The Australian, Entrepreneur
DARREN Rowse is an accidental entrepreneur. The Melbourne-based lay preacher has earned more than $700,000 from internet advertising since 2003 simply by working out what people want to read on the internet.
Now he runs the B5Media Network of 320 bloggers with co-founders Shai Coggins from Adelaide and Jeremy Wright from Toronto after 18 months ago raising $US2 million in venture capital.
Mr Rowse was an internet amateur when he started blogging in 2002 after a friend sent a link to a blog in an email.
“That first experience of a blog showed me how powerful the medium was at giving individuals voices and helping them form communities around particular topics. I started my first blog that very day.”
But he didn’t realise the commercial potential until 2003 when travelling to Morocco and Spain.
He posted holiday snaps and a review of his new digital camera on a blog. Nobody looked at his pictures. But they read his camera review in their hundreds.
Digital Photography School was born, a name that ranks well in the search engine optimisation (SEO) stakes, which means it is easy to find with a Google search.
As his website traffic increased to the tens of thousands a week, Mr Rowse also discovered Google Adsense.
Adsense, like similar programs run by Yahoo, pays websites for displaying advertising procured by Google.
Google maintains the ads and pays the owner of the website based on the number of times that users click on them.
Advertisers bid in a Google-run auction for key words such as “digital photography” and their ads are matched to websites that mention those words.
Typically between 1 and 2 per cent of visitors click on the ads, which pay from a few tens of cents to a few dollars per click.
Mr Rowse’s talent is writing content that is engaging enough to attract a massive audience and loyal community, while using the correct key words to attract the most relevant advertising for his audience.
“I just thought it was a hobby and maybe I could make it break even and that anything beyond that is a bonus,” he says.
Soon he was earning nearly $10,000 a month and, in the past five years, has earned more than $700,000 from advertising.
“I always had this entrepreneurial spirit, I guess,” Mr Rowse says. “But this was a complete fluke. But once I saw it beginning to happen, the entrepreneurial spirit kicked in.”
As a spin-off from Digital Photography, Mr Rowse started Problogger, a blog about making money from blogging. Each day 15,000 to 17,000 people visit Problogger.
Large advertisers look for a critical mass in audience before they adopt a particular media property.
According to Matthew Crook, managing director of digital media buyer Emitch Melbourne, advertisers will go as low as an audience of 50,000 to 100,000 unique website visitors each month.
He says depending on the audience engagement, an advertiser will pay from $10 to $100 per thousand people. The average cost to reach 1000 people across all media in Australia is about $20.
Increasingly, Mr Crook says clients use advertising products from the major online networks such as NineMSN and News Digital that track each website visitor to each sale and pay accordingly.
Mr Rowse also uses a similar kind of advertisement, known as affiliate advertising, which pays upwards of $50 to sign up a person to a service.
In fact, Mr Rowse has established his own affiliate advertising for his course, Six Figure Blogging, which pays 25 per cent of the $320 course fee or $US80 to affiliates.
Mr Rowse’s audience, like that of many web entrepreneurs in Australia, is global, but he sees a local potential.
“I have one little digital camera site which is on a ‘dotau’ (domain) and that gets a tonne of Google Australia traffic. It just strikes me how much less competition there is, particularly for search engine traffic in Australia. Obviously, the total audience is smaller. But if you can be a big fish in a small pond you can do very well.”
Traffic tips
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Traffic builds over time, which is why early blog adopters usually have more than new ones.
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Search optimisation helps build traffic, from the name of a blog to the words used in posts and tags.
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If you build a community and trust with your audience, you can make a lot of money from affiliate sales.
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There is less clutter of websites in Australia than in the US and potential to build internet properties with the .au domain.
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Give visitors the option to save posts to social bookmarking sites. They can multiply traffic.