Alright, today we had our first lecture with Julio Alonso from Weblogs SL. It was quite interesting and Julio talked about the business, its financing and KPIs. There were lots of questions and the competition for one was fierce, I still have one that I'll mention in the end and I'll try to get it answered by posting it in his blog.
About the business, Julio shared with us that he was working in consultancy and that his passions for blogs and support from his family were the main motivators to start his own business. Actually, he still keeps his own blog that you can check: www.merodeando.com. As it's often the case, people thought that by leaving his job he was crazy but he went for it since he was spending more time blogging than working as a consultant.
Weblogs has a series of very specific blogs, written by real bloggers that talk about the things they like. According to Julio this is key to differentiate these publications from ordinary newspapers and magazines where journalists are not necessarily specialized in the things they write about. With that, each of these blogs attracts a very specific audience and Mr Alonso can sell target advertising space to companies that will most likely have higher conversion rates and increased brand awareness in these publications than they would anywhere else. As a matter of fact, Weblogs promotes that when selling ad space on its blogs by showing the audience of each one of its blogs to the advertiser, for an example check the audience of Enrique Dans' blog.
Even though these blogs allow very targeted ads, there is also a conflict between social media where people share their opinion about something and advertisers that want to promote their products and obviously don't want their ads close to bad reviews. Julio mentioned that the priority is still to have good content and real opinions and that they prefer to loose an ad opportunity in the short run rather then their traffic in the long run. I entirely agree with this comment and it reminds me of a case we've seen in another class here at IE where a company decided to create a blog with content generated and moderated by an ad agency where bad comments were being filtered what generated huge image problems for the brand.
Julio also talked about the funding part, and said that all the resources for growth have been internal. The development of the blogs was also done internally. Even though the beginning was tough, with their first month with sales of 100 us dollars, he believed the opportunity was great being the first to establish a network of specialized content in a market still not well explored in that sense, Spain. Another thing that allowed him to fund everything on his own was the fact that Weblogs has always been a lean company (with no secretary until today), and his desire to avoid conflict and misalignment with externals. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs and having taken a family venture course last term, I must say that one of the biggest reasons for a company to fail is the lack of clear objectives and more focus on conflict handling rather than managing the business.
Last, Julio talked about the importance of analysing his business and understanding his readers. For that he uses Google Analytics, which is free and he is able to understand in detail where traffic comes from (searches, referrals, direct); the most used words in searches leading to his blogs; where these people come from; the sort of browser they have; their average time in each page; etc. In another course that I'm talking we talk quite a lot about online advertising and the tools Google provides, if you want to know in a few minutes what Google Analytics can do for your website check this video:
Well, before this becomes a book, this is my question for Julio: you mentioned about the specialization and unique content of your blogs and how important that is. In Brazil your first blog was Motorpasion, that talks about cars but in the country there's a lot of very specialized and well known publications in the sector such as Quatro Rodas and in a good number of cases your blog actually refers to these publications. Based on that, how you define the segments you want to be in and how you believe you're adding value in this case given that most of these publications are off and online, allowing client interaction?
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