Week in numbers

• Unique visitors: 90 (0,09% of target)
• New Twitter followers: 85 (total 85)
• Income this week: 0€ (total 0€)

Analysis

I was expecting the week to be very low on visitors, but I had hoped for a little more than 90. The main disappointment was the fact that Twitter brought in only 9,3% of the visitors, since it's the channel that I've been most active in.

It seems that if I don't update actively, either the blog or the Twitter account, the number of visitors drops close to zero.

Targets for week 2

250 unique visitors.

One of the biggest challenges with trying to get a blog to take off, is getting the users to participate. Currently, the flow of information is only from me, the author, to you, the readers. To make this blog more interesting, and to leverage the readership, I need to find ways for the readers to participate in creating content. With participation, the commitment of the reader will also be elevated to a new level, compelling the reader to come back to see how his or her contribution has been received by the other readers.

The simplest way, conceptually, is commenting on the blog. Unfortunately, the threshold for commenting tends to be rather high unless the subject is controversial or the author is really, really wrong. With blogs, discovering other means of participation can be challenging. Googling "blog participation" yields results which tend to sum up to the following suggestions:

• Make commenting easy
• Be controversial
• Encourage round-table conversations
• Hold polls

Again, we come back to the problem that encouraging blog participation would require a somewhat active reader-base to begin with. So again, there seems to be no shortcut to happiness, which is somewhat of a problem as one of the goals of this blog is to find all the possible shortcuts.

So, dear readers, to engourage participation, I'm holding a poll in this blog. Participate!

Disclaimer: If you're an actual marketing professional, reading this post may cause brain damage. Really. It also may make you want to scream "No! You don't do it like that! Step away from the keyboard, now!".

I had a revelation today. Well, not really a relevation, not even a mini-enlightenment. Just kind of a realization.

It came to me when I was on all fours, and covered in sweat.

I was scrubbing my bathroom floor tiles, and I had a realization about Twitter.

But before we move on to my realization, let's step back a little and go back to the first post of this blog. In the post, I linked to my new Twitter account, @blogproduct, which I'm using to communicate about this blog. One of the main ideas behind this blog was to not spend that much money on marketing, but rather leverage social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

For some reason, I expected Twitter to be one of the shortcuts to happiness when it comes marketing this blog. It took me only 48 hours to realize it wasn't. During the last 48 hours, Twitter has brought in 11 visitors to this blog. My account has 74 followers right now, so this means only around 15% of the followers have followed a link either from the profile or from my tweets. To kickstart my Twitter marketing, I've encouraged people to follow the account with my normal account, I posted a intentionally eye-catching tweet pointing to my second post, and all but begged to get RT'd. All of the attempts failed pretty miserably.

So the realization?

Twitter, and using it for marketing, is a lot like cleaning my bathroom tiles: it's hard work, not all that fun, and I need to get my hands dirty if I want to get anything done.

Currently, most of my followers seem to have the same agenda as me: drive traffic somewhere. A lot of them have 10k+ followers. So if I post something using my account, what are the odds that it'll be noticed? Pretty much non-existant. I began going for quantity of followers, thinking that if I get hundreds of followers, that'll be enough to have enough people read and retweet me.

So I need to get quality followers, and a lot of them. Users that are actually interested in seeing what I post. This brings us to a rather large issue: I need to start coming up with interesting content.

That might be a problem...

Oh, and to finish off:

1. Follow me on Twitter!
2. Re-tweet this post by clicking on the "Retweet" -button on the right-hand side of this post.

In an intrestingly titled article on Advertising Age, "Twitter: A Vampire That Can Legally Suck the Life out of You", Simon Dumenco reigns down on Twitter's new terms of service. Following the fiasco of the Facebook TOS change just a little over six months ago, Simon sees similarities between the terms and cries wolf.

Reading his article, I remembered a conversation with a corporate lawyer a while back regarding different TOS's for websites. He stated that:

"You don't need a good terms of service that's full of legalese for the good days. For those days, a simple set of bullet points will do. But when the bad day comes, you're going to be happy if your TOS is full of legalese and less full of loopholes."

And looking this from Twitter's point of view, this seems to be exactly what they're doing. One of the point's that has been causing a stir, is the excerpt of the TOS that defines ownership and distribution of the tweets:

"By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."

Yes, it does give Twitter basically the right to do anything with your tweets. But given the nature of Twitter, it might be even a good thing. A big part of Twitter is it's API that allows developers to extend Twitter, even create new services based on it. Given that, how could we expect a TOS that says "we won't touch your tweets, we'll just display them on our website"? Distributing, aggregating, allowing access to the tweets. It's a complex equation that Twitter needs to balance legally as well as technically.

Some still cry out and claim that Twitter has too many rights over the content. As there are similarities between the new Twitter TOS and Facebook's infamous we-own-it-all TOS, why isn't Twitter all that evil? Simple: the content produced to the services is vastly different.

Of course never-ending arguments could be had over the value of a 140-character tweet, but we have to accept the fact that the probability of an average user providing something immaterially valuable to Twitter is a lot lower than it's on Facebook. Why? Facebook's vast amount of pictures and videos uploaded by the users. To create something worthy of snagging off of Twitter is hard. Uploading a cool photograph on Facebook that could be used in commercial work isn't that hard.

But what it all actually boils down to is: even if the Twitter TOS would give Twitter rights over the tweets so that they could sell them for money, without giving you a penny, why would they?

Think about it for a while.

Now that you've thought about it, consider which is more likely:

1. Twitter tries to rip off the users, selling the content for money for profit
2. Twitter tries to create a safe legal base for it's service and for that, they need to create a TOS that allows them to develop freely and won't stop them from allowing deeper integration for third-party tools

If you chose option 1, do you see Twitter having a future?

Oh, and if you chose option 1, please check the proper adjustment of your headgear.

Wow, starting a blog is always so damn hard! I always forget that starting is the hardest part, and I've started a few blogs in the last few years, most of which have been abandoned since.

The idea for this blog came to me a few months ago when I was being interviewed for the Finnish magazine Mainostaja (translates to Advertiser). During the interview I talked about blogs and marketing, and actually said some pretty radical things which were mercifully left out by the journalist so I haven't been forced to explain my outrageous claims.

So I'll just blurt them out here instead and get flamed by the blogging community:

• It shouldn't be that hard to make money by blogging
• It shouldn't be that hard to get 100.000 unique visitors for your blog. Each week. Building from scratch in one year.

I do remember after the interview hoping that the journalist wouldn't hang on my hundred-thousand-visitors-a-week -idea, as I did doubt it a little later. But hey, now I'm going to give it a shot!

Unleashing the new product: this blog!

Yep, that's it in a nutshell. To make money, you need a product or a service (and I ain't servicing nobody!), and this blog is the product (hence the name of the blog). Starting now, for at least the next twelve months, I will try to raise revenue with this blog, and get as many visitors as possible to see how close to the 100K mark I get.

To be realistic, I'm not expecting to reach 100K, not even close. And of course there's the possibility that I get bored, delete the blog and deny that it ever existed.

About the content

First off, this is not going to be one of those "how to make money with your blog" -blogs which compare different affiliate networks and Google AdSense ad formats. I really have no interest in those, as the revenue from them is so small unless the user volumes are huge.

I aim to focus more on online business models, bragging about my own knowledge (which isn't much to brag about) of the internet, and the development of this blog in general.

Getting the visitors

As I stated in the interview, to monetize on blogs, you should treat it like any other online media, and advertise it. The thing is, I don't have any interest in blowing money on paid advertising (although I might pour a few euros to Google AdWords), so I need to work a bit harder:

1. The content of this blog needs to be really interesting, so people come back
2. Focus on word-of-mouth: make sharing to social networks easy (note the buttons at the end of this post)
3. Be active on Twitter, Facebook etc. to drive traffic from there

To tackle #3, there's a Twitter account set up for this blog. If you follow the account, I'll follow you back, promise! And I'll try to actually use the account to post bits and pieces of relevant info that aren't quite big enough for a blog post.

Generating revenue

At this point, I see three options for generating revenue:

1. Advertisements
2. Partnership with another media (providing content to some other site)
3. Selling the blog

Advertising is probably the easiest, as long as the blog gets enough visitors. I will probably start with affiliate programs and/or Google AdSense, but the long-term goal is to try to get advertisment deals directly (or through a sales broker).

If the content of the blog turns out to be excellent and interesting, one option would be to offer content to other media's, by providing the blog as a part of the site. This could provide a steady source of income, but in this case any advertising revenue would go to the media.

Last, but not least, is the exit strategy. Make the blog so popular, that it might be in someone's interest to buy it. It's pretty closely related to #2, but I intentionally posted them as separate options, as I see #3 as an option where someone else takes over the blog totally, whereas in option #2 I still would provide the content.

About me

My name is Tuomas Rinta, I'm a thirtyish web-junkie from Finland. I've been tinkering with the web since around 1996 and founded Vuodatus.net, a Finnish blogging service, in 2004. In 2008, Vuodatus.net was aquired by the Finnish media company Alma Media which now employes me under the title Development Manager.

To clarify, I don't have a marketing degree. I don't have a business degree. Hell, the only diploma I have is a high school graduation diploma. So for your business and market analysis needs, go elsewhere. I'm a programmer. I make websites and think about what makes people go Oh! in the Web 2.0.

I did write a chapter in an internet marketing book called Klikkaa tästä (translates to Click here). So if you know Finnish, off you go to order it!

So this was the hard part. The blog has now lost it's e-virginity. Now, go ahead and give me a kickstart by following my Twitter account blogproduct, and tweet about this post!

Please?