Blog to Blog, Inc. -Turning a Cup of Coffee a Day into Millions -By Jeremy Wright

April 29th, 2007

23 comments

Expert: Jeremy Wright, b5media

#29 of 30

About the Expert

Jeremy Wright is a longtime serial entrepreneur who has been involved with the business, programming, and IT aspects of the technology industry for nearly a decade.

He has focused on communication-orientated ventures and regularly consults on blogging, communication, IT, and time management. Jeremy is the author of Blog Marketing, a business book on blogging as well as as the President of b5media, a prominent blog network.

Y’know, I remember back when blogging was simple. More community oriented. Less commercial. There were no “blog measurement” companies, no “blog consultants”, hell there were probably only 3 companies that had blogs at all.

A simpler time. A quainter time. The wild, wild west. Home, home on the blog… Where the jerks and the buffalo roam.

Yep, them were simpler times.

And then, just like our precious wild west, somebody realized there was gold in them thar hills. I still remember the original feud that raged across the blogging world back in 2003 about ads on blogs. At the time it was a shitstorm (pardon my French) around “running AdSense on your blog will compromise your integrity!” I mean it was serious! People unsubscribed from A List bloggers by the dozens! The blogging world nearly imploded!

It’s pretty funny looking back on it.

But eventually bloggers got used to ads. Readers got used to ads. And the truth was that almost nobody’s integrity was compromised. And those who had their integrity compromised were self-selected out and shunned.

From Day 1, bloggers have always stumbled along in the world of advertising.

Even at b5media, the blog network I help run, that we’ve often stumbled along a little bit. Sure, there’s a bit of a process for going from 3$ a day (where we started) to 3,000$ a day (what we’re about to reach)… but we totally ignored that process. We made a lot of mistakes. This post is designed to share a few of the lessons we learned while stumbling along in the dark. Sure we got lucky, had a fantastic team and had great timing… but we still made a crazy number of mistakes! I hope you’re able to learn something from them ;-)

Have a Vision

I remember in early 2005 when the first email that kicked b5media off was written. It was something like “hey, we’re all making decent money, let’s pool together and sell our blogs as a package!”

Famous last words, eh? (yep, I’m Canadian!)

Then, like a bunch of putzes, we figured “well, if we’re going to do that we should put them under their own brand” and “if we’re going to have our own brand we should launch new blogs” and “if we’re going to do that we should hire writers”.

One of our biggest mistakes in the early days was having a clear vision. We did fairly well at planning 2-3 months out, but we simply weren’t able to figure out how the company would grow 2-3 years down the road. What would it look like if we had 200 blogs, tens of millions of pageviews a month, millions a year in revenue? We were pretty good at imagining the status quo growth (10-20% per month)… But because we didn’t envision big growth, we often had to stop in the middle of the highway, open up the hood and go “hang on, if this continues we have some changes to make here!”
It’s pretty funny looking back on it.

Basically, because we spent our first year playing catch-up with b5media’s potential (which felt like trying to race a boulder tearing down a mountain!) we simply didn’t do enough looking ahead to the future and we didn’t do enough “what would happen if?” type discussions. Who knows where we’d be if we had (I’m hoping it’s not Iowa… *shudder @ Iowa*)?

Shut Up Until You Have Something to Say

I remember the day we launched b5. Duncan and I had been working basically non-stop for 3 weeks. We’d found bloggers, picked names, installed Wordpress, designed themes, put plugins in, done the homepage… it was crazy. Absolutely crazy! We were all so excited that we … well, we kind of got ahead of ourselves. The day of launch we realized there was no tagline. So in a rush of excited, youthful enthusiasm we made the site headline “b5media – a new kind of blogging network”.

Yeah, that was a good move.

We got absolutely roasted. Especially because just weeks earlier, Weblogs, Inc. had sold to AOL for 25M$ (give or take). Everyone said we were just followers, that we’d copied WIN’s model, that there was nothing different about b5 at all and that we’d be dead in 2 weeks, nevermind 2 months.

Yep, a great move.

It didn’t matter that we’d been working on the project for 6 months, that we were trying to basically do the opposite of WIN, and that the tagline was really just a funny placeholder to us. It also didn’t matter that we had big plans! Big ideas! Big … erm… yeah.

What mattered, and what I’ll never forget, is that we spoke too soon. We knew it would take time to show off all of our ideas, but we wanted to tell the world how great our ideas were right now! Hell, we still haven’t done half of what we originally set out to do!

Only talk about things when you’re ready to show them off, or when you already have a history of doing cool shit. And even then…

The Main Thing is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing

We started b5media with a few key things that we wanted to accomplish (one of the things we were very, very good at early on was documenting things… we had to be, until we got funded nobody in the company had ever even met!):

1. Make our bloggers famous – every chance we got we wanted to promote our bloggers

2. Value community – we honestly felt (and now know) that a strong internal community can make anything happen

3. Focus on great writers and keeping them happy – do this and the rest (traffic, revenue, etc) will happen

4. Build an industry – we’ve believed from day 1 that working with other networks, other owners and building real partnerships and sharing resources was the only way to turn the hodgepodge of networks into a real industry

Each of the biggest mistakes made in b5’s history was caused by us forgetting about one of these things. Sometimes we’d forget how important a healthy community was and make some bull-headed decision and it would hurt! Other times we’d focus more on b5 than on the health of our industry and find that other companies didn’t want to work with us as much.

We’ve never had a mission statement; the above 4 points are as close as we’ll likely ever come. But when you have a mission, you really, really need to stick to it!

Challenges of Growth

When we first launched b5media, it was our goal that within 3 months we’d grow to 50 blogs and 100,000 pageviews per month. What ended up happening? 100 blogs and 1 million pages per month. We weren’t a TechCrunch or a Boing Boing or a Gawker. But we had serious growth challenges. Hell, we still do!

We’ve had challenges in:

1. Keeping servers up – we started out sharing my 5$/month hosting plan. We’re now at 12 high-end servers. Each transition step was painful!

2. Managing the platform – running 200 blogs, maintaining the software, managing plugins, upgrading stuff… is HARD!

3. Paying bloggers – Ooh, blogger pay. We started out doing a type of revenue sharing (we did 60/40, but gave bloggers 100% of the first 100$ each month so it was basically 50/50). We’ve now moved to a 2-tier system where bloggers get a base pay (50-250$ depending on experience) plus a traffic bonus (1.65$ currently, though it goes up every quarter). The truth is that finding a fair way to pay the stay-at-home mom who loves gardening and just wants to write about gardening while also ensuring that the high-traffic blogger who has a massive audience are both compensated fairly is HARD! Paying our community has been, and will likely always be, a challenging exercise!

4. Stats – The metrics industry is in a state of upheaval right now. If we measure our stats the way some of our competitors measure theirs we’d be doing 30,000,000 pageviews per month. If we measure it the way others do, we’d have 7,000,000 pageviews per month. Finding a way to measure stats that is both accountable (ie: to advertisers) and stable (ie: for bloggers) has been one of our biggest challenges.

5. Designs – Yeah, when we have challenges we try and make them major! Blog design is a massive challenge for us. In an ideal world every blog would be totally unique, and totally imbued with personality. But doing that makes it totally impossible to manage the backend of those blogs centrally (which is fine with 15 or 20 blogs, but stupid with 200 or 300). Walking that tightrope between maintainability and customizability has been a huge challenge for us. The new templates we’re rolling out now are our newest attempt at this: they rely on a core template, but allow bloggers and Channel Editors to move elements around, do some minor restyling and add their own elements (like widgets and such). It’s not perfect, but yeah ;-)

And those are just the biggest challenges! We’ve gotten into useless fights with competitors, had to put out new contracts for all of our bloggers, had to move the company across country lines, raised Venture Capital funding, had to part ways with a founder, spent too much money on meals with potential partners, had to manage acquisition talk…

Running a blogging empire is a lot of work!

But it’s a lot of fun ;-)

If you’re looking to go from 0-3$/day or from 3$/day to a full-time wage or even trying to start a major blog-based empire, I have only 3 more tips for you:

1. Make sure you really, really want to do it first… It’s not easy. Sure, it’s rewarding, but if you can’t handle 100-hour weeks for months at a time it probably isn’t for you, heh.

2. Plan, plan, plan… Build financial models, traffic models, everything. Ask yourself what happens if you only grow by 1/10 of what you planned… Ask yourself what happens if you grow by 10000% of what you planned… Planning makes the world go round!

3. Build a great team… I can’t tell you the number of times the team and community at b5media have saved the company. Hell, how many times they’ve saved me and kept me sane. It’s way more balanced now than it was in the early days, but even today it’s the team and our community of absolutely amazing bloggers that makes us tick and that lets us do cool stuff. Without them, we’d be nothing, nada, kaput.

It’s never perfect. It’s always fun. It’s always scary. It never stops. But going from Blog to Blog, Inc. is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. We aren’t “there” yet, but if we can stay a community, stay a team and stay focused on what truly matters, we will eventually get “there”!

See you at the finish line. We’ll bring the mojitos!

About the Author: Karla Escolas is part of the CRM/Marketing team here at Chitika Inc. She also specializes in working one-on-one with publishers using simple optimization techniques to increase their revenue. Follow her on Twitter @KarlaChitika to find out more.

Share this Post:

Chitika|Premium Together with AdSense &
an AdSense alternative

23 Responses to “ Blog to Blog, Inc. -Turning a Cup of Coffee a Day into Millions -By Jeremy Wright ”

Make Money Online: Weekly updates 28-April-2007 Says:
April 29th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
[...] Jeremy Wright, b5media – Blog to Blog, Inc. -Turning a Cup of Coffee a Day into Millions [...]
Stevezy Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
That’s a pretty insane growth spurt man. I’m getting a headache even thinking about the server upgrades…
Matteu Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Awesome post Jeremy! I have always been fascinated about b5media. It’s great to know the process in getting to b5media.
Darsi Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Hey I was patiently waiting for the post from B5media. How awesome is this! Great post Jeremy!!!I am certain B5media is going places.
Jason Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I love the originality in your post! This was a great read with great tips.
jayvee f. Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
hey chief! i remember all of these from way back in 2005. its good to look back and see where we are now. i love this team :) and im loving where we’re headed!
Linked Intelligence and 5 More Blogs Join b5media Business Channel Linked Intelligence Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
[...] One more b5media note… CEO Jeremy Wright, as part of the Chitika Blog Bash, has written about the b5media story and some of the challenges they’ve faced in building one of the largest blog networks: Blog to Blog, Inc. -Turning a Cup of Coffee a Day into Millions [...]
William Lehman Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Heck, even in the last six months, we’ve come a long way. Great post Jeremy. The history behind b5media is pretty cool to look back on. ;)
Inside the Bee’s Ass (ie: My Contribution to the Chitika Blog Bash) Ensight - Jeremy Wright’s Personal Blog Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
[...] So, here’s my post: Blog to Blog Inc. – Turning a Cup of Coffee a Day Into Millions�(yeah, they picked the title). [...]
B5Media Growth - Licence to Roam Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
[...] A nice piece over at Chitika Blog, where Jeremy Wright, President/CEO of B5 Media talks about how the network developed and some lessons learnt. He discusses the 4 key things that could be regarded as the company mission statement: 1. Make our bloggers famous – every chance we got we wanted to promote our bloggers [...]
Alden DoRosario Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
My gut instinct says that the blogosphere is going to create the next great publishing empire (similar to Ziff Davis, IDG, etc).

I sure do hope b5 is the one to lead the way on that.

The good news is: b5 is on to an awesome concept and are grinding it out to implement it.

The bad news is: When I read your list of challenges it sounded very technical (things like stats, servers and templates). If b5 is going to be the next IDG or Ziff Davis — there have to be business challenges that you have not talked about. Things like syndications, partnerships, etc. What are IDG and ZD doing right by which they get their massive traffic and revenues ? Is it all servers and technical stuff ? I dont know the answer — but you probably do.
jeremy wright Says:
April 30th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Alden, good catch ;-)

It’s probably because a lot of our challenges so far have been growth-related.

Technical. Social. Revenue.

We’re now entering a new era, though, where business challenges are huge.

But, it’s way too early to share advice on that ;-)
colbert Says:
May 1st, 2007 at 1:55 pm
jeremy. great post…Tho its a bit tad too long for me but it greatly sums up the b5media’s journey. Cool
Jeremy Wright - Startup Lessons | StartupNorth Says:
May 1st, 2007 at 3:09 pm
[...] Read it all [...]
Small Business Booster » Latte to Big Bucks Says:
May 1st, 2007 at 7:46 pm
[...] Titled: Blog to Blog, Inc. -Turning a Cup of Coffee a Day into Millions -By Jeremy Wright, the post outlines Jeremy’s take on the whole b5media experience. [...]
Jason Says:
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Great recap and insight into where we came from and a glimpse into what’s still ahead for b5media. Still amazed and grateful everyday I’m a part of this team.
Dan Wilt Says:
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:40 am
The demigod of blogging speaks, and we say “Oompah Pah.”

Solid work, Jer.
=) Bnpositive’s Blog » Bnpositive and b5media Says:
May 3rd, 2007 at 10:50 pm
[...] For all of that information, many of you probably have no clue who b5media is or what they do or where they came from. Our CEO and one of the original founders, Jeremy Wright, recently had this post on the Chitika blog about our history as a company. Even at b5media, the blog network I help run, that we’ve often stumbled along a little bit. Sure, there’s a bit of a process for going from 3$ a day (where we started) to 3,000$ a day (what we’re about to reach)… but we totally ignored that process. We made a lot of mistakes. This post is designed to share a few of the lessons we learned while stumbling along in the dark. Sure we got lucky, had a fantastic team and had great timing… but we still made a crazy number of mistakes! I hope you’re able to learn something from them [...]
The Chitika Blog » Blog Archive » What’s with the name Chitika? Says:
May 7th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
[...] This post was inspired by Jeremy Wright’s (b5 Media) up-skirt post for the Chitika BlogBash. [...]
qldoih Says:
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Hello, Greetings!
Bye.
glitmdkadj Says:
May 28th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! ryystghrtd
mdempclipt Says:
May 29th, 2007 at 8:46 am
neamqhwk
wacyvuzblw Says:
June 18th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! iizcsgafebs