The Blog Mastermind program is a very interesting and helpful coaching program that blogging expert Yaro Starak puts on. I have learned so much from his various articles and multimedia blog posts. Recently he did an interview with a friend of his Alborz Fallah who is the creator of CarAdvice.com.au. Apparently this blog of Al’s is brining in over $20,000 per month in revenue and is reportedly valued at $5 million. Below is the interview podcast of Yaro with Alborz Fallah of CarAdvice.com.au. I have posted my own particular notes that stood out to me and how they relate to open soruce.

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My Notes from the Interview

• He started 3 blogs before finally finding his 1 blog that worked out for him
• In the beginning he used Google Adsense as his main revenue model. He did not want to flood his blog with advertisements
• CarAdvice is an example of a blog competing with major mainstream media websites. This is possible
• Marketing for the blog was done all through word of mouth. None through traditional marketing
• He gets about 5,000 unique visits per day which is translating into about $20,000 in income per month. Interesting!
• He found a way to get a good domain name in the beginning. Don’t listen to people who say that all the good domain names are gone.
• The first year or so blogging he had a full time job that he was committed to, and he still managed to write on the blog on the side.
• His first blog was “ugly” and it used the Wordpress content management system. I still don’t think his blog even now looks all that good. But that’s just my opinion.
• He blogs on his passion. Don’t waste your time blogging something you’re not passionate about.
• In the beginning he wrote consistently 2 blog articles per day
• If you need to keep a day job, find one that let’s you blog during the day
• His blog was based entirely on his opinion. He never let advertising or marketing get in the way of his opinion. He spoke the truth on his reviews of cars, and his readers loved him for it.
• When creating his blog titles, he would just ask himself, “what would I type into Google if I were looking for information about this car?”"
• Always be honest in your blogging
• Wordpress plugins for SEO were essential to him
• About 80% of all of his traffic come organically from the search engines. You can probably estimate from there that about 80% of that is coming from Google.
• He just focuses on Content when it comes to SEO. He figures if he writes great quality content, that the rest will take care of itself.
• Breaking news on cars is a big thing for him. He’s one of the first to report news on cars, even before the major media websites in his niche.
• Affiliate Marketing does not work that well for him.
• He has never copied and pasted content on the blog. Every blog article is written from scratch every time.
• He still only uses YouTube for all of his video hosting and sharing.
• He always focuses on writing about things that he finds interesting, rather than being motivated by what’s profitable or what will get more traffic!

How This Relates to Programmers & Designers

If Open Source teaches us anything it’s that we can all collaborate together to build and design things on the Internet! It’s how we really advance Internet technologies. Even though there are many blogs out there on code and graphic design, there are still many programmers and designers who are not sharing their knowledge. If I could get you to understand that you can make money by sharing your code or your graphic design, then you would be off blogging just as much as I am. Keep that in mind! Programmers, share your code! Designers, share your designs and tutorials! And make some money doing it. If you want to learn more about blogging and how to do it effectively and make money doing it, check out the Blog Mastermind website.