users goal by the start of June.

Something that concerns me a bit more though, is the fact that the amount of posts have also dropped slightly the past week. I have no doubts that we’ll meet the goal of 5000 total posts by the start of June still, but it concerns me because I don’t want to miss out on the active members we’ve managed to draw in so far. One of the reasons for this drop is the fact that I simply haven’t been able to participate as much as I should in the dicussions myself, mostly because I’ve been spending my Bloggst timeshare on developing and working on everything else. I really need to get these things sorted however, because any new community needs an active and present founder. If the founder doesn’t take the time to engage in it, why should the rest of the members? Hopefully I’ll be able to pull myself back in as soon as possible, and by then I’ll hope the ball will get rolling again.

In terms of monetization, I’ve started to play around with AdSense integration in the forums. Just as expected the return isn’t anything to speak of as of yet. Once I start to seriously monetize the project, I hope to make the bulk income from direct ad sales. I’m still some way off from reaching the required visitor numbers for this to be a possibility, but hopefully as the site continues to grow, the visitor numbers will as well.

That’s about it for now. Don’t forget that if you have a blog, you can now promote it over at Bloggst! Do it, do it, do it!

I suspect it is a feeling that most people working with any sort of project development encounters every once in a while. When building online communities, I have found that there are especially at two points I get stuck with this awful feeling. Right now, I am experiencing this feeling with Bloggst. My initial methods of promotion have been somewhat successful, but it’s growth has been slowing down a bit the past few days, leaving me with the feeling of not knowing exactly what I should do to avoid it from happening, and all in all just helpless.

I also remember having this feeling when working on a previous project, and I felt that the site I was working on had pretty much grown to its full potential. At that time, I felt that there was really nothing I could do that would make the site grow any further in terms of attracting new visitors, and increasing activity.

Of course this feeling is just a hoax, a deception of the mind if you will. When you come to this point, and get that helpless feeling, the easiest thing to do is to give out. Perhaps sell, sell, sell, and leave the responsibility to someone else. But that’s not nearly as rewarding as overcoming the obstacles put in front of you. So what I intend to do, is to more or less take a break from the project today (I already posted an article, so that’s covered), collect new strenght and motivation through rest and relaxation, and come back stronger than ever tomorrow. Hopefully a day’s rest will do me good, and maybe I can even come up with some new ideas that I can use for promotion. If not, that’s no crisis, because I know that what I’m already doing is working, and I just need to keep at it and be patient.

This was a somewhat random post from the inner workings of my complicated mind, but it would be nice to hear someone else’s take on these things as well, so feel free to comment if the situation seems familiar.

I’ve been quite busy these past days, as I have a lot on my plate. I am still spending several hours per day working with Bloggst, and apart from that we also have a few assignments at University that has to be done. Infact, I am working on one right now, but writing this post during a break, so I think we can safely assume that this will be a long post!

I’ve you’ve been following Bloggst these past weeks since the launch, you’ll know that it has been growing quite nicely. Today we just reached the 1000 posts “milestone”, which I am pretty happy with. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that huge, but for a one man project like Bloggst, I think it is more than decent in less than three weeks.

The member count is currently at around 180, which is also pretty decent. It has stagnated a bit the past week at about 5 to 10 new members per day, but that’s mostly because I haven’t been as aggressive with the promotion as I was in the very beginning. Right now we’ve got a nice base of posting members, which is the cornerstone of all online communities. Hopefully the members who have settled in will stay around and keep contributing, because if that’s the case, it’s a very good stepping stone for future growth.

As I mentioned I’m not as aggressive in the promotion as I was right after the launch. This is mostly because now that we’ve been able to establish ourselves with a decent base of contributors, and a steady influx of new members, I can take some time to focus on working with the parts that I want to improve on the site. Yesterday I finished up the draft for the new front page, and I have sent it off to my designer. I’m now awaiting confirmation that he’s started the job, and hopefully he’ll have it finished by the weekend. Once that goes live, I’m going to implement a similar style to the content sections, as I feel they need to be more seperated from the forums in terms of style and organization than they are right now. As it stands now, they are also a bit unorganized, and could definitely benefit from a facelift.

The campaign we are running with “Today’s Featured Blog” has been a very successful marketing tool, and as of right now more than 50 inbound links from blogs are already registered in Technorati. There are still a few spaces left, but I am pretty sure that once I do one more post about it, those remaining spots will be filled, which of course means more backlinks for Bloggst as well!

It seems the contest has also picked up some momentum, and I have gotten some indications that a couple of the members are there to participate in it. It’s of course nice to see this, but once this contest finishes, I have plans for a new one that I hope will work even better. The new contest will be based around viral marketing, and hopefully it will help draw in even more contributing members! I will also try and get some more attractive prizes for the next contest, so that members will have more incentive to participate.

The next and final point on my list for this post is the question of monetization. I have been asked many times already if I don’t plan on monetizing Bloggst, and if I’m just doing it for the fun of it. The answer is pretty obvious, yes, I do have plans to monetize it. However I feel that trying to monetize it from the very beginning would be pointless and counter effective. Right now we are getting around 300 - 400 visitors per day, and I have promised myself that once we start touching the thousands, I will start thinking about making money from the site.

To help keep me focused and constantly working on Bloggst, I have set a few goals that I hope to achieve within certain timeframes, and I thought sharing them with my readers would be nice, because that way you can remind me of them if you see me slacking off! The goals are:

• 5000 posts by the start of June. That means around 55 posts on average per day since the opening, and as it stands right now, we should be on track in this department.
• 500 registered members by the start of June. This is around 5.5 new members per day on average since the beginning, and we’re also on track here. I want to keep this goal modest though, since a lot of communities stagnate a bit after the initial opening hype. If we manage to keep up the current trend however, this shouldn’t be a problem to reach.
• Have at least 100 subscribers to the Bloggst feed by the start of June. Right now I am not promoting the feed very well, but it has still attracted a few subscribers. I need to take full advantage of the powers of the feed, and promote it more actively, as it has come to a stand still at around 30 subscribers for the past few days. This goal shouldn’t be too hard to reach, but I definitely need to promote the feed more actively.
• Earn at least $100 USD from Bloggst in the month of June. Again, modest, but I expect that by the start of June I will begin to monetize the site, and for the first month I would be very happy if it would bring in at least $100. If everything goes according to plan though, we’ll have some decent rankings for the domain and in the search engines by that time, and I will probably be able to bring in the $100 on text links alone.

Those are the goals I am working towards so far. Of course, should anything go terribly wrong, or even terribly right, I might have to adjust them along the way. Right now with the current growth though, these goals are reachable, and still something to strive for. Right now I can almost hear that assignment calling for me, so I guess I should get back to work!