Last week I heard that a couple of blog networks were about to shut their doors. Since I have a rather vested interest in what’s happening in the blog network industry, I was both sad and insanely curious. Who the heck could it have been?
Then I found out one of them is Know More Media. I’ve been friends with this team, Easton Ellsworth especially, since I started blogging over two years ago. I’m heartbroken to see this happen, mostly because I know that the KMM team invested their hearts and souls into growing their network and to lose that after so much time and work must be the hardest thing they have ever had to do.
The main reason for their closure is because of a stiff penalty that Google leveraged against their network. Google doesn’t like text links or paid reviews, and KMM found themselves between a rock and a hard place. Give up their revenue, or give up their Google traffic.
So what can we learn from the downfall of Know More Media?
You may be thinking to yourself – I don’t run a blog network, and I don’t sell text links or paid reviews, so this story has nothing to do with me or my business. And you’d be dead wrong.
The story of KMM isn’t about networks or selling page rank. It’s about having all of your eggs in one basket.
Even if you are a one-man or one-woman show, this is an absolutely critical lesson you must learn. My freelance business ended because of two reasons – lack of work-life balance and lack of diversification of my income. I started my business at the end of the dot-com heyday. 4 years later the market was so saturated with laid-off freelancers that I couldn’t find work at half of my old rate.
I was kind of surprised at the number of conversations I had at BlogHer with people who were struggling with this same issue – that the economy was starting to take a bite out of their income, and that it was getting harder and harder to find clients. These people were still thinking of how to grow their business by finding more clients. They are making the Know More Media mistake.
Let this be your wake up call
Blogging as a business is changing. Social media is changing. The economy is changing.
The way you make money today might not be there tomorrow – and here’s my own painful lesson as an example. When I launched my blog network last September, I knew I had one source of consistent income that would cover all of my expenses. So I ensured that I only hired as many bloggers as that source of income would cover. I also knew that as soon as I launched the network, that source of income could only grow, so I felt 100% safe in committing to moving forward under this budget.
Less than 45 days later, that income source was gone. As in, completely gone, never to return again.
I felt like a #$&* fool.
I’ve taken that lesson to heart – and since that time I’ve been working incredibly hard to ensure that no one source of income held my fate in its hands. I’ve significantly altered my advertising strategy, altered my content & production strategy, and now have diversified my business further by launching SparkplugU.
Can I say for sure that I will be in business 5 years from now? I hope so, but I can’t guarantee it. But I can guarantee that if I do go out of business, it won’t be because I relied on one revenue model.
My heart goes out to Know More Media and their team of extremely talented bloggers. I know that hindsight is probably a little painful to look at right now – but I can’t wait to see what you guys do next. You built a great empire – and your next empire will be even more impressive because of what you have done.
More from me on this subject:
Why you Will Always be Vulnerable to Recession with a “Dollars for Hours” Mindset
Diversify Your Income Workshop with Wendy Piersall & Marla Tabaka
(Starts tomorrow!)
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