I have decided to cut this blog into 2 parts. The first part is the story behind my blog/podcast “The iPhone App Podcast” and the second part is the strategy that went into creating a blog for profit and how I made it profitable.
I have been blogging for a long time now. I started blogging in 2001, mostly about whatever my hobby was at the time. In 2004 I started blogging often about the business I was in at the time. In 2005 I started sharing any information I had a passion for with the interweb. One of my struggles through all of these years of blogging was trying to find a profit medium in which my efforts could be supported. I did not want to blog for the sake of getting paid, I just wanted to make it worth the time I was investing. I tried many ideas, some which I shut down rather quickly, others I maintained for a while and would soon loose interest in. It was not until last year that one of my passions met with audience desire and generated me an income.
The anticipation of the 2.0 iPhone was huge, it was all that my techie friends talked about. Being an early iPhone adopter I was always being asked questions about the iPhone. Writing an iPhone News blog had crossed my mind but there were many out there already, some with amazing sources for information. I knew I would be doing nothing but rewriting what was already written about. In late 2007, tired of the limitations of the iPhone, I jailbroke my phone. This opened up a whole wide gamut of usefulness for the iPhone and awakened my desire for using my phone to do more then simply make calls. New apps were being released daily for free. I loved it.
When I heard that apps were coming to the iPhone I knew I would begin to get questions about them from friends all over. Being an avid blogger and podcaster I thought I should start a podcast and blog about the topic of apps and the iPhone. This is when I decided to start The iPhone App Podcast. I have always been a firm believer in finding your niche and sticking to it so I opted not to talk about iPhone news and speculations unless it had something to do with the use of apps. On July 11th, the day the iPhone 2.0 update launched I started my podcast with full force. There were already several apps available in the app store for me to review so I went to town reviewing at least one a day sometimes reviewing as many as 25 in one day. In starting this podcast I knew that there would be others who would follow suit but I knew that if I focused on unbiased reviewing with quality video for people to watch, people would watch!
The Podcast took off quickly, with in a couple of weeks I had over 4500 subscribers to the iTunes feed and the website was attracting over 1000 daily unique visitors. I continued providing content by reviewing at least one app per day. After about 3 weeks of reviewing apps my iTunes bill had reached about $300. After the end of the second week my server had came to a crawl because of the demand video streaming had put on it. I knew I had to act fast, I did not believe in my heart that this website had been around long enough to obtain creditable advertisers that would pay enough to support my costs. This is when I decided that I would have to create to create a revenue stream from this website in order for it to support itself. I was able to find a way to host the video files with out incurring any additional cost. The video files were of course the lifeblood of the website. In my opinion it was a much better way to display the functionality of an application then through written form.
In the next part of this blog I will outline what I did to generate a revenue stream from my website and how well it has been performing so far. I will also discuss what I believe has to be in existence in order to ask for sponsorship and receive it.
Very interesting reading – just what I’m interested in. I’m hoping to make some $ off of my blog too – tho i may be doing it differently than you because I’m earning income from day 1 by having affiliate stores that I’m posting ads for. Eager to read part 2!