The entrepreneur: Jay Brewer, 34 years old, is a former Web designer and product designer from Arlington, Mass.
The business: Mr. Brewer is founder of Blogpire Productions, a group of 14 consumer-product oriented blogs. Each blog focuses on a specific niche category such as single-serve coffee products, shaving products or poker products, and generates revenue through direct advertisers, Google Ad Sense and Web affiliate programs.
The idea: During the late 1990s and early part of this decade, Mr. Brewer worked at Abuzz.com, a portal bought by The New York Times Co. in 1999, and later at Affinnova Inc., a Boston-based consumer-products company, where he helped design the Dunkin' Donuts' coffee bag, he says.
Blogpire was not his first foray into the blogosphere. In 1999, Mr. Brewer launched
fastfoodfever.com, which featured humorous suggestions for new fast-food products. The site was an immediate hit, Mr. Brewer says, garnering about 50,000 hits a day, and was picked as Yahoo's site of the day. Shortly after launching, he placed a few ads on the page using Google's AdSense program, and then in 2002 added a blog feature that offered news on the industry.
But, Mr. Brewer says the inspiration for Blogpire, didn't strike until two years later. A huge fan of TiVo, Mr. Brewer says often relied on PVRblog.com to find information on the digital video recorder. He suspected that such niche consumer-product oriented blogs could be a profitable business model. While looking for a niche to target, he says he stumbled across articles and advertisements for Phillips' Senseo Single Serve Coffee Maker.
In May 2004, he bought a Senseo Single Serve Coffee maker and wrote a review for his new site:
singleservecoffee.com.
The business: Singleservecoffee.com immediately outperformed his expectations, Mr. Brewer says. Traffic was strong and within a month Aloha Island Coffee agreed to advertise on the site. "All of sudden I had a little business," Mr. Brewer says. "The site was making money from Google ads and Amazon, and it had its own direct advertiser."
Over the next six months, Mr. Brewer launched three more blogs -- kitchencontraptions.com, justthechips.com and shavingstuff.com.
During this period, he was the sole writer and designer for each blog, while still working full-time at Affinnova.
"It meant getting up at 6 o'clock and working before going to work and fielding calls on my lunch break and then going home and doing wrap up," Mr. Brewer said. "You have to be disciplined and make a schedule and really get it going each day."
Although he was the sole author for the first four blogs, Mr. Brewer's plan, he says, was to find a writer for each blog, with the goal that they would become experts in each niche category. In the fall of 2004, he brought on his first writer, a former coworker at Abuzz.com, to write for shavingstuff.com.
Even though he considered the sites successful, Mr. Brewer says he considered Blogpire a side business.
"It was basically a bunch of product-oriented blogs," Mr. Brewer says. "Sure revenue was good, but I wasn't so sure it could a replace my salary."
But six months after he launched singleservecoffee.com, traffic and revenue had both more than quadrupled, Mr. Brewer says. He realized he could make the blogs a full-time job, but he had to make sure the performance in that fourth quarter of 2004 was not a fluke. He set up a forecast for the first quarter of 2005 for the blogs to maintain half the traffic they had in the fourth quarter, with the notion that if the sites met or exceeded his expectations he would quit his job. He began looking for more writers for each blog, while rolling out more at the same time.
By March 2005, Blogpire had outperformed his forecasts, he says, and he quit his job.
The payoff: Today, his stable of blogs has grown to 14 with almost 750,000 visitors each month and more than 30 direct advertisers. The heaviest trafficked blogs can generate upward of $10,000 a month in revenue, while the less trafficked ones generate between $1,000 and $2,000 before expenses, Mr. Brewer says. He now makes more than he did at his previous jobs, while having more free time to pursue side projects such as consulting.
"This works because we are geared toward consumers that are looking to research something they want to buy," Mr. Brewer says. "And for that reason, we get [a higher quality customer] than other sites and that makes advertisers happy."
Mr. Brewer also says that since he started singleservecoffee.com he has seen blogs make gains not only in popularity but also in acceptance. Early on, when Mr. Brewer would ask for products to review, many companies would say no. Now, he nearly always receives the products he requests for reviewing and finds that some companies are seeking him out.
Mr. Brewer oversees all of the blogs, but remains the main contributor for singleservecoffee.com only. He deals with advertisers and media buyers, developing new blogs, and passing along information to his network of 13 writers, who receive 50% of their blog's revenue.
The pitfalls: Mr. Brewer says hardest thing at the beginning was the writing and he struggled to churn out four posts a day. "Now it is effortless, but when I started it was very challenging to get something short and concise and grammatically correct out," he says.
Although Mr. Brewer had plenty of experience at building and designing Web sites, he says he knew little about selling ads or dealing with media buyers. When companies suddenly wanted to advertise on the blogs, he had to determine ad rates.
"Basically, by looking at how much people are bidding for spots on sites like Overture, I got an idea of how much people were charging and basically would charge similar rates," Mr. Brewer says.
The future: Mr. Brewer says he plans to continue to grow Blogpire. He is researching new ideas, trying see what product categories would make a good blog. As he adds new blogs, he also plans to cull underperforming ones.
"I find it absolutely mind-blowing that you can do this full-time," Mr. Brewer says. "It's just amazing that thousands of people are reading what you put up. I really enjoy the community of it all."
-- Mr. Grocer is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Online.
