Interview with Jarkko Laine

1. You have two blogs - Insanely interested, and Jarkko Laine.com . Why did you decide to have two seperate blogs?

To understand this decision, you need to know that I'm the kind of guy who often acts first and thinks only afterwards. I think it was Skellie who was the first to call this approach the fire-aim approach. Sometimes, this leads to great successes, and sometimes to big mistakes. But at least it leads to action.

The case with my two blogs is a little bit of both. When I made the decision, I was at a point where I felt pulled to two directions: I wanted to write longer, magazine-like articles as well as shorter, more personal thoughts in the style of Seth Godin. The way I had organized my blog at jarkkolaine.com was somewhere in the middle ground. I thought about the problem for an hour or so, and then decided it would be a good idea to split the blog. I already had the domain name "insanelyinterested.com" reserved, so I created a quick WordPress theme and started my second blog.

And here's the successful part: Both of the two blogs have their own fans. I've had people tell me that they love Insanely Interested, and at the same time I've seen the Jarkko Laine blog readership grow even without putting much effort into it. I'm sure I could make a difference with both blogs if I put in the effort needed.

Which is what I think went wrong in the split: Two blogs require more work than one. Especially when one of the two is branded to running long, insightful articles! So, for a long time I ended up not posting to either of the two blogs.

Now, as I've been starting to put in more effort to blogging again, I'm starting with one, and focusing on getting the bigger of the two (Jarkko Laine) to a steady, focused growth path, and worry about Insanely Interested only after I feel I'm doing a great job at the first blog.

And to be honest, I have more than these two blogs in the planning. As a spontaneous, idea-driven guy, I can't help but come up with ideas for new blogs I'd love to run. But luckily, I've been able to keep both of my new blog ideas in the planning stage -- for now. I do have the domains reserved already, though.

2. You have a store on Insanely Interested where you review other peoples products. How has this worked for you?

The Insanely Interested Store was my first experiment with affiliate marketing. And again, just like the decision to have two blogs instead of one, this one was made in a very short time.

I think in the early days, I didn't quite get affiliate marketing. I didn't realize that the point in affiliate marketing is to pre-sell the product to the reader and let the product's official sales page do what it is designed to do: close the sale. So, instead of featuring products on my blog, I thought of affiliate marketing as a kind of storefront, and so I created the store. Instead of throwing the user to the product's sales page, tried to point him straight to the shopping cart, without even seeing the original sales message.

This, as it turns out, is not the way most successful marketers close sales. Instead, they focus on reviewing and promoting their favorite products and then letting the seller make the sale. While I did make some money with the store, and it's still generating traffic even though I haven't updated it in the past months, I wouldn't recommend doing the same. Good reviews and recommendations work much better.

You recently released the donation Can plugin. Do you have any thoughts about businesses or individuals having a donation button on their sites?

Making money from your blog is a tricky task and almost everything (as long as it's nothing immoral) is worth trying out.

I created Donation Can with non-profits in mind. More specifically, it was created to support the Train for Humanity project for which I've been working as the web site developer, and other projects with a similar idea. For those, donations like this are a pretty natural way of making money. For blogs, this is one of many options.

I know some people say that having a donation button on your blog makes you look bad. I don't think that's the case, obviously.

That said, how the donation widget is displayed in the blog makes a huge difference. You can use the donation button in a way that makes people feel like you are begging for money, and that can definitely eat your credibility, or you can position the donation button as optional payment for the quality content you are offering.

I haven't experimented with this approach too much yet, and only put the donation widget on my own blog to test my own donation plugin in action. But I have a plan to remove the generic donation widget from my blog sidebar and instead have a donation button at the end of each post. This would be the blogging world version of what Radiohead did with their record "In Rainbows": you get the content for free, and can then decide the price you feel it was worth.

I don't believe donations or optional payments will ever be the number one stream for income from blogging, but what I love about them is that there, you are actually getting money based on the value you create, not from selling someone else's work.

4, What do you have planned for the text is art theme?

You have some tough questions, Jade. The kind of questions I'm struggling with almost daily as I think about what I want to do on my Career Renegade path.

Text is Art was again a project that I started by hunch. Every other day, I feel it can be a great idea, but every second day I doubt it will ever make a single download. That said, I do have a plan for completing the product and actually making it into some kind of a small business: although the project is running on back burner, the plan is that on some time frame, I will first release a free version of the Text is Art WordPress theme, and then one by one, put out customized, more targeted, niche versions of the theme. Something like "Text is Art PROblogger" targeted to people who want to make money from blogging or "Text is Art VIDEOblogger" for the video geeks out there.

But let turn the table and ask you for help: what do you think I should do with the theme?

5. You seem to be friends with so many people in the blogosphere. What tips do you have for networking online?

This one is easy: be real.

To be more verbose, I never think about what I can gain from the people I call my friends. Instead, I try to pay attention to them, and help and listen to them as best as I can. From time to time, I make mistakes and fail to do what I think is right, but I have noticed that as I'm open and not playing a role, people tend to forgive my shortcomings.

Also, I have noticed that people on the blogosphere usually like people. More often than not, if you approach people you feel share your values and would like to connect with, they respond to you. There is nothing to lose, so I think it's safe to just reach out to people and say hi.

6. You have done a number of paid posts. Can you share your experiences with this?

I have done it on two sites, mainly: the now defunct http://northxeast.com where I wrote about blogging, and http://net.tutsplus.com where I have published two tutorials on web development so far. I plan to write more tutorials to Nettuts as soon as I find some time, but apart from that I'm not actively freelancing for blogs at the moment. Next, I'm hoping to focus a bit more on my blog and doing guest posting to market it instead of "just" blogging for money. But let's see how things go

Actually, there are probably many ways to get started. I started by writing things for free. I guest posted in a few places, including NorthxEast, so then, when I offered to write for a pay, the guys at nxe already knew me from before. That was probably the important part there. Also, it's important to just get out there and offer your services to bloggers.

But actually, I like the TutsPlus (including NetTuts) approach even better. First of all, they pay really well ($150 for a published tutorial). Second, they give everyone a chance: if you know your topic, you just pitch the topic to the editor, then write the post and submit it. If the editor likes your article, it will be published and you get paid. This way good writers who know their stuff get published and earn money and fame. Out of all the tutorials I've submitted (2), all (both) have been published and paid for.