Review: 279 Days to Overnight Success

JP and I have been having a little bit of a conversation about 279 Days to Overnight Success in the comments.

At a simplistic level, 279 Days describes a strategy for building your blog in such a way that you can make a living (or at least a side-income) from it.

Is it the sort of thing you'll be interested in? Well, that depends on what you want:

• Do you want lots of people to read your blog?
• Do you want to sell stuff that you've created?
• Do you want to build a community of people interested in the same topic(s) as you?

I've recommended it to two people so far: Jenni (because she's interested in creating stuff people want to buy) and Morgue (whose ideas about small group action deserve a wider audience).

There's quite a lot I like about this manifesto. First off, it encourages you to think about why you're blogging - I've had to do a bit of that over the last year (and came to the conclusion that I just want to enjoy it - more fun, less profundity).

Second, I absolutely agree with the philosophy that if you're going to try and make money off your blog, do it with your own creations, not Google ads. As part of that, 279 Days describes the process of listening to your audience and discovering what they want. I find the process of finetuning the balance between my writing needs and what people who comment here say they want to be really fun.*

* Actually, JP, based on an earlier comment of yours, look for quite a bit more TV reviewing to show up here in the near future.

279 Days also mentions some other principles I agree with:

• Figure out your writing style
• Commit to a publishing schedule
• Know why people should read what you write
• Ignore vampires (critics who try to vapourise your will to write)*

* I've had a couple of these over the years, and I've had to figure out a couple of ways to deal with them.

This is not for every writer. The desire to expand your community - whether or not you intend to make money from blogging - isn't for everyone. But there's enough good stuff here that I have to recommend it.

Questions, JP?

(BTW, JP's blog is one of my top five reads on the internet: literate, thoughtful, funny meditations on growing up and parenting. This is a perfect example.)

Links - the future of media

Advertising

Pop-ups in TV shows are being considered as a possible near-future form of advertising. For instance, viewers might see a commercial playing in a TV in the living room of the set. Then the commercial would pop full-screen.

Netvibes is a stie that gives its users to build a web page that gathers their favorite sites, blogs, etc, together. It does not accept paid advertisements. Instead, it makes advertisers create a Netvibes that provides a useful service to its community.


Online businesses

Over at GigaOm, there's an article about how the toughest part of a new venture is to get your users to pay you anything at all.

"The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny."

As Anne Zelenka says,

"the reason there’s a huge gap between people paying you nothing and people paying you something is because that’s where you go from hobby to business. Between zero revenue and positive revenue lies your business model. Going from zero pay to a penny is where you’ve discovered how to make money–and that’s what businesses are about. The penny gap separates the winners from the losers, economically speaking.

Downloads, Music, & DRM

If every music listener in the world paid $50, they could have access to every song ever recorded while maintaining or increasing music sales. That's according to Cambridge-educated economist turned music-manager (Pink Floyd, The Clash, Ian Dury And The Blockheads, Billy Bragg) Peter Jenner.

Here's the story of how one man's terrible DRM experience trying to legally download a single piece of music has led to him giving up on online music altogether. Over-reaction or flawed business model? You can decide.

CD sales keep declining. The artificial demand for replacing all your old music with CDs has been over for a while. Now, sales in the first quarter of 2007 a 20% lower than the same quarter last year.