No it’s not a typo. I’ve emailed out notices to a least a hundred bloggers (and the WordPress support forums since it’s a WordPress blog) about finding a sponsor for the bandwidth costs of the We’re Not Afraid blog.
See my other posts on We’re Not Afraid here, here, here and here. See also my post on What The Islamic Terrorists Want.
Could be expensive image hosting cost did it in. It’s a blog marketing courage and fearlessness instead of fear, anxiety and helpless paralysis that some media companies and politicians have been doing. I said they had 4 million visitors a thousand photos online and several thousand in the queue and interviews on BBC, CNN, and The Guardian etc. I blogged about it here, here, and here.
I did it because I think it’s a brilliant idea and I’d like to see more courage and hope in the world, and fundamentally it’s a way that the average global citizen (left wing, right wing or none of the above) can get involved and make a difference in the fight against global terror. The terrorists are marketing fear but you can’t terrorize the fearless. See this post or this one
It would cost a company around $3000 Cdn a month from what I heard from Alfie Dennen the blogs creator who had help with several friends.
Well I apologize, I unknowingly misstated the numbers. Just heard from Alfie and the blog is getting 4 MILLION visitor A DAY. If you wanted to get that kind of visibility at a steal of a price, you’ve missed it, Redbus was smart enough to recognize a good thing when they saw it and are know paying for unlimited bandwidth and exclusive advertising for the blog starting next month.
So forgetting the fact that sponsoring his blog would have been a great humanitarian gesture and would have generated a lot of good Karma for you, by spending $3,000 (maybe a bit more), you’d get the PR opportunity of a lifetime. You’d be sponsoring a blog marketing courage and fearlessness against global terrorism that has gotten thousands of individual photos from around the world that appeals to people of all political and religious persuasions. They don’t allow political or religious statement just fearless ones.
You’d also be the ONLY ADVERTISER on a blog that gets 4 MILLION Hits a DAY for $3,000 Canadian.
To put that into perspective, the 3rd highest ranked blog on Technorati is The Daily Kos. I’m using that one as a comparison because he publishes his traffic publicly with sitemeter. His sitemeter stats say that he gets an average of 549,280 visitors a day. He has many ads on his blog. To buy the top ad on his blog according to his site will cost you:
$5,000 for 1 week
$9000 for 2 weeks
$16,000 for 1 month
If the people out there who read my email in their inboxes or from my blog posts or on certain blogs that posted the request or read the request for sponsorship on the Were Not Afraid Blog and elsewhere would have realized how good this opportunity was and sponsored his blog, instead of getting your ad in front of 550,000 visitors a day for $16,000 a month, they would have gotten a much better deal.
4 million visitors a day for $3,000 CDN (about $2457 US in US Dollars).
So you’d be spending about a sixth of the amount of a single monthly ad on the Daily Kos that is one Ad of many and getting more than 7 times the traffic.
You’d also be the exclusive advertiser on the blog, vs 1 ad out of 8. What a lost opportunity for a business that’s on the net. This is not to criticise the Daily Kos, I read his blog, it’s good and I’m sure his ad fees are no different than another blog his size.
One group of people I’ve emailed the request to was every single blogger on the 27 blogs on the UK PR Blog list, since I thought it’d be a natural fit.
To the best of my knowledge, only 1 of the 27 blogged about it. None of the rest. If you were a client of one of these firms or of the other PR bloggers (among others) that I emailed to get them to blog about it wouldn’t you be upset that you could have been told about this once in a lifetime opportunity and missed it? And I wasn’t the only one doing this. Too bad they didn’t have an ADDer on staff that could quickly recognize this opportunity and jump on it right away (impulsivity CAN be sometimes useful in business).
Nevon a UK PR blogger posted about it on his blog, so did and someone from Rainier and Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn didn’t blog it but did email me directly which I forwarded on to Alfie. Guy Kawaski, Steve Ruebles, Darrren Rowse and Rebecca Blood, and Drew of the Blog Consultancy did contact me but didn’t blog it. To be fair Guy doesn’t have a blog and some of my emails didn’t indicate the 4 million hits since I didn’t email all the bloggers at once and found out the 4 million and changed the emails mid stream Media blogger Jeff Jarvis blogged it and got 135 comments on his post and photoblogger Mark Goldstein blogged it too.
Vancouver based blogger Darren Barefoot did as well, along with blog consultants Ianiv Schweber and Arieanna Foley.
The last 2 BC bloggers run multiple blogs. Many bloggers in the Vancouver area, we have the 5th largest weblogger meetup group in the world that actually meets with 131 members. (since meetups self destructive fee changes). Luckily or fees are sponsor by Travis Smith and Susannah Gardner of Hop Studios. If you’re in Vancouver on the 3rd Thursday of the month check us the Vancouver Webloggers meetup, we’re a pretty friendly bunch.
I’ll write some lessons learned in the next post.