After renaming the $15M sale of Bankaholic as the "Killer Blog Based Business Model #1" I have found a network of blogs worth of that same title of Killer Blog Based Business Models and it is Smartphone Experts who operate these well known blogs: Crackberry, TreoCentral, IphoneBlog, WMexpert, and AndroidCentral. What is the Smartphone Experts network doing right? Just about everything. Here is a short list:
- Great domain names. Name of the product in the domain which helps for seo and adds trust to the overall experience.
- Building a community by being an authority. This can’t be stressed enough. These are great blogs with writers that are experts within each niche phone device. Covering launch dates, rumors on new phones, everything. This expertise causes other relates blogs to link to them which obviously builds up trust in the search engines which lead these sites to accumulate extremely high rankings. Not only high rankings but a very long tail of keywords due to the volume of posts per day giving them a chance to rank for all kinds of related keyword searches.
- "Ads" that reinforce the brand! This is my favorite thing these guys do. If you look at these blogs you will have trouble even finding an Adsense ad. All ads are calling visitors to their own branded ecommerce stores selling accessories for the very phones the blog covers! Why send visitors off when you can own the whole cycle yourself? Brilliant. It worked on me today. I had been to Crackberry.com many times over the last couple of months checking news on the new Bold. Then today I go to search for "blackberry bold cases" on Google and a familiar site pops into the top 5, shop.crackberry.com Now all these sites will have the same products but of course I go with the site I "trust" as they have branded themselves an authority in my brain because of their great blog content.
Does this blog based business model work? Well the company did $584k in 2003 and $16M in 2006, so that is a resounding yes! So I can’t get the point above out of my head and here lies the challenge of building a great blog based business: How can you not only build a brand by creating an authority blog for your topic but not stop there… own the traffic that comes in by developing your own product or service that answers a need for that crowd and delivers that product or service yourself?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Trust is the big thing here… social communities will sooner or later replace many of the uses of search engines
You are on dot. Putting out killer content on your topic, getting recognised as an expert and then monetising all that popularity is the best way to do business. The blogs make it so much easier.
Seth Godin’s new book Tribes: We Need YOU To Lead Us lays out the concepts used to create those loyal social communities. Finding products/services to sell is the easy part–like AussieWebmaster says above, trust is the key. However, trust isn’t something that happens just because you have an authority blog, it takes intentional effort and time.
WOW! I look at CrackBerry a couple times a week (I have BlackBerry Bold)…. I never would have guessed they make so much?!?