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David Risley has been a problogger for over a decade.

PCmech.com, launched during David’s college years, earned him enough money to enable him to skip the dreaded JOB SEARCH, senior year.

He simply went problogger.

Through lots of tumultuous and surprisingly dramatic twists, turns, and cliffhangers,
David managed to persevere.
And grow PCmech.com into a SIX-FIGURE BUSINESS.

As blogging became a word that the entire population recognized,
and lots of people floundered to create profitable blogs,
David decided to teach people how he grew a six-figure-per year business, from blogging.

In a few short years, DavidRisley.com had ALSO become a six-figure per year business.

David Risley is not your average problogger.

He is an active member of BOTH the blogging world, and the Internet Marketing world.

David Risley gives no-nonsense advice as to why your blog is not earning you money.

If you have thin skin, you may want to skip this interview.

If you want practical tactics that you can use today…

Press play.

[buzzsprout episode="23744" player="true"]

Items mentioned in this post:

• Blog Master’s Club
• David Risley’s Inner Circle
• CreateSpace.com
• Lulu.com
• Kunaki.com

Transcript:

Bolaji: This is the day before overnight success podcast episode 2. Today’s episode from Sam’s Club cashier and hobby blogger to 12 year pro blogging veteran and creator of two separate six figure blogs featuring David Risley of DavidRisley.com. Let’s do it.

Intro: The world celebrate overnight success but what really happened on the road to success? Discover the true stories of passion and perseverance on the day before overnight success.

David Risley (montage of notable quotes):

• “You can’t eat and talk at the same time. We all know that and you’ve got to think of that in terms of content. You can’t assume content and be producing it at the same time. Limit the amount of time that you spend consuming. I’m big on talking about this in the blueprint.”
• “I’m looking at the psychological aspects of it because as marketers we can’t create a demand. All we can do is take a demand and point it in a particular direction.”
• “If we’re going for higher price tags we want to start thinking along the lines of access. As a blog we automatically have an authority with your audience. They automatically are paying attention to you and that puts you on a pedestal to them. Therefore you can sell access. You don’t want to go off and act like the king of your world. Either it’s just a matter of you’re providing value to them and if they want that questions they can ask you instead of just reading an eBook you can now do video.”

Intro: And now your host Bolaji.

Bolaji: Hey what’s up folks this is Bolaji with the day before overnight success podcast and I’m talking with the unmistakable David Risley of Davidrisley.com.

Now David is a six figure blogger who’s been making a living at the crossroads of blogging and internet marketing for over ten years.
Not just on davidrisley.com mind you but also on PCMech.

Both of these sites are six figure a year businesses. David gives a no nonsense advise to bloggers on how to generate a full time income online by turning their passion into a solid stable and profitable business. So this is the real deal folks. If you have been blogging and haven’t seen financial success yet. Pull out a pen and paper and take notes.

Without further ado let me welcome David Risley. David: welcome.

David Risley: Thank you.

Bolaji: So how’s it going man?

David Risley: Going pretty well, busy as usual.

Bolaji: Yes I understand… the life of a pro blogger. I understand that you are just getting back from Yanick Silver’s annual event.

David Risley: Yes I got back a few days ago.

Bolaji: That’s kind of interesting. That is one of the most popular internet marketing events around. I don’t know how many bloggers at least typical traditional bloggers go to internet marketing events. Do you tend to attend events in both worlds?

David Risley: I do. This is my second year in underground. It does kind of have a reputation for being one of the best internet marketing events out there. It’s also typically high end. Of course that’s the way Yanick likes to place his stuff but I was obviously there but there were also a few mommy bloggers there because Yanick actually did have, her name’s Janice with five minute mom or something like that speak there. It’s just kind of cool to see a blogger up on stage at this internet marketing conference. I think I tweeted at that time it’s kind of nice to see the two worlds kind of flirt a little bit.

Bolaji: That’s interesting and I’m going to want to ask you about the state of blogging and the future of blogging later in the interview that might tight in to this internet marketing tangent but let’s go back and sort of tell people who you are a little bit. I had the opportunity to download listen to the six figure blogger blueprint. That’s the blueprint that you created last year on blogging and it’s a fantastic resource but in that resource I heard your story which I thought was pretty interesting. Let’s go back to the beginning. Tell us a little bit about how you got started in blogging in the first place.

David Risley: Well I started as a hobby and of course I started as a tech blogger, computers, things like that.  I started back on geocities back when that thing actually existed. Funny I still remember my geocities address too but of course it’s not there anymore. I even look in the archives that that guy had in geocities and it’s not there. It kind of evolved up to a point where I started thinking about turning that into a business. When I started I had no idea that it would ever evolve in anything. As you saw in the blueprint I was pushing cart. I was working at Sam’s club. I was basically their cart dude and talk about starting at the bottom rung with a college job. I think I was making $6 or $7 an hour and I actually thought I was banking.

Doing the Sam’s club thing and then starting this blogging thing kind of as a hobby. Of course it wasn’t referred to as blogging back then. The word blog didn’t even exist. It was just kind of putting articles online and it was a very manual process using Microsoft FrontPage which nobody ever talks about anymore. It got to the point where once I was starting to make a little bit of money with that thing. It was like Sam’s do I really want to keep doing this or not? It used to be a social affair for me. It got to a point where I was, I moved from doing carts up to eventually being a supervisor and kind of like managing a bunch of people there which is kind of fun. Then it got to a point where I was just going out shooting pool with these guys, drinking beers and stuff and I was like just hanging around. It got to a point where I was like why am I doing this? I can hang out with this people and not work with them.

Bolaji: You have the liberty Dave of making that decision saying I don’t need that job and I don’t know if people actually understand that even that while you were in college you were earning a significant amount of money.

David Risley: Yes. Not what I do now obviously but for those standards I was making definitely a lot more than most people do. I was making more money doing the online stuff than I was with a college job. That’s why it got to a point where I was, I think I remember the feeling one day where my schedule was really, really light and then I went in one day and they scheduled me for like some time the following week and sometimes where I really didn’t want to be there. You know those types of jobs they got this little grid on their thing and they schedule you when they want you there. Six hours they give you a 15 minute break. I was like I don’t want to do that anymore. I feel like these people are running my life and the stuff that I actually want to do is having to go around that. I just put in the two weeks notice. I worked the two weeks so I could be cool and I was just like see you.

Bolaji: So you graduated from college in 2001 and that point did you go get a corporate job?

David Risley: No I actually was one of the few people who was not looking for a job. I just decided to do the online thing full time because it wasn’t that I was making enough money at that time to completely live off of. The thing is I was doing everything with spare time. I figured well if I had all day to work on this stuff I could probably make it work. One push in that direction also was that at the time a lot of my friends were looking for regular jobs and they were having a difficult time finding one. It’s probably still what might be going on right now actually. A lot of people especially in that world. In IT were coming right on the .com boom days or when the .com was on its way back down again. It was affecting that field quite a bit. I was just saying screw it. I’m not going to look. I’m not going to put myself into that mix.

Bolaji: How did you then grow pcmech.com from that point when you graduated college into a bona fide six figure a year business?

David Risley: Basically I kept doing what I was doing. The site grew fairly quickly in the early days but of course it wasn’t really monetized that much. At that time the world of tech on the internet really wasn’t all that saturated. It kind of grew and I kind of carved out a niche for myself at that time by purposely not going the way that everybody else in that market went. That was they wanted to review hardware and software in order to basically get free stuff. I was like I’m not interested in collecting a bunch of circuit boards.

I want to do something cool here. I went down in plain English approach just describing how the computer works and showing them how to do things with it and how to build one. It worked for me. I just kept doing that. I eventually got some other writers involved and that time they were just doing it based on volunteer which is obviously quite cool for me.

I build up a forum on the site which is again at that time was easier to do admittedly nowadays it’s a little more difficult and a lot of times that I recommend people don’t even bother with forums these days. It was more like just doing what I was already doing but doing more of it because now I didn’t college on my schedule and I didn’t have Sam’s club on my schedule.

Bolaji: David I want to hear about the seven figure offer for your pcmech website. Where in the world did that come from?

David Risley: It kind of came out of nowhere from my point of view because I was thinking why would anybody be all that interested in this site but basically what happened is during the .com boom period where everybody was equating the internet to this big gold rush and basically they thought that if it was online you were going to be a millionaire. Basically what this company was doing was if there were was if they were aggregating properties such as mine together and of course using it as a big banner ad pool. At that time that was a good model and they were making money.

They came in with an offer. It was cash as well as stock options. When you put a number that big in front of a person right out of college. I was like holy crap and I think that was the idea. Obviously on the flip side of it the deal kind of went on to hell when the .com rush bubble burst. It burst hard and this company start resorting to some shady stuff to try to keep themselves afloat. They weren’t upholding their end of the contract.

The big thing I also learned was how useless stock options were. It’s just like they not worth anything because if the company doesn’t go public what’s the point of the stock option. It was a big learning experience and I’m really glad that it happened because it also like I said in the blueprint it forced me to re-evaluate the way that I’m making money and come up with some other income stream that I wasn’t using before because I was still running this site legally they owned it even though I was in the process of basically grabbing everything back from them but in the mean time the ads on that site were going to this company and not me.

I was sitting there going what the hell. I either start selling something and that’s what brought me into the whole thing of offering products.

Bolaji: Interesting so you sort of diversified your income streams that later enabled you to make a solid six figures on an annual basis and I understand it’s the site is doing well today.

David Risley: Yes it is. Obviously the situation is changed with pcmech. I haven’t looked at QuickBooks at just specifically pcmech in the last few months but I’m pretty sure it’s still a six figure business. The big thing is that it has changed because the market has changed quite a bit. Not only that I’m spending a lot of time helping bloggers these days. Pcmech I’m basically running it as a business only these days. Almost all the writing takes place by other people. It is a different situation now but I’m sure the site is still doing well. I don’t look at what the exact numbers are. I know as a whole my business is definitely six figures. I’m wondering how much is going to be on that thing just coming from the other one.

Bolaji: Now I want to talk about your more recent business, davidrisley.com. I understand that website is maybe two, two and a half years old and you are focusing, it’s basically entitled confessions of a six figure blogger. So you’re teaching people how you became a six figure blogger and how they can also go professional. Why did you decide after so many years of sort of doing your thing behind the scenes to come up from behind the curtain essentially and say here it is, here’s how to do it?

David Risley: Essentially really just a matter of diversifying some more. I didn’t want to have all my eggs in the tech world and that’s really the essence of it right there. I just didn’t want to have everything wrapped up in tech. Tech is becoming; not becoming it already is becoming extremely saturated. It’s also kind of evolved into a news niche now and it’s really very difficult to make money with news outside of banner ads.

I wanted to diversify the business not be quite so dependent on that and not only that being that I have been doing this stuff for so long I figured I had quite a bit to offer and I honestly thought that some of the people in the market that have already made a name for themselves were not really putting out the full story on what it actually takes to do this. They were thinking more like bloggers and not marketers.

You’ve got to really combine the two together to do it. That’s a skill that I had to learn. I’m still learning but in the world of tech to try to turn a blog like that into something that is making more money than a lot of tech sites do. You really got to put your marketing hat on because face it tech people are cheap.

Bolaji: Apologies to any tech people listening but David I want to hone in to something you mentioned. I’m interested in the difference between internet marketers and bloggers. It almost seems like there are two different camps or tribes and folks in the internet marketing have a certain set of skills but also a certain culture and then vice versa with bloggers. They have another set of skills and a different culture. What’s your take on it?

David Risley: That’s certainly what my observation on it and in fact it’s kind of interesting because you even mentioned the by-line of my blog, confessions of a six figure blogger. If you actually go to a right now it’s different. I’m actually playing around with some different tag lines and right now I think it’s making a living at the crossroads…

Bolaji: The crossroads of blogging and internet marketing. Look at that.

David Risley: Because that is really where my philosophy is. Typically the worlds are very different. Bloggers are all about putting out lots and lots of content, talking it up on twitter and facebook then the monetization component comes in more as an afterthought because I’ve got this thing, this blog and this presence and they’re like okay how do I make money with this which is actually pretty much backwards from the way you needed to do it if you’re actually going to make a living at this whereas internet marketers they come from a different mentality.

You are very rarely going to see them with blogs and if they do they don’t post that often. It’s not that fancy. They’re all about what works, conversion rates, that type of thing and guess what, they’re a lot more of them banking than bloggers.

The thing is I’m not going to say they’ve got it all figured out because I think a lot of people they get weirded out by internet marketers because everything they do is designed to be a pitch in a lot of cases. I think there’s a happy balance right there in the middle and I think some really successful marketers have figured that out and they’re doing that but they still don’t share out as quite as much as a typical blogger does. There’s always a line there and it moves back and forth. There’s really not a right combination between them but I know that success is found with combining the two.

Bolaji: David you talked in the bloggers blueprint about why bloggers actually fail and I’ve got to admit some of that stuff was a little uncomfortable for me to hear. I’m not saying that I’m guilty of any of that stuff but I have friend. Maybe you can elaborate on some of those reasons as to why bloggers actually fail.

David Risley: Sure. I see a lot of bloggers lined up against the same basic traits when it comes to fail and obviously when I hear the word fail, if they come into this with the idea of making money then they don’t maybe they consider themselves a failure. I think the first one is they get lazy about it and that is because they go in this thinking almost that 90s stock gold rush that I was talking about earlier and it’s not that way. There’s a lot going on out there in the internet.

You can’t just show up with some simple blog post and start banking. It’s not going to work. When that reality hits home I think a lot of bloggers give up because they went into this solely for the money and not because they actually had a passion backing it up. As heavily as I talk about the business side of blogging it’s all the concrete slab underneath all that is that you still need to have a passion for what you’re doing otherwise you’re just not going to be driven enough to realize the payday.

Also a lot of bloggers because they come into it with that mentality they tend to always be looking for the next trick and the next strategy, the next hot thing that’s going to get them that payday and because they’re doing that it’s like major ADD.

Bolaji: That’s actually a very difficult one because the internet inherently gives you a million different directions to go in. It’s almost an addictive quality to where you log on. There’s email, facebook, twitter. There’s your RSS feed. Then you have 20 different things that you want to do on a given day. So I can see how that would contribute potentially to failure probably in any industry.

David Risley: It’s a huge one. We’re basically at a point where the only solution to that is self discipline. Outside of a forum in my site I don’t remember if I said it this way in the blueprint but you can’t eat and talk at the same time. We all know that. You’ve got to think of that in terms of content. You can’t consume content and be producing it at the same time.

Bolaji: That’s great. That’s powerful.

David Risley: Yes. So you really have to just limit the amount of time you spent consuming. That includes reading other people’s blogs and twitter and facebook. It’s all just consumption. When it goes time to produce you’ve got to turn all that stuff off and just not pay attention. Also realize at the end of the day you’re really not missing out on anything if you like go several hours without reading people’s blogs. You have to also just make the decision for yourself. Are you in this just to be a social butterfly or are you in for business?

Bolaji: Wow. That reminds me of Seth Godin’s most recent book linchpin and how he emphasizes the need to ship. You need to basically get stuff out. To your point it’s not enough to consume the information and become really smart you actually have something to show for it.

David Risley: Yes totally. At the end of the today if we’re not producing stuff nobody is going to pay any attention.

Bolaji: Very true. What about the challenge of the folks who decide to teach, this might be more for internet marketing bloggers but those who want to teach make money online. You teach people how to make money online why can’t a newbie do that. It seems like a very profitable niche.

David Risley: It can be a profitable niche but if you don’t know what you’re doing already it’s probably not going to be profitable for you because the people smell BS from a mile away these days. A lot of times they’ll paint something with a BS brush even though it’s not BS just because there’s so much BS. So you get into a market like internet marketing, if you’re to actually making money don’t go into it. I was doing this in tech well before I went into the make money crowd. I came into it with some credibility. I see a lot of bloggers they’ll go into the blogging market. They’ll show other people how to have a successful blog even though they don’t yet have a successful blog. Why do that?

Not only that it’s not just a matter of faking it at that point you’re actually making it more difficult on yourself when you do that because these niches they’re huge but not only that they’re a lot more saturated. You can actually apply internet marketing and the blogging stuff we talk about in other niches a lot easier. Just go into some smaller niche that you have a passion for or sub niche it down, whatever you need to do there and you’re going to find that it’s usually a lot easier to market to those crowds because they’re not exposed to marketing all the time.

In this market when somebody does a product launch you’re probably getting about 10 or 15 different emails on launch day to tell you you’ve got it. In other markets that’s not happening. If you’re applying some marketing and you’re in their inbox you’re the only person they’re paying attention to.

Bolaji: You’ve talked in the blueprint as well about market selection and I want to dig into that because I’ll be honest I’ve started a couple of websites based on things that I was passionate about so I did get that passion aspect in there but personally I’m not too fond of market research so I pretty much skimmed over that step. Do you tend to see that a lot with bloggers and if so what really is the importance of choosing and do your market research and how do you do market research the right way?

David Risley: A. It is important if money if going to be one of your aims obviously you need to do market research. In terms of the other part of your question I mean I teach ways of doing market research however at the end of the day I don’t want people to get too hung up on the specifics of it because at the end of the day it’s always going to be some research backed up by a gut feeling. At least that’s make take on it because the things that I look for in a marketer are not just things like keywords like search demand and things like that. Those are indicators of demand and that is very, very important.

I talked about this is the blueprint looking at the psychological aspects of it because as marketers we can’t create a demand. All we can do is take a demand and point it in a particular direction. It’s not just search volume. You also need to look into what unifies that group of people as a particular market. What are they trying to accomplish? What fears should they have? Are they trying to get away from? I mean what is unifying them in a particular direction. You’ve got that direction vector. They’re doing that already and all you’re going to do is come in and help them along and ultimately provide them solutions to get them to move quicker along that path they’re already going. That’s what we’re doing as marketers.

That’s something that you can get indicators by doing things like keyword research and checking out competitor, I call them competitors even though I don’t look at them that way but other blogs people’s comments in forums and on other blogs. You can get indicators of the psychological demand like what common questions are they always asking because it’s always on their mind. These are things that you want to look for. Back it up with your own gut feeling and understanding of that market and what you can help them do.

Bolaji: That’s a real interesting one and I think one that a lot of bloggers probably struggle with. Let’s assume David then if there are bloggers out there that have actually done their homework. They have actually selected a good niche and it’s a good fit for them and there are buyers in that niche. How do they then go about monetizing? I heard you use a term that I thought was hilarious. You called it blogger’s welfare. Can you talk about blogger’s welfare and why that’s not such a great way to monetize your blog.

David Risley: I’m not the one that came up with that term. The first time that I ever heard that phrase was from Brian Clark with copyblogger. He’s basically using it to refer to adsense because that tends to be the de facto way of making money with newbie bloggers is by putting adsense on the blog. The reason I call it blogger welfare is because everybody can do it so therefore there’s not a whole lot of money to be made unless you basically expand out in terms of traffic. I made decent money with adsense every month but I have a lot of traffic that I’m throwing at it with my tech site. Honestly if I were running adsense on my blogging blog it would not be making me very much money and I’d be pretty pissed about it.

It’s just not a good way to make good money unless you’ve got good traffic already. You can make money selling things a hell of a lot easier than you can with adsense. That’s where my focus is when I help bloggers out is affiliate marketing because that one you can sell products that you didn’t make and that’s always awesome. Ultimately the top rung of this ladder is making your own products to market to your audience and being that you are going to be in tune with your own audience, with your blog commentors, hopefully you’re building a list so that you can run surveys and things like that. You should know what your market wants and then you can custom tailor the product to what they are asking for.

Bolaji: David I want to ask about list building which you just mentioned. From what I’ve read from you a great way to build a list is to create a free information product often an eBook that gives an incentive. It’s like an ethical bribe I think you called it for people to opt in to your list. Could you talk a little bit about creating that first free information product and then transitioning to creating a paid or premium information product? What’s the difference between the two?

David Risley: The eBook, I mean it’s pretty simple to do. Essentially all you’re doing is brain dumping into a word processor, you print a pdf. You’re good to go. I would have somebody design a cover image for you and also create a 3d version of the cover so that it actually looks like a book when you put it on your page. It just gives it a much higher perceived value and it’s going to also stand out a lot better in your opt in form.

In terms of the content that goes in there it’s really up to what works best for everybody. Ultimately I assume that if we’re all bloggers we shouldn’t have that difficult of a time writing something. Keep in mind that this is a free eBook it does not have to be large. You don’t have to create a 100 page thing to give away. If you know what your audience is looking for then you just create an eBook. It could be short, 10 to 15 pages, double spaced, triple spaced if you have to. It’s more about the value of that information in helping them solve something.

Another thing that some bloggers do successfully especially if they’ve got a blog that has been around a little while is they’ll take some of their good stuff from their own archives and they’ll just put it into an eBook. It’s a nice simple way to get started. If you’ve got an existing blog and no giveaway. Lots of ways to go there.

In terms of evolving into a paid, in fact I have been writing about this lately but its access is a bigger sell these days more so than content. Really what it comes down to, you’ve got the eBook. That’s cool. A lot of bloggers they default to the idea well I’m just going to make a better eBook and I’m going to sell it which can work in some markets especially if it’s a market that is not exposed to the world of internet marketing that much. The idea of eBooks might be a little bit novel but maybe they’ll be over it. You also have to consider that a lot of markets are not, they don’t really get eBooks and they might want it in a physical form.

There are ways to go about that. You can have companies out there print them and ship them. It’s cheap. It’s really not a big deal at all but then if you’re going toward higher price tags you want to start thinking along the lines of access because you as a blog automatically have authority with your audience. They automatically are paying attention to you and that puts you on a pedestal to them. Therefore you can sell access. It’s not a matter of oh you can email me. You don’t want to go off and act like the king of your world. Either it’s just a matter of you’re providing value to them and if they have questions they can ask them of you. Instead of just reading an eBook you can now do video. There’s a lot of things you can do. It’s really just up to one’s imagination.

Bolaji: That’s pretty cool. I just want to see David if you can give any examples going back to your comment about creating a physical book. It might be the same content but higher perceived value. Off the top of your head can you think of some good websites or resources that enable one to do that?

David Risley: Sure. The easiest way to do is just to create a natural book and self publish it. You can go to createspace.com and self publish a book fairly easily. That is actually owned by Amazon. The whole idea here is that you’re going to get listed in the Amazon marketplace which is cool. You’re going to be right in there in the mix with every other book which is awesome.

Some people also like to order from just more of a printer. In which case you can go to lulu.com and you can get them to…you can actually sell it right there on lulu if you want. They’ll collect payment and send you the check. You can also just order inventory and have it shipped to you and you can do your own shipping. It’s really just a matter of what you want to do.

You can also aside from printed books you can also put things on CD or DVD and there are the most A to B company that I know that does that is called kunaki. It starts with a K. It’s basically a fully automated service for printing and shipping DVDs and CDs. You’re not going to be able to pull up anybody on the phone and get anything custom. You basically set it up. You upload it into their system and it’s very A to B. Then if you want something fancier there are fulfilment companies out there that can do custom stuff. We’re all about keeping things simple. There are a lot of companies that will create physical stuff. I don’t want anybody to think that it’s daunting to create physical stuff. In this day and age it’s really easy.

Bolaji: I’m really glad you shared those resources. There’s a couple I’m familiar with. Createspace.com I just learned from you today. I’m definitely going to be working to get my stuff into Amazon. Who knows what could happen?

David Risley: It’s on my list here to right a book. I’m going to be doing the same thing.

Bolaji: At the very least my mom can show it to her friends and feel like my being an internet marketer is a little less weird than…

David Risley: The thing is I think the world of print is changing a lot. A lot of people are now starting to self publish rather than go through a traditional publisher. You have authority by going through a publisher. Oh you’re a published author but this day and age I don’t think it matters that much. I know several published authors that have said they’re not just going to bother with that world anymore. They’re going to self publish. Having a book with your name on it is an automatic authority booster.

Bolaji: True indeed. For the folks listening kunaki is spelled K-U-N-A-K-I.com. I think as David indicated there are several other resources you can probably do a Google search and find them. David one of the biggest struggles for bloggers even before they get to creating their own information product is building an audience. So a lot of bloggers feel like they’re writing great content. Maybe they’re even in a great niche. They ought to be able to get the eyeballs but nobody is coming. What is a good way, a solid way to attract traffic?

David Risley: That is the $64,000 question right there because it’s kind of like what we were talking about earlier with all the shiny objects out there. That’s huge in the world of traffic because it’s such a big button. Everybody is constantly looking for something hidden little tactic that they don’t already know about but generally my view is to forget about all those tactics because at the end of the day it’s pretty common sense. It’s going to take a lot of work don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we’ll be able to find some hidden magic button that we didn’t know about and out pours traffic but if you just step back for a moment from all that and look at it with the basics in mind, you have groups of people out there in the internet you want some of those people to come to your stuff. The best thing to do is to go where all that group is already hanging out.

If we just blow the internet down to people rather than all this weird URLs all over the place it starts to make more sense. They’re living, breathing people out there. They’re just looking for something interesting. You find out where your market is hanging out. In a lot of cases it’s not going to be twitter. I know of lot of us as bloggers we tend to think oh wow twitter that is a huge deal but most of the world doesn’t think twitter is that big of a deal. It’s just the reality of it. There’s a lot more people on facebook than there are on twitter. It could be that your market isn’t even in either.

I mean every market is either but also you can go to what sites are those people already on and how can you get content on to those sites to link back to you and this could be in the form of guest posting. It could be in creating something that might be a little newsworthy and you submit something as a little press release. I know with the tech market there used to be and I think they’re still there this underground distribution between all the tech sites internally where we would distribute our own content to the other tech sites. They would say oh pcmech just wrote a story about blah, blah, blah and it would show up on hardOCP.com. It’s a tech site. I guess it’s still there. It was just like that type of thing going on.

Every market is different. You just got to know where those lines are. Where are people talking? What do they need and want? You just give them that and then you can get on those lines that already exist.  That’s the simplicity of it. I don’t want anybody to get mired down into the minutia of these traffic strategies because at the end of the day it’s the basics that work and you just need to do them consistently.

Bolaji: Recently David there’s been talk about blogging being dead and it’s been a bit of a controversial sort of lightning rod topic. I’m interested in your take of that whole conversation and maybe what your thoughts are on the future of professional blogging?

David Risley: It’s funny. The people that I’ve heard call blogging dead are usually, I strongly disagree with that notion the idea of blogging being dead. I think it’s just changing. I think it’s funny cause a lot of the people who have said that blogging is dead are usually the people who just can’t seem to make it work for themselves. All you got to do is look at the stats out there with blogs and how fast the blogosphere is doing. How many new blogs are created every day? Blogging is not dying. It’s just changing a little bit.

In terms of how we make money doing it. It is changing. There is so much saturation now, so much information that it is becoming more difficult to stand out in that crowd. You really got to bring your A game and I think that is one thing that is evolving and that is that you really got to step it up. It’s kind of like natural selection in the natural world. The tigers are going to survive. Everybody else is going to drop off the radar. I think one of the big things that I’ve been talking about this lately is selling small membership sites with a low price tag.

I’m a big believer in continuity which is basically the idea of billing month. I think that the really, really good model obviously the higher the price that you charge on a monthly basis the more you’ve got to deliver but it’s a good model if you do it right and if you market it right and you if you provide that value you’ve got an ongoing growing monthly income stream that is predependable. That removes you from the commodity market of Google adsense and banner networking stuff. You no longer need to mess with them once you build up that type of an income stream.

It’s an income stream that you have full control over. One of the big things that I’ve been talking about lately is bringing the price tag of that whole thing down because the economy has changed things online some and not only that they whole apple phenomenon has changed things quite a bit because now people are seeing these pretty awesome apps on the iPhone and the iPad that are like $5 or less. There’s people out there really making some major coin selling these cheap sometimes quite stupid apps actually.

I think what it’s doing is it’s creating a whole new economy that is based on this small little micro purchases. You’re seeing PayPal kind of getting ahead of this with their micro payment. You’re seeing the Google checkout system and they just released a new publisher system. I forgot what they call that onepass or something like that where you can sell things using Google checkout. With these, sell content on a micro purchase, micro subscription basis. I think there’s a lot going on in this phase and I think there’s a lot of room for bloggers with large audiences to monetize by getting people in at a few bucks a month on some type of a program.

Bolaji: That is very interesting. You have talked about a few things about membership sites and the importance of continuity as a business model. I have been hearing that for a few years now particularly in the internet marketing space but it sounds like this is a little different with almost like a nano continuity twist to it. So really small transactions like apple has sort of made us accustomed to so that hopefully the friction is less. People are more willing to try you out and if you have good content maybe they’ll stay.

David Risley: Exactly. Well that’s also the idea. If you’re not billing as much they don’t tend to question the purchases much cause most people if they see let’s say $4.95 or something like that and they’re being billed. If you’re giving them some value on a monthly basis that is helping them solve something even if they didn’t use you that month they’ll be like well maybe I’ll use it next month or someday it might come in handy. We’re talking $4.95. That’s like a starbucks latte right there. It’s not that big of a deal. I think with volume that could build up quite a bit.

Here’s the other thing from a marketing perspective buyers are always a lot more valuable than freebie seekers. You get somebody to give you even just a tiniest bit of money they’ve just prequalified themselves as a serious player to market to. There’s a lot of tire kickers out there on the internet who will never buy anything but they will sit there and consume everything for free and complain when don’t give them free stuff. As a business owner you have to get to a point where yes you’re going to give free stuff because it’s good business but at the end of the day if you’re not willing to pay me for something then just enjoy my free stuff and be quiet.

If we’re in this for business we’re going to provide our best stuff to people that are paying us something. It’s just the way it works and with this micro purchases they’re now paying you something so now you have a buyer’s list. You can get them into upsell offers. Obviously be tasteful about it. You don’t want people to pay in just so they can be marketed to but it doesn’t mean you can’t bring a good opportunity to them when it comes along.

Bolaji: I think that’s sort of an a-ha moment. It will be for a lot of people listening because often newbie bloggers might have that psychological barrier that says I don’t know if I have anything that is worth paying for yet. I don’t know if my information is valuable enough yet. Well if you’re only charging a very moderate amount, starbucks latte as Dave said. Surely you can bundle up some of the stuff you have and put it out there and see what happens.

David Risley: Absolutely and I don’t want anybody to look into this and think well maybe this a way to get around the idea of providing value. You still have to provide value. I’ve heard it said that you should go with a four x rule whereas you try to give them at least four times the value monthly than what they’re paying you but it’s not that difficult. If you’re charging something like $5 how hard is it to get somebody $20 worth of value.

Also a lot of times with bloggers I find that that idea of what they’re giving away isn’t valuable enough is really a self created notion. Your readers in a lot of cases are not thinking that. I find a lot of bloggers shoot themselves in the foot unnecessarily for self esteem reasons or something but chances are all the things that we rip on ourselves for nobody else is thinking.

Bolaji: That is a truism in blogging and in life. David I mean there’s so much more that we could learn from you but I’m going to ask people to check out the six figure blogger blueprint. You can find it a davidrisley.com. David this was amazing stuff. Thank you so much.

David Risley: You’re very welcome.

Bolaji: On that note David I’ll go ahead and wrap up. Thanks so much. Folks this was Bolaji speaking with David Risley on the day before overnight success podcast. Visit davidrisley.com to get the six figure blogger’s blueprint and follow David’s ongoing adventures at the crossroads of blogging and internet marketing. That is David R-I-S-L-E-Y.com. Thanks for listening and I look forward to sharing your overnight success story. See you.

End: You’ve been listening to the day before overnight success podcast with Bolaji. Visit daybeforeovernightsuccess.com and discover the real deal about becoming an overnight success. You can also find Bolaji blogging at whoisbolaji.com. That’s who is B-O-L-A-J-I.com.

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