Quick Stats

• First site launched: December 1, 2006
• First search engine traffic: December 4, 2006 from Google
• First AdSense earnings: December 4, 2006

Network To-do List

• Get private forum up and running…will be online by Christmas [yes 2006].
• Get plug-in made so that each site has a link to every other site on the network.
• Incorporate business so that I can distribute shares and attract investors to finance expansion.
• Find a great technical resource so I can get some sleep [let me know if you find someone who is pretty much a clone of Aaron Brazell.]

Biggest Challenge in Running a Blog Network

Not to “one-off” everything. For example it would be simple, with 4 blogs, to put a set of four links in each site’s sidebar so that they would all be linked together.

However, if the goal is to have one hundred or five hundred sites, that would mean that adding a new site would become a burden…just for this simple task alone. Not to mention things like updating templates.

Other Challenges with This Network

To really achieve the kind of success that I believe is possible for these sites it may be necessary to attract advertisers beyond AdSense. It has always been my vision to have a network large enough to be a viable advertising mechanism to larger, possibly national or international advertisers, but I see now that it may be necessary to scale in the other direction and be able to accommodate very small advertisers who would want to place ads on an individual site.

The challenge is to have a system that can deploy such ads in an efficient manner and even more of a challenge is to find a way to bring these smaller advertisers into our system. It would be lovely to have an advertising account rep in every city, but for now we’re going to have to be more creative than that.

Primary Point of Leverage

I think in any business there is one place where the CEO should spend the bulk of their energy. It could also be called the key metric. If that metric is favorable then the business is healthy.

For a lot of businesses the key metric would be something like:

Life time value of a customer / Cost of acquiring a new customer

Therefore, the whole business is designed to make this number as large as possible.

For a blog network, at least one that is 20 days old, since I’m making this up as I go along, the metric that I stay awake at night thinking about is: average monthly earnings per blogger.

The first reason is purely selfish. I am working on this network full time now and the bloggers make the first $100 dollars each month, so until a blogger makes over $100 I get zero…and zero doesn’t pay many bills

But more importantly it really is the proof of the system if the bloggers can make money. Not only will the network be profitable but it will attract new bloggers easily and it shows that we are creating enough page views to be valuable to surfers and therefore advertisers.

Traffic Observations

Traffic cycles through the network site and to the other sites. Visitors seem to enjoy checking out the other sites on the network. This is a good sign, as each site that we bring into the network should increase traffic to all the other sites on the network.

The majority of traffic to the sites is localized. It is too early to do any real stats but if I look at the location map of visitors to the sites, clearly the majority of the visitors are from the region that the site is targeting. This is a very good sign as the whole network concept is built on attracting local visitors and advertisers.

Predictions

More and more blog networks. Already I’m seeing some new networks making unrealistic promises to bloggers. Recently I saw one offering a 70/30 split and admin access with the ability to fully customize their template to the blogger. In my opinion this is not sustainable past a few sites. Once they hit 10 or maybe 20 sites, updates will be too onerous to continue to maintain sites and the bloggers will pay the price for the network’s over optimism.

Beyond that, it is clear from my initial call for bloggers [I had a lot of high quality applications] that there is demand for high quality blog networks for bloggers to be a part of.

What We’re Creating at Home Turf Media

I have to say that seeing the sites on the network so far is very encouraging to me. Even though they are very new a couple of them have a real sense of community forming around them that I find inspiring.

Another really refreshing aspect of this project for me has been the community that is forming within the network. For someone who has been a lone-wolf online for the past two years, to be working closely with even the small group that we have on board so far has been very rewarding.

Going Forward

I’m really looking forward to having a few sites that have been around for 6 to 9 months as it really takes that long to get a grasp on the earnings potential for a blog.

Given that fact, it is fairly important for me to begin to launch new sites at a fairly rapid pace so that the network can begin to make a profit ASAP. It is my intention to have 100 sites up and running by the end of 2007, but really the way I am designing the network systems I would like to be well beyond that.

With the continuing trends that see advertising money coming online and the growth of local blogs and local blogging networks, 2007 is potentially a great year for Home Turf Media.

I’m really looking forward to reading this post in about 12 months to see if it all went according to plan.