Prior to new media, newspapers were simply handed “breaking stories” by P.R. representatives. That’s no longer the case. For example, say that you are friends with the CEO of a large company and you run your own media company. If you talk to that person on a regular basis, chances are they are going to give you the story before anybody else. Breaking news now comes from (and may have always come from) building strong relationships with your sources. Additionally, investigative reporting helps to provide breaking news as well.

If you want to win in the new media landscape you better be aggressive. Rather than fighting for access to the P.R. representatives, you should be fighting for access to other employees within the organization. It sounds like some of these new media people have become spoiled with “access” to higher quality press releases. They are still press releases though. The real juicy scoops don’t come from building relationships with the communications department, it comes from knowing other people in the company. The bottom line here is that building relationships with people is going to beat out any form of informal public relations. It’s as simple as that. A combination of intelligence and aggresion will put you on top.

I have yet to receive a significant payout from my new blog but I have entertained a number of offers. This is the only thing that makes me think that my new blog has a chance at greater success. Will it become the next TechCrunch or Mashable? Who knows. Do I care? Not really. I will keep staying up until 1 or 2 AM just so my readers have something to fill their time with the next day. I believe that this dedication will somehow reap rewards through building relationships, increasing client referrals and building name recognition, but I don’t know how quickly all this will happen. All I know it that it will. I read in Napoleon Hill’s think and Grow Rich that one of the key components of becoming successful is having an unwavering faith that you will succeed. He was right. So for all of you that have an idea that you want to have materialize, start working on it. All you need is the willingness to learn how to get where you are going and unwavering faith. That’s it. I know you can get there and I know you will. You might not get there on the first go around but if you keep that vision close I know you will get there. Best of luck! I will see you at the finish line!

The source of the pain for larger publications is citizen journalism. While some of these journalists may be more dedicated than others, they are truly a serious thorn in old media’s side. Sites like Techcrunch, PaidContent.org, Read/Write/Web and others are all major competition to large publications and are taking away readers. Not only are readers leaving but advertisers are running out the door as well. As the Forbes article highlights, Business 2.0 ad pages dropped 21.8% in March over the same period from a year ago and PC Magazine experienced a 38.8% drop in the same period. So just because Mike Arrington, Rafit Ali, Richard MacManus, Om Malik and others can do it, can someone else come along and do the same thing? Hell yes! That’s not to say that the majority of bloggers don’t experience a low volume of traffic, but if you pick the right niche you are sure to experience a boom in traffic. That’s when the fun starts. Late nights, non-stop networking, rinse and repeat. Becoming successful isn’t easy but who said starting your own business ever was. This is true guerrilla warfare at its best and there is still plenty of niche markets to capture.

So I have decided to enter the competitive landscape and will be releasing a few more media properties in the coming months. As you can tell from reading my blog I have ten thousand ideas but many of them I don’t have time to follow. New media though is probably the most exciting thing that I have been involved in and as such I’m going to dive in completely. There is some exciting new media ventures right around the corner. Also, I know I have been promising some exciting news. It is soon to come! How are you taking part of the new media revolution?

So why am I going off on this whole discussion about blogging? Well, I was inspired when I heard Marc Andreesen talking about the power of blogging. He gives a great overview of basic lessons that he has learned from blogging in the first five weeks. It was also great timing because I had planned on posting a complete tutorial on starting up your own blog. While many of my readers are already bloggers, many are not. I am hoping that by providing a little advice they can experience the same wonderful things that I have experienced as a result of blogging. I want to make that tutorial as complete as possible so look for it to come out in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, if you aren’t blogging, try it out! If you are blogging, keep at it!

A New York Times article this past weekend asked the same question. Is it possible to make a job out of blogging? The conclusion was that it is possible but very difficult, with the rare full-time blogger making in the range of $40,000 to $60,000 a year. The real money in blogging comes from the connections made. From my two blogs, The Webpreneur (this blog), and my recently launched All Facebook, I have managed to build numerous business contacts. Some of these contacts have even led to potential business partners and start-up funding.

So can you make a living blogging? Yes, but the real value comes from building relationships. When you start a blog you need to be passionate and dedicated because chances are you are not going to see any money coming in the door for months to come. While I have already received cash offers for advertising space on my recently launched Facebook blog, the offers are nowhere near enough for me to live off. So if you have a blog idea, all I can suggest is to get out there and start blogging. There is so much more to be gained from writing down your thoughts and sharing them with the world than just monetary gain. If you choose not to share your thoughts with the world you are missing out on a world of opportunity.

I’m going to keep this post short as I have a feeling there is going to be a fair amount to write about Facebook once they make their press release today.

The Black Book highlights a few key factors critical to the success of a blog. A few of these include:

• Blogging Platform – In order to have a successful blog, it helps to have a powerful platform to blog from. While many choose blogger or livejournal as a starting point, the author highly recommends using Wordpress. I use wordpress to publish this blog and wouldn’t switch to any other platform.
• RSS Marketing – While the author doesn’t make many suggestions on how to build your RSS subscriber base besides installing the ‚ÄúWhat would Seth Godin do‚Äù plugin. I haven’t installed this plugin because I think it would probably be annoying to visitors, but hey maybe I’ll give it a try at some point.
• Social Bookmarking – Jack Humphry (the author) suggests submitting each of your posts to every social bookmarking site. While I’m not too sure about the value of this, it may be worth a shot for getting the buzz going about your site.
• Video Marketing – This is one of the last marketing methods covered in the ebook. By creating videos and publishing them on sites such as YouTube or Blip.tv you can direct viewers directly to your blog. The only problem I have with this one is that it takes a significant amount of time to create a catch video whereas it takes significantly less time bookmarking and pinging content syndication sites.

Overall the ebook is definitely worth a read, especially since it is free. The bottom line is that blogging takes a significant amount of time with or without marketing. Marketing is necessary though to get your site over the initial hurdles. Once you have reached the “tipping point” for your blog, you are well on your way to success. Good luck!

Now to the core matter. What was the first step in monetizing this blog? Applying to various internet advertising programs. The ones that I have selected to participate in so far are:

• Text-Link-Ads – I will be using Text-Link-Ads to provide ads in my RSS feed as well as testing their site based ads. At the end of each post there will be a single text ad that is a sentence long. Text-Link-Ads provides a variety monetization methods. This includes site based text ads, post level ads, and feedvertising.
• ReviewMe – ReviewMe gives advertisers the flexibility to create review offers for their blogger marketplace and/or order reviews direct from specific top blogs. I plan on occasionally posting reviewme posts, but not too frequently as I want to maintain a high level of informative postings.
• Google AdSense – If you don’t know what Google AdSense is then you’ve probably been hiding under a rock for the past couple years. Google AdSense is one of their primary sources of revenue. Google places targeted ads on your page based on the subject you are discussing. If approved for this program, I will be placing the ads on the sidebar.

My only concern in the whole process is maintaining my integrity. As a reader, do you think that I lose integrity by accepting ads on this blog? I’d love to hear your feedback. So let me know!

ShoeMoney is best known in the SEM community for his ability to hyper-monetize websites through large volume affiliate sales funded by PPC minimum bids.

In other words, target a given niche using CPC advertising and then try to sell them a product since you probably have a good guess about what types of products they would be interested in. While this is a good model, it is only good as long as other people stay away from your market. As more advertisers come in, the margin on each affiliate sale decreases rapidly. Mintz goes on to further explain his experience with advertising on his blog:

I turned off my North American Google, Yahoo & MSN ads since I got little traffic from minimum bids and when I increased the bids high enough to draw traffic, my ROI was only a fraction of what I earned in Europe. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to sell my products into Asia. Asian affiliate programs seem to be the least developed… however, I think it’s just a matter of time before that changes.

At first glance it seems like Todd is already experiencing what would be a rational result in this type of revenue generating model. The hands-off approach of generating revenue only exists under two circumstances:

1. The market has not yet been flooded and there are still opportunities to milk a given niche for cash flow
2. Create your own product and sell it to customers

The second approach is obviously much more secure because you own the actual product that you are selling. Many other bloggers are still using the first approach. While I don’t think that the market for CPC arbitrage has been eliminated (there are always be arbitrage opportunities in any market), there is now fierce competition and blog monetizers have to begin looking elsewhere. The only really effective way of monetizing a blog over the long haul is building a solid readership base that regularly reads your blog. As you build your base you can begin to use advertising tools more effectively to generate revenue. As an experiment, I will try to monetize this blog over the course of the next 6-months while explaining it every step of the way. Let’s see what happens!