20600674 - Entry #7 (I Can Has Cheezburger?)

Eric Nakagawa, a software developer in Hawaii, posted a single photo of a fat, smiling cat he found on the Internet, with the caption, "I can has cheezburger?" in January, 2007, at a Web site he created. It was supposed to be a joke. Soon after he posted a few more images in the same vein: cute cats with funny captions written in a silly, invented hybrid of Internet shorthand and baby-talk. Then he turned the site into a blog, so that visitors could comment on the postings. What happened after that would have been hard for anyone to predict.
"We just thought, O.K., they're funny,"Nakagawa says. "Suddenly we started getting hits. I was like, where are these coming from?"

He saw traffic on the blog, I Can Has Cheezburger, which he runs with his partner, "Tofuburger" (she refuses to disclose her real name) double each month: 375,000 hits in March, 750,000 in April, 1.5 million in May. Cheezburger now gets 500,000 page views a day from between 100,000 and 200,000 unique visitors, according to Nakagawa. The cheapest ad costs $500 for a week. The most expensive goes for nearly $4,000. Nakagawa, an accidental entrepreneur who saw his successful business materialize out of the ether, quit his programming job at the end of May: "It made more sense to do this and see how big it could get."

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Take a look at this! People make money when they do something that they are interested or are passionate about. Many of the most popular bloggers have similar stories as Nakagawa. They started out with a niche idea - an inside joke, a particular obsession. Then, what happens?! It explodes! It becomes so popular!

You might be wondering, "how do these blogs make people keep returning to their sites?"

Nakagawa answered that they basically create a playground where people keep coming to play, so they are tyring to create new games all the time.

How to attract readers:

Don't just let readers rate or comments on the posts. Make the blog interesting by making the readers also create the entries. In the Cheezburger's site, fans submit pictures, write funny captions, and send them in. Any visitor can vote on the subminssions, and the most popular ones make it to the main page. This is why readers keep coming back. It is a community! They interact with the blog. The idea of building a community around content supplied by users sustains several top blogs, and most put the idea of community ahead of making money.

Why is blogging so popular and successful? It is because blogging creates a direct connection between authors and readers, a conversation with distinct voices carried out in comments and e-mails and other blogs.

To see how top bloggers earn money, go to the sites below: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/07/0714_bloggers/index_01.htm
http://icanhascheezburger.com/

By: 20600674 (Entry #7)