Starting A Flagship Blog Series
February 4th, 2008 by CourtThere are literally hundreds of ways that individuals can make money through internet marketing. It seems that one of the hardest parts of creating an income with the internet is deciding what methods to use to achieve your goals. Flagship blogging is a huge topic that could never be covered in a single post. For that reason, this will be a series that will last for at least two weeks.
Definition of a Flagship Blog
A flagship blog is a special kind of blog that is intended to develop a huge audience or following. Flagship blogging is very different from ‘blogging by keyword sniping’. Frankly, flagship blogs require about 1000 times more work - but can also deliver 1000 times more results.
Flagship Blogging vs. Keyword Sniping
To establish a solid online portfolio, you want to create a variety of sites, and this will usually include a variety of keyword sniping sites. These sites are perfect for passive income because they can generally produce well with little maintenance.
Flagship blogs, on the other hand will require a significant amount of maintenance. Some of you might be asking yourselves why you would want to have a flagship blog in your online portfolio when they require a lot more maintenance than other types of sites. I have chosen to have a flagship blog because they have several remarkable characteristics that make them stand out. They are extremely:
- Brandable - Any good flagship blog is able to establish a strong brand that can be used to sell a variety of products and services. Since most solid companies are a combination of a trusted brand and a solid sales team, you can probably see why this can give you an enormous competitive advantage.
- Residual - After a flagship blog is established, its traffic will sustain itself, in fact the traffic of a good flagship blog will grow itself with little continued effort. With an established brand, readers will start to promote your flagship for you. Although search engine traffic is essential for the establishment of a flagship blog, they aren’t really reliant on search traffic for sustenance.
- Saleable - Flagship blogs are sold everyday for huge amounts of money. This has to do primarily with their ability to gather returning visitors, their brandable nature, and the easy ways they can be monetized.
- Monetizable - Flagship blogs have literally thousands of options for monetization. The individuals and companies that have the most success monetizing flagship blogs are those that are developing their own products, but there are also plenty of other options for monetizing flagship blogs. Most great flagship blogs have the ability to sell a variety of affiliate products and make great money through direct advertising.
Who Should Have A Flagship Blog?
In my honest opinion, no individual should have more than one flagship blog. This type of blog will require a hefty amount of time to establish and going for two or more will only delay the results exponentially. Anyone that is willing to pay the price until it works can establish this type of a site.
Flagship blogging requires patience, commitment, and determination. If you lack those traits, I would recommend starting with a different kind of online business.
Getting Started With A Flagship Blog
The first topic that we will need to go over to help you to establish a profitable flagship blog is topic selection. Since that topic in itself is enormous, we are going to dedicate the next post in this series to it. I look forward to helping each of you to see the enormous potential of flagship blogging.
For more information on getting started in blogging, visit this article: 5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog.
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February 4th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Court,
Little off-topic, but I wanted to know what’s your experience with Article Marketers “support”?
I’d hate to signup and then have difficulty with any support issues.
February 4th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
I don’t know what you need from them in terms of support, but you’ll want to be aware that the “all articles reviewed in 1 business day” is crap. It might be 2-3. That’s not rare, but consistent. It isn’t a problem per se, but it is a direct contradiction to what they say. I haven’t noted any other issues.
February 4th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Thanks for the reply. I noticed that every article I submit has the same non character formatting issue, and then they offer to correct it for $2.95. Is this a regular occurance?
February 4th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Jimmy if that’s happening you need to remove the formatting before you paste it in!
You can remove the formatting by pasting it into notepad and then recopying.
February 4th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Check here - Word’s Smart Quotes is probably your problem.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Microsoft-Word-Smart-Quotes-and-Article-Marketers-Dont-Mix&id=15624
February 5th, 2008 at 12:05 am
I think my comment got caught as spam somehow. At any rate, do a search for “Word Smart Quotes” and you can find out how to turn them off. That’s most likely your issue.
February 4th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Hmmm… Patience as the #1 requirement… I’ll stick with KS
February 4th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Looking forward to the rest of the series Court.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Great idea for a series. I’ve been looking for someone to address this topic in depth. Look forward to subsequent posts.
February 4th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
never had a flagship blog but hopefully uncover some gems through your series to begin one…
February 5th, 2008 at 9:48 am
I have a problem I’m hoping someone in here can help. I have 6 article writers writing articles daily for me and I use Article Marketer for submissions. They suck! I spend more time redoing article and eliminating too many occurrences of words, not even keywords and I’m done with that company.
With that rant being said…LOL, does anyone use ‘other’ software that is easy and effective for article submissons?
I’d appreciate any input.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
It sounds to me like you need to spend a lot more time educating your writers on what Article Marketer is looking for.
No matter what you believe, Article Marketer is acting in your best interest. They don’t accept articles that they don’t think will be accepted by some of the directories.
If your writers are writing bad articles you need to spend more time educating them.
February 5th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I’ve done everything they recommended to fix my articles but they are still coming back with issues/errors.
It’s been two days and I have not heard anything from support. I’m trying hard not to jump the gun but when you pay for a service you expect to at least hear back from support.
I only signed up because Court spoke so highly of Article Marketer. This is not good.
February 5th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Sorry jimmy but you haven’t fixed everything if they are still coming back with issues.
I’ve done what you’re doing thousands of times! Slow down, read what the errors actually are, and fix them.
If you want to find a different service, go ahead! However, you’re going to have the same issues because AM’s precautions are in place to help you to not get rejected by article directories.
February 5th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Court,
Your point is well taken. I will go back, slow down, and then do my very best to fix exactly what they say needs to be fixed. It’s frustrating because my articles appear on other article directories with no problems.
Case in point. One of articles is a tips articles set up like any normal tips article. AM keeps telling me that I have large blocks of text when I don’t. Most tips are 2-3 sentences long. Just frustrating!
February 5th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Jimmy I understand that things get frustrating when they don’t work how you want them to.
If you want to send me the article I would be happy to take a look at it.
I probably edit my articles one out of every 50 times I submit one. That means that there is a formatting difference between what I submit and what you submit.
Jimmy Article Marketer isn’t an article directory. They are a service that wants to get your article into as many directories as possible.
Can you see that it’s in their best interest to make sure they get your article into the maximum amount possible?
That means that if you have a formatting problem that will keep it from being accepted by 30% of the directories they will tell you about it and make you fix it.
Some people get mad at them instead of learning how to correct the errors but I can tell you that this is all for your own good.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Court,
I’m sending you two articles that I’m having issues with on AM. Hopefully you can help me sort this out. Sending via your contact form.
February 5th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I’m just wondering, how is this a flagship blog? Didn’t you focus a lot on the keyword “internet marketing” when you started this blog? Is the work you mention that is needed to be put into a flagship blog mostly socializing and getting people to come to your site? If this will all be answered later you don’t have to reply to this comment.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Focusing on SEO is a part of the flagship process. Building a flagship site requires a lot of different marketing angles.
If I had only focused on getting ranked for internet marketing I wouldn’t even be close to the traffic levels I’m not at - definitely wouldn’t have the subscriber base I now have.
February 5th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Court! I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. I’ve sent a few e-mails but haven’t heard back from ya. Let me know you’re still alive and shoot me an e-mail!
February 5th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Just sent you an email!
February 5th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
This sounds like a great learning series. I am all ears.
I also agree that AM is really helpful in getting the best quality articles out. I too have had to redo several articles more than once to get it right.
Jimmy don’t give up on AM you will be glad you stuck with them.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Well, looks like one of my first sites went to the sandbox. I think it might be because I had more links out than I had in (I was linking to downloads). I did subscribe to article marketer and I like the results I got on my first article.
I had a good laugh today. I was looking for keywords for another niche site and I found one with over 500 searches per day and that’s after dividing by 120! Only 6k competition and wordtrack showed links I could beat. The thing is…I found a site only weeks old with k sniper being used. Looks like we are going to have a competition here for this niche! Let’s just say the site is Biblical.. is it yours Court?
February 6th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Flagship blogging requires patience, commitment, and determination. Court I have these 3 traits in volumes, looking forward to the series
February 6th, 2008 at 8:57 am
I am not sure if one of those local newspaper sites could be a flagship site but I must say I had fun results from one post I made. Super Tuesday Results - Obama vs. Clinton
I wrote the article yesterday at about 3:00 and just checked today and i had a real increase in my stats. Anyway: page 1 of “g” and position 4. 269,000 pages served without quotes.
Ahead of youdecide, abc, aol news, cbs, etc..
What fun.
February 6th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Additional Page 1 results:
super tuesday results obama
obama vs. clinton delegate count super tuesday
obama vs clinton on super tuesday
and a few others.
This is along the lines of some finding a hot news topic and writing about it same day.
I think today I’ll write about the “election results”, “super tuesday delelate count” and “midwest tornado”
February 6th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Hey, wow great post. You are the first to mention it. really this is good post. i enjoyed reading it.
February 6th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Can one’s very first blog be his flagship blog?
February 6th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
[…] Starting a Flagship Blog (series) – Courtney Tuttle really inspires me at the moment and it is really quite freaky how he seems to put up a post on a subject that I’m thinking about at the time (do you ever get that?). I’ve been a big follower of Court through his Keyword Sniper series and just think this guy has a huge amount of information to pass on. Courtney looks into creating a flagship blog in your portfolio (mine is this one) and as I read the Flagship blog post I just kept ‘ticking the boxes’ (I find myself doing that a lot too) and realised that road2blogging is probably my true flagship blogs amongst my other keyword sniper (or adsense niche blogs) that I currently have in my portfolio. If you’re following the newbie blogstep series on road2blogging, then the keyword sniper series is a must. […]
February 6th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Court,
Thanks for looking at my articles yesterday.
I have a niche site (no pr right now but I’m out of the sandbox) that’s ranking nicely for some competitive keywords. My projected pagerank is a 5 according to iwebtools and I also have some really nice authorative back links.
My question is is it possible that my organic seo traffic will increase once my pagerank is given?
February 7th, 2008 at 5:26 am
Good idea there about a flagship blog. Trouble is i dont have a blog yet, so a flagship blog is very much in the dim and distant future.
February 8th, 2008 at 2:30 am
[…] Starting A Flagship Blog Series […]
February 10th, 2008 at 8:05 am
[…] Courtney Tuttle has started a series of postings where you can learn more about Flagship blogging. […]
February 11th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
[…] This article is part of my flagship blogging series. […]
February 13th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
[…] I dig further and further into the topic of flagship blogging with my mind, there is something that I keep thinking about that I would really like to share with […]
February 18th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
[…] Starting A Flagship Blog Series […]
February 18th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
thanks for the analysis. i will apply them to see the outcome
February 28th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
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