Congratulations to Matt who has just announced that the Blog Herald has been sold…. again (it could be the most bought and sold blog going around with another sale or two).
There’s no mention of who bought it or how much it was sold for but Matt has decided to sell it and other blogs that he’s developed over the last few months in order to get into blog consulting work.
It will be interesting to see how the Blog Herald evolves with it’s new owners and management. I’ve heard whispers about who will be involved and am fascinated to see how things unfold.
Hopefully it will not slow down in momentum which happened after it’s last sale.
Finally, Matt reflects upon the lessons he’s learnt from his involvement with the Blog Herald:
- “First, when following an existing blogger with a strong voice such as Duncan Riley, make sure that you have a solid plan in place for how you will be filling the void left by that voice.
- Second, having many different voices involved in a site is a very good thing. The current stable of bloggers at The Blog Herald rocked my world – they made the site the success that it was.
- Third, underpromise, and overdeliver. For a number of reasons, we had made public some changes that we were going to make – including a new theme and some new bloggers – and then this took us months to actually pull off. Next time around, I’ll say little about what we’re doing until we’re ready to unveil it.
- Finally, to hell with the haters. Listen to your audience, but make sure that you’re following your own heart – your own advice. We had folks telling us to do just about everything except pay attention to our core. Ignore them. Do it your way.”
PS: it will be interesting to see how Matt and his team go with their consulting work. Since hearing about his plans to sell up his blogs to do this kind of work I’ve been wondering how a blog consulting business will go without having some active and well renowned blogs to leverage. I don’t think it’s impossible – however I’ve seen a few others go the blog consultant route in the past 12 months and find it pretty hard going.
All the best with your endeavors Matt – if you put the same level of work into your new ventures as you did into the last few months of reinventing Blog Herald you’ll do well.
PSS: Aaron has an audio interview with Matt at Technosailor.
Thanks for the kind words.
I will confess to being a bit worried about not having a major traffic blog behind problogging.com – but I also believe that we’ll be able to build up traffic there with good content – and good products in our services line – which you’ll see down the road a bit.
Thanks again :)
Matt
I’m a follower of the blog herald, I do miss the feeling when it just started. I do agree that a strong voice is hard to replaced.
I’m consulting now more than I am writing. It’s a different mindset. I can’t decide which I like better, but I do enjoy helping a business that has only heard of blogging find a way to make it helpful for them.
I’m speaking locally on blogging/podcasting on Tuesday and most of the execs I’ll be addressing are intrigued about blogging, but don’t know where to start. It’s rather fun being the person that gets to help them along in this regard.
did they ask you when they decided t call themselves problogging.com?
I think they both made a mistake with that (as you have the that brand pretty much sewn up) but also think it is bad form them choosing a name so close to yours. While they say that they are not going to compete with you in that podcast with Aaron it does sounds like they are when they describe some of what they are going to do with the site.
It is interesting that they are talking about building a resource for bloggers when performancing, which seemed to start with the same sort of goals, looks like they are either going out of business, selling up or changing their focus (from what I am hearing being whispered behind closed doors).
Add to that the shambles that I’ve heard 1938media is in (another group that was getting into helping/managing bloggers) with Prince C apparently in massive trouble and I think it is a risky space to be getting into.
Lastly, I was dumbstruck in that interview with Matt when he said that they under estimated how much work it took to run a blog network and that they couldn’t make their blogs profitable. Sounds like just the type of people I would want to hire to consult with in getting into Professional blogging!
Making a blog profitable is not an easy venture. Good luck to the new crew coming in.
I just saw Matt interviewed at a blog called Deep Jive Interests where he said this,
“my writings at Problogger wil (sic) be more about how to build your blogs, make money, find great bloggers, etc.”
once again, I don’t see how this doesn’t compete with ProBlogger.net here as I think most of that is covered here, he even called his ProBlogging.com blog ‘Problogger’! Seems to be some mixed messages coming from Matt today.
Thanks for your concern Emily but I’m sure Matt’s being genuine in his comments and even if he does have some overlap with ProBlogger.net I’m sure there is plenty of room for everyone – it’s a large niche and in my opinion the more people writing on the topic the better for everyone.
In terms of the name – yep they are pretty similar. I’ve already had a couple of emails from people who have mixed us up that I’ve referred on to Matt.
If I were still in the consulting game (I got out of it a while back except for a very small number of jobs) it could have been a nice little way to find clients for me! :-)
I guess it will probably cause some confusion for some but hopefully not too much.
I guess I’m not surprised at the reaction of some people here to another blogger using the Problogger name but as Darren says there really is plenty of room for both Darren and Matt.
In fact it may surprise some people but there are more people out there on the Net who have no idea of what a blog is than there are who do. For those of us here in the blog world it sometimes seems like the centre of the universe but mention the word ‘blog’ to most people and their response is “Huh?”
Names that mean plenty to us are basically unknown to most Net users who couldn’t give a toss about Jason Calacanis or any of the ‘A Listers’ and until bloggers realise that they’re basically minnows in a huge ocean blogging is going to remain insular, isolated and unknown no matter how good we might think it is.
How many of you are actually taking the benefits of blogs to those who know nothing about blogs? How many of you are actively promoting your blogs in any other way than by trading worn out traffic via your blog rolls?
My partner is currently working on a deal to take blogging to aboriginal women who are only now learning how to use a computer. She wants to give them a voice and encourage them to claim their ‘space’ on the Net.
How many of you even bother to talk to your neighbours about it?
Here endeth the rant.
Wow… Stuart, you seem to be making huge assumptions about a group of people you don’t know anything about. My wife & I have used blogs to connect with cancer patients all over the world, most of whom are not bloggers.
There are many, many amazing people using blogs to reach out across the gap…