The $50.00 blog challenge
Contest closed winner will be announced and contact on 12/5/07
A few days ago Darren of Problogger wrote a post asking if you would blog differently if you had money. It got me to thinking about the issue, but up until now I’ve not had a clear answer. I finally realized that an answer isn’t exactly what I’ll come up with, but instead I have a question of my own.
In Darren’s post he asks if we would blog differently if we had one million dollars. Reality is that the vast majority of us do not have that kind of disposable income to throw into blogging. Most of us do however have fifty dollars to throw into our blogging addictions. So if someone were to hand you $50.00 and tell you the only condition for its use is that it must go towards your blog, how would you spend it?
As for myself…
- First things first
- On the day it came to spend the money I would make sure my “house” was in order by taking some very basic steps
- Making certain my best post(s) are displayed prominently on the front page
- Ensuring that all of my links works with a dead link checker
- Using No-WWW, a Wordpress plugin to ensure that all links go to the non-www version of pages. If you don’t use wordpress you’ll have to check around and see what options are available for you
- Making sure that everything displays properly in a variety of browsers at a variety of resolutions
- Having a week, possibly even two weeks worth of posts written and scheduled out
- I would setup real time statistical monitoring so I could make adjustments on the fly if need be
- Spending the money
- The way I see it $50.00 is not very much money at all. So the only reasonable thing to do as far as I’m concerned is to put that money to work for me earning more money by bringing in highly targeted traffic. I’d spend some time deciding what method I would use but it would likely either be Google Adwords or a Stumble Upon traffic campaign. Either way I would spend a pretty decent chunk of time attempting to monetize the blog for that particular method.
- Final thoughts
- I would give it about a month and a half before I decided the overall benefits of the $50 I just spent. Of course I’d keep track of the day to day minutia, but I don’t think it would really paint a clear picture until about 6 weeks into the whole thing. Hopefully by that time traffic has evened out and what remains are faithful readers for the most part. I’ve seen other blogs do analysis’s of how much each reader is worth and that is something I would also do in order to determine how successful I had been.
Regardless of the short term success this is the type of thing that would benefit you the most by treating it as an ongoing project. It doesn’t matter if you have $20 or $100,000 if you don’t make it work you might as well just throw it in the toilet and flush.
How would you spend $50.00 on your blog? One lucky and creative winner will get a check for $50.00 from me in order to spend on their blog however they wish. In order to enter just
