Page Views, Business Goals and Walt Disney World!

How to make your blog a paying business? Tom Mangan works nights as a copy editor and page designer at the Mercury News. He spends a couple of his off hours each day betting on his idea of journalism's future. That involves updating his Cat Stock Blog, a site he created last month as a one-stop digital shop for everything you'd want to know about Caterpillar Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of engines, earthmovers and mining equipment. What sets Mangan apart from most bloggers is his clear focus on the business consequences of the content he's creating. If you think you want to blog for a living, you must be able to answer two questions: Where will the audience come from? And where will the money come from? Then you need to face a brutal reality: at best your blog will generate a penny per page view; you'll be lucky to get half that in the beginning. At a penny per, you'd need 10 million page views a year to earn $100,000.

Warren Buffett believes you need to keep score on your inner scorecard as opposed to your outer scorecard. In other words, measure yourself vs your own standards and not against other people. Yet another mistake I made. I compared my business to others regularly. It was a huge waste of time. So, here are two ways I make my visits to the competition productive. When I visit the competition, I won’t leave without an action plan that would work for my business. I may not use it, but at least I have it for further reference. Great stories are powerful and rare. When I visit the competition, I look for great stories to log into my moleskin. This has been a huge help with my writing and my presentations. So, while learning from your competition can be beneficial, comparing yourself to them is a waste of time. Don’t worry about who’s better or who earns more money. Instead, focus on what you can do to earn more money and achieve your business goals.

As I have thought about my experience with my personal websites, I kept coming back to my experience working at Walt Disney World. Disney trained its employees that, even though they had specific assigned responsibilities for their position, their job was to ensure that the park's guests were comfortably enjoying their visit. That meant you were supposed to do whatever you needed to do, not only to fulfill your assigned responsibilities, but to support the overall show at the park and to help the guests in your area. That's the attitude you need to bring to online publishing: Do whatever you need to do to make your site succeed, however you choose to define success. So your first assignment is to find five ad-supported websites you admire and learn how they handle their advertising. Get their rate cards and ad order forms. Find their readership profiles. Learn about how they manage ads, both now and when they first started publishing. You'll need to know how many absolute unique visitors your site attractions each day, week and month.

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