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Blog Engage $500 USD Guest Blogging Qualifying Article

Every once in a while, either with my wife, friends or other random people, we come across the subject of what would we do if we won the lottery. Some of the usual answers are buying houses, cars, vacations, giving money away to friends, family and / or charity, all of which I’m sure is common in all groups when the topic comes up.

It’s funny because it doesn’t really matter what the amount of money the lottery is, for this conversation to happen, just the other day in the weekly office raffle we were discussing what we would use the money for if we won, some said they would have a nice lunch, while others said they would invest their winnings in real lotto tickets, and this was all for only about twenty or thirty bucks.

Well today I was thinking what I would do with the $250.00 I could win writing this very post in the Blog Engage guest posting contest. The first thing that came to mind was spending it on domain names because I’m addicted to them, but then I sat there and thought, maybe I should do something more productive like add it to my marketing budget. In the end, I won’t know what I’ll do with the money, until I have it, if I win, but I think I would invest in becoming a bigger sponsor in the next Blog Engage contest.

All this thinking, made me wonder what I would do if I got a million dollars that I could only spend on blogging related activities, you know since a million is the magic number whenever these discussions come up.

So I thought about it long and hard, and this is what I came up with.

Choosing The Million Dollar Niche

Normally I choose niches for my blogs that I think I can compete in, and have a good chance of making money with, well with a million bucks, I can actually pick the niche I really love and take it to the top thanks to the marketing budget. So the actual niche itself is irrelevant, but its meaning to you is what counts. For those who are curious though, it would be a blog about hockey for me.

You could spend money on finding the “perfect niche” but to me the perfect one is the one you love, and you don’t need to spend any money to figure that out.

Buying The Domain You Need, Not Want

Obviously you can spend the whole million on a premium domain that is already owned by someone, but I would rather just get one that isn’t owned but that is descriptive of my niche with the main keyword in it, for example I would take hockeybite.com over hockey.com because the first one will cost me about twelve dollars a year to register with no upfront fees and the second one will probably cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just to acquire, and then you still have to pay the twelve bucks a month.

I would register the same domain in the .com, .net and .org extensions, and each one for twenty years. If you do the math ($12 x 3 x 20), it works out to $720.00, so I still have $999,280.00 left!

Choosing The Hosting You Always Wanted

Right now I’m on shared hosting, and as everyone knows, this is good for low or medium traffic sites that don’t host a hardcore amount of data (video takes a lot of bandwidth if you host it yourself), but if you want to get something more stable, which I will need for the expected traffic my new million dollar blog will get, you should invest in VPS hosting. Plans for VPS hosting start at about twenty bucks a month and can exceed two hundred a month, here I will take a top plan at around two hundred dollars a month, and will prepay for 20 years. Doing the math once more ($200 x 12 x 20), we come to $48,000.00, so I am now down to $951,280.00.

A Brand Is A Powerful Thing

Before I get to the actual blog design, I need my brand to be designed, and that includes not only a logo, but the marketing graphics as well, like the different banners ads I want for the blog, I’ll need all the popular dimensions to run in my ad campaigns. I would also include my offline branding designs like letterhead, envelopes and business cards.

You can get a whole corporate identity package for under a hundred bucks these days, heck you can even get some for five bucks on Fiverr, but if you want something really special, nothing beats a real branding specialist. A lot of times, people will share a logo or website if it looks “cool” so don’t go cheap here.

Looking at different design agencies, I’m pretty confident I can get everything I want designed and delivered for $20,000.00. I now have $931,280.00 left.

WordPress Is Free, But A Professional, Custom Design Isn’t

All my blogs run on WordPress, and I see no need to change that, but unlike my blogs I would love to get a really high quality custom theme, right now I use premium themes which are great, but I do have a million bucks to spend, so I’m going to get it my way, just like at Burger King.

I see some great custom work for under a thousand dollars, but I want something really over the top in terms of looks, but also in the way it functions. I’ll want all the best functions that I usually install plugins for, to be built right in, including the best SEO options possible.

I think I would actually get 4-5 different designers and programmers to try and please me independently just to get different perspectives. I could always sell the extra themes afterwards to make money, or give them away free for marketing purposes, but I digress. I would dedicate fifty thousand dollars for the design and another fifty thousand towards the functionality portion for a total of $100,000.00, no real math needed this time, I now have 831,280.00 remaining.

Blogging Is All About Content

Content really is king, your blog can look great but if there’s nothing for people to read, watch or do, they will be gone!

There are a lot of forms of content: text, video, audio, infographics, games, etc.

This is the first of the two really big spending sections of a blog, unless you do it all on your own. I know I could handle all the writing, and probably get some good guest bloggers for free, but I think I would to pay for some professional writing to go along with my own. Lets say I want to have one professional article each week for twenty years, that would be 1040 articles, and I think a good price to get real quality posts is $100.00 each, for a total of $104,000.00.

Now audio, video and games are a little tricky, because I’ve never really bought any of them and not sure if I really would or not, but I think a mobile app game could be good for marketing or even for revenue if it’s good enough to be sold instead of given away. I would be willing to invest a hundred thousand dollars on a good mobile app game that can be sold for like $2.99 or something of the sort and also be branded with my blog branding.

And the last sort of content I would invest in is infographics, I love infographics, I got a quote once from a well known company, and for the quality I wanted along with the research for the statistics, I was looking at about $4,000.00 for one graphic. So if I wanted one for each year for the next twenty years, we would be talking about $80,000.00.

The total for the content portion is $104,000.00 (Text) + $100,000.00 (Mobile App) + $80,000.00 (Infographics) = $284,000.00, I now have $547,280.00 left, which is still more than half.

There Is No Such Thing As Too Much Marketing

The headline is true, although a lot of marketing money can go to waste. You can spend as much as you want on marketing, its up to you to decide what you think will work for your blog. I could’ve taken the whole million bucks and gotten a commercial during the Super Bowl, but I don’t think I would’ve had much success, specially with a blog about hockey.

I love internet marketing and social media marketing, I even love offline marketing, so I would do this myself, but if not you could always hire someone to do it. A lot of it can be free, even all of it if you choose to go that way, but I would spend money on ads (Google, Facebook, TV Ads) and would sponsor events and people. I would spend $27,364.00 a year on marketing, which would come up to $547,280.00 over the twenty years my blog is registered and hosted. The number isn’t a specific number for anything, but it’s what I had left to spend.

My Million Dollar Dream Blog

Here’s the break down of the million dollars I spent to have an amazing blog for at least twenty years, hopefully I can monetize it during that time so that it can not only be self sufficient but it could also support me too.

Niche = $0.00 (0.00%)
Domain = $720.00 (0.07%)
Web Hosting = $48,000.00 (4.80%)
Branding = $20,000.00 (2.00%)
Theme = $100,000.00 (10.00%)
Content = $284,000.00 (28.40%)
Marketing = $547,280.00 (54.73$)

Now, it’s time to head over to HockeyBite.com and see what I’ve done with my million dollars, oh wait, I’m sorry, I was just dreaming about having a million bucks to spend on a blog, I got a little carried away.

What would you do with a million dollars if it was only good for blogging?

About Jamie Northrup

I’m a 30 year old Canadian web consultant. I love the internet and blogging, you can find me all over the place, usually with the nickname DeuceGroup, like on Twitter and right here on BlogEngage!

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