And what sort of marketing do you do?
Not a lot. It’s largely, as I said before, really just that community marketing for you.
And you’d rank high on Google because you’ve been around so long.
Yes, again it’s about creating useful content and people will link to that. I do write some posts that I know will do well in that space of being linked to, but the majority of it is just questions that readers are asking and then passing that on to their friends.
And then of course you’ve been so successful at this, you launched another site which is ProBlogger about blogging. Tell us what you’ve learnt from doing that.
I created that site because I wanted to read it. I was searching for information on how to make money from blogging and people were sort of talking about it but there wasn’t any site dedicated to it. So it was sort of a flush of inspiration one night that I was becoming a professional blogger and I thought, well I’d start a site on. Again it’s about solving a need and fulfilling a need that people have.
And how’s that site going, how many uniques a month do you get to that?
That one I think is around 300,000 to 400,000. It’s a smaller market. There are less people with blogs than cameras and it’s also more of a beginner site. So I find readers come to that and hang out for three to six months and they move on. They either give up blogging or they’ve moved beyond on it. So it’s got a bit of cyclical readership.
We have terms for our bloggers: some have only one blog in them, others have five and then stop. And then you have your lifers where they really get the knack of it. But what have you found? What makes the perfect blogger?
I guess one that you need to have is great communication skills and some written skills, but it’s really about nailing down a topic that you think you can write about and you can continue to write about.
A lot of bloggers can choose topics which they think will be profitable but when you ask them to name 10 topics that they can write on that overall niche, they struggle to come up with more than three, because those three is all they know. So it’s about choosing a topic wisely I think and having patience.
For me all of my blogs haven’t really hit their tipping point until at least a year or two into their life. So if you’re expecting overnight success, it’s not there. So patience and creativity is important, it’s an indefinable sort of quality: I call it ‘mojo’ and like Austin Powers they just have it sometimes. They’re creative souls and they surprise you with interesting reflections and I think some people have that ability to connect with readers and be able to communicate in a refreshing way.
Who shouldn’t blog?
I’m not sure, I think it’s something that could be used by everyone but I guess if you don’t have anything useful to say, I’d say you probably shouldn’t blog unless it’s therapy.
I think it’s something that personally I’m really drawn to positive people and people who are able to be constructive about topics rather than just rant. I think rant type blogs can succeed but they tend sort of attract other ranters to them and they can become quite negative spaces. Personally I think if you are a creative and positive person that would be the sort of attitude I’d take into blogging.
One of the things that scares businesspeople about blogging is the time and the discipline. It can take up a huge amount of time. And when you’re looking at why you’re doing it, it doesn’t seem to get the reward. Have you got any advice for bloggers about how you can structure your time around blogging?
I think partly for me it’s been over the years identifying the golden hours and working out when I’m most creative in the day and then structuring activities around that. So for me mid-morning is a time that I write and I turn off the phone and I even get offline and I just write content.
The other thing I do is I tend to batch processes or batch all my jobs together. So I’ll write five posts in one go rather than write five posts in five days. And I do the same with email and I just do it once a day and get it out of the way and Twitter. All these different activities, instead of just jumping from one thing to the other through the day, I tend to just focus on one and do it well.
How do you make Twitter work with the blog and the email? Tell us how that all works.
For me Twitter is sort of like an outpost or satellite to my blogs. So for each of my blogs I have a Twitter account rather than mixing them all into one account. I see my blogs as the home base and Twitter and Facebook and some of these other social sites as being sort of secondary supporting places where I can build deeper relationships between us, but also drive traffic back to the home base.
For me Twitter’s just a place to really broadcast what’s new on the blog and to build a little bit of community around the topics and also tap into what people are thinking about the things that I’m writing. It’s a great place for research in that way.
Do you get a lot back from that? Are you getting a lot of traffic from Twitter?
Yes, on ProBlogger it’s bigger because that audience is more interactive in that space. And I have four or five times the amount of followers on my ProBlogger Account. But DPS the photography one is growing as well so I’d say on ProBlogger it’s the third biggest referrer of traffic for me. On Photography School I think it’s about the fifth or sixth.
So looking into the future, what can you see? Can you see this blogging growing? Are we going to see companies having blogs and using social media networks to spread the word?
Yes, I think as more and more people are going online and as the tools develop and become more useful, I can’t see us moving away from it.
Many blogs don’t actually look like blogs any more. They’re starting to look like portals or normal websites so I sort of see the way blogs are being used are changing slightly. They are merging a lot with other types of technologies – video and Twitter and social networking but people are still communicating online using those sorts of tools.
How are you monetising ProBlogger?
That’s probably more on selling direct ads, advertising to people and the affiliate marketing. So there are a number of courses around on blogging that I recommend on that site and do take a commission. But I also sell my own product on there. I have an eBook which I launched last month which has sold really well.
How much do you sell that for? What’s the average price for eBooks?
That book sells for US$19.95 and it’s a 31 day course that gives people practical tasks on what to do with their blog on that day. So to help people to break through that first month.
And how many of those have you sold?
Last I checked it was probably approaching 10,000. That’s not pure profit, you pay commissions on some of those sales to people who recommend it, but yes it’s been a profitable thing for me, much more profitable for me than writing an actual book through a publisher.
But how does that work though with the commission, how have you found those people to spread the word?
Just through blogs. There’s a whole network of other blogs that write on the topic of blogging and so they’re the ones that have converted the best, but many of them are sending out recommendations on their blogs or via email or via Twitter. And interestingly it’s the ones who are doing it on the email who’ve developed lists and newsletters who have seemed to have converted the best for some reason.
So what is the future for you?
I need to sleep. I’m so tired.
That’s your kids, not your blogging.
No, it’s having a US audience and being up at all hours.
About 95% of your audience is from overseas, so how do you handle that?
In some ways it’s nice, that you don’t get stalked here. I’m relatively unknown in Australia which is nice but it can be frustrating at times too because of the other main players in those niches are in the US and it would have been great to be with them and at the conferences and interacting and cooperating in those ways, so it can be a little hard at some times. But it’s kind of nice in other ways; particularly when a big story breaks and everyone else is asleep you can scoop the world.
Good on you. So you scoop the world, you’ve got a great life, a lovely profitable business and you do what everyone wants, which is to have the freedom to be around your family while you work.
Exactly.
I’m not sure what we’re going to put on a headline for this story but it could be ‘Australia’s most successful entrepreneur’. Good to talk Darren.
No problem, thanks Amanda.
Darren will be appearing at Energise Enterprise – Victoria’s Small Business Festival. For more information see here.
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