First off, I’d like to introduce a new addition to Robswebtips called “Community Debate.” I have been happy with the growth and activeness of my community and reader interaction, so I wanted to spice it up a bit. Community debate is a community led post, I’ll post a subject to debate about, share my thoughts, and let the rest of it be ran by the community. Community debates will be ran every Friday depending on the results of this one.
Enough of me blabbering, let’s get started eh?
Build a Community or Monetize starting from day one?
I was first approached with this idea when I was reading Darren Rowse’s 29 debates bloggers should have about blogging. I followed up the debate with my own personal argument, how desperation to make money hurts your blog. I’m all about building a community, and not because I do it for the heck of it, because it’s a valuable trait in a blogger to carry on. Making money online isn’t easy, it’s a process and you need to build credibility from your audience before you can even think about making money.
Why trying to making money from day one, drives you broke on day 239
Making money online isn’t met to be an overnight process, and very few people have overnight success online. If you try to monetize your site from day one, you’re automatically destroying your credibility.
- Nobody knows you
- You don’t have any readers
- You are victimizing your community
- You are losing money by making money
I want to go in-depth on point four, you are losing money by making money. You are probably wondering, how in the hell is this suppose to make any sense? Rushing into making money online only prevents you from making money online in the long run. If you take the ounce of trust you have established and crushed it by trying to monetize your site to early, you are screwed.
Why building a community first earns you a larger income
Have you ever heard the saying when you were younger “patience is a virtue”? Well after hearing your parents tell you it a million times, it’s going to finally make sense. Let’s say you had a super-amazing product that you launched. You knew it was awesome so you went ahead and put it on the market. One week later you check your Paypal account to see you only made 3 sales. You are probably wondering why? You do not have a community, no readers, and nobody cares about your “super” product, since you already victimized people with your early monetization attempts.
Total earnings: $60
You decided to take the smart route. You took the time and built a community, you have trust and a loyal following of readers. Great. Now, you release your product to your 1,000 readers. Since you built a dedicated following of readers, formed a community and interacted with your community, people trust you. Week 1 from selling your “super-amazing” product, you made $5,000.
Total earnings: $5,000
Community Debate – Building a Community VS Monetizing your site from day one?
So you heard what I have to say, I solely believe building a community is the first step to take before monetizing your site. What about you? Do you think that building a community does not matter?
Things to consider including in your debate…
- Is building a community worth it. Why?
- What are the advantages of monetizing your site from day one? What are the disadvantages?
- By building a community are you really wasting your time?
- Most importantly… What would you choose?
Ready to make money online?
William Veasley (4)
Colleen (3)
Devesh (3)
evan schulte (2)
Kharim (2)
{ 28 comments… read them below or add one }
Building a community first versus instantly monetizing, is definitely the way to go. The reason being is because starting out, yes, you’re not very well known, but it’s not just that, you have no influence. I can’t just start up a blog, make one post, then expect people to buy from me. It doesn’t work like that.
Once that trust and relationship is built, THEN you can get into much more profitable and effective monetization, versus pitching and selling something from day one, to people that could give a crap less who you are and what you have.
There’s an old sales principle that goes “people buy from those they know, like, and trust”. When you focus on building that community, you build those qualities with your readers and audience.
Mike Stenger´s last blog . . .The Real Purpose For Building Alliances
Right on Mike, loving your point of view on this. I think you really hit the spot when you said nobody is going to buy from you if they do know anything about you.
I think that you can definitely find a nice balance between the two. Just because you are focusing on building a community doesn’t mean that you cannot also promote the odd product as well.
However, I would hold off on creating my own product until I had a solid community to ensure a successful launch.
Tom | Build That List´s last blog . . .The Aweber Code….And Why You Need To Promote It!
True, but where do you think you would see better results? If you held off on doing monetizing do you think that you could earn all that money back and more, after you’ve built a community?
I like the comment Mike left when he said
Whats your thoughts?
Yes I agree with you about building community first, but I have sites that are product based that start making money almost instantly and blogging on them is purely for SEO and SERP’s, but a community can be built on these sites too.
I think it depends on your niche, what products/services you are offering, etc.. In our niche (blog tips) yes you need to build up a level of trust and have a community surrounding you before a product launch. I plan to only offer free products for now on HBT (working on a keyword research e-book now) and will add more free products throughout the year until I feel like I can launch something that has monetary value.
Keith´s last blog . . .Drooling On PageRank
Right Keith I can agree, so that draws the question for new online business, what can they do to offer something to BUILD their credibility? I’ve seen a lot of companies offer free trials, or beta runs. I see you plan on offering a free product as well which is a smart move and I’m interested to see how that works out for you.
If we don’t focus on monetization from Day 1 it gives us the ability to focus on producing really great content instead of trying to juice everyone of their cash or trying to get everyone to click on our ads. In the long run the awesome posts that we will have produced will show how good our blogs are and as a result we’ll end up with more readers and subscribers, giving us the chance to make more money.
Jasmine Henry from System Fail News´s last blog . . .Don’t Take Offense Paladins…
Right on Jasmine, I think that should be all bloggers main focus is to produce quality content that people enjoy reading and will value.
I think it’s everyone’s intention to make money with there site, I said it myself “I’m going to start a site so i can make money” every time I make a site I wait at least 6 months to monetize it, because if you do it from day one people will think all you care about is making a buck…almost every site/blog I go to nowadays is filled with adsense ads.. – very little content, I suggest waiting till your blog is a success to start monetizing, because you deserve it in the end.
You’re right Scott, and I think it’s people going in with the mentality that “I want to make money” that really destroys them. “I want to make money” should be in the back of your mind, and if you keep it in the front of your mind it should be used to encourage you to make smarter decisions so you do end up making more than $10 a month.
If you have info of value you can charge for it….but give tastes away first…simple…unfortunately most people dont have info of value
I agree/disagree. I believe all information can be found for free. What I’ve seen, the only difference with paid content VS free is that paid content all the information you are looking for it is right their without you doing any searching.
That is a great point Rob! Thanks for bringing it to everyone’s attention. I would like to also remind everyone the importance of taking action in creating a community or following and not just read about it or looking what everyone else has done. So lets get going!
You are a genuine rock-star Mitch! It’s all about taking action and building the community.
Thanks Rob!
Hi Rob. Let me commend you first for the great work you have done at such an early age.
I could be your grandfather age wise and it is a great privilege to be learning from you.
As to the debate in my case, as a visual artist and art teacher, it is definitely more inspiring to walk into a site or blog that gives a feeling that there is a genuine interest in the general field of the topics and issues that are covered and yes, the issue of trust is very important.
Thank you for the opportunity to be a part of your community.
Josef
Josef´s last blog . . .
Oh since your a art teacher I guess I can throw out a catch like this… It’s like walking into a class, you already had to pay $1000 for the class, and the SECOND you walk into the class you have the teacher (who you never met before) trying to get you to spend another $300. Seems a bit uncomfortable right?
Trust and Persuasion are essential in monetizing your website to it’s fullest potential. I learned this the hard way with my first blog, as I think a lot of us did when we were first “drawn in” thinking blogging was easy money. If nothing else, a website that’s been heavily tarnished from ads will at least “hopefully” be a good lesson to the webmaster, or a reason that they search and try to find information on why their blog isn’t making the money that they thought it would. I agree with building a community first. Building a community promotes good effort, and good content so there’s nothing to really loose by doing it!
Josh Katherman´s last blog . . .The Importance of Persuasion and Trust – Being Authentic
You’re right Josh, a lot of bloggers do jump off thinking making money blogging is easy, and some bloggers go to the extent of plastering ads all over their site. In-text link ads (OH! those are so annoying), banner ads smacked in the middle of the post etc…
I think building a community promotes more than good effort, it shows love and dedication to your readers as well.
I believe that monetizing your web site from the very beginning is not a good idea. I’ve tried it and it doesn’t really work.
Right now my web site is doing a lot better and I could make a lot more money through it. The reason for this is as I think, that I’ve stopped trying to make money through my blog. I’ve deleted all of my ads and other stuff and now simply focus on building a community and creating useful content.
Julius Kuhn-Regnier´s last blog . . .How to Make a Great First Impression Through Guest Posts
I’m glad you realized that Julius, the other thing is, unless you have a top notch site with hundreds of thousands of visitors monthly, you’re not really going to profit anything from ads. I make make more from 1 affiliate sale than I would 4 ads on my site.
Well, I’m going to jump on the monetizing bandwagon. Plus I like to play devil’s advocate. When a brand new bricks and mortar store opens (not a big, brand name), their intention is to make money and (hopefully) build community. But they are monetizing from day 1.
If they are successful, they have accomplished both goals simultaneously. As understanding of both concepts grows in the blogger community, I think new blogs can do both. Of course the income in the beginning is measly, but as long as the intent is to provide value and create community, then I think monetizing at the beginning is a good thing.
I tell my readers that making money allows me to continue to build community. I monetize items that offer value. I’ve seen more than a couple blogs start to monetize after building community and that community got insulted and left. Or sent hate mail.
So I vote for intelligent bloggers to monetize from the beginning!
Debbie Lattuga´s last blog . . .Heart Rate Monitor Training – Using a Marker Run
I get where you are coming from when you are talking about monetizing from day 1 promoting products you like. If it were a situation like that, I wouldn’t go rock-star crazy and make ALL my posts promoting products, readers would get the feel for that.
For the blog that got hate emails because the owner decided to monetize from day 1, the overall truth is that if they are getting pissed off because someone is monetizing their site, they would have probably never bought from you if you did monetize your website. It’s just those kind of people that only want free stuff, and the second they find something that can’t get free, they go on a rampage.
If I am creating value, then I only promote products that provide value. My goal is great content, and if I can weave value into that content with product promotion.. then I’ve hit my mark.
Debbie Lattuga´s last blog . . .Polar CS600 | Cycling Heart Rate Monitor Training-1
I’m right with you Debra, and I couldn’t agree more. I’m an affiliate marketer, so finding the balance between the two is the golden key.
Rob – this may sound contradictory to our previous debates, but I didn’t truly start monetizing DSWM for the first year and a half or so.
Clarification – I may have had a banner or two up, sitting there, but I didn’t advertise or push the fact at all. I definitely didn’t do any affiliate marketing (reviews and so forth).
I find it ironic that you put Darren Rowse and community building in the same sentence…a man NOTORIOUS for not replying to comments.
Yes, he has a large fan base, and that’s exactly what 99% of them are. Word of mouth fans, only seeking to get a hello from the star.
Sorry, that always gets to me…him and several others.
Dennis Edell´s last blog . . .WANTED – Keyword Research Expert(s)
With the Darren Rowse thing, I agree he does not put as much time as I believe he should put into for a community. And I only referenced him, because this debate was brought up from his list. But, as any good debate, I have to play devils advocate
Darren does run a forum where he interacts with other members. Yes, they do have to pay to get in, but at least he is interacting. He interacts in the Digital photography forum with his other members, he has done webinars before, and when I’ve asked him he has came to my community gatherings and interacted with the people.
But, I have to switch back to my view point. I think he should try and interact with ALL his readers, not just the ones that PAY to talk to him or PAY to get into his “community” I think even if he replied to 1/2 of his comments, or comments that people had questions for him.
Get where I’m coming from?
Absolutely. This was a huge black hole for some reviewing the Third Tribe fiasco. Apparently none of the founders interact with people on their free blogs and such. lol
Dennis Edell´s last blog . . .I am Unsubscribing From Your Blog – Again
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