I started working on OIOpublisher in July. In the first few months, the only “big” exposure I got was through a John Chow paid review, which sent me a nice bit of traffic, and a few new users.

Last week saw a small change in fortunes however, when John Cow took up OIOpublisher and started using it on his blog. He even endorsed it, with 2 of the last 4 posts being OIOpublisher related! It was also during that time that I put a price tag on access to everything, after months of giving it all away for free, which has so far been a hard sell. It’s interesting to note that quite a few make money online bloggers are not actually willing to spend even a little capital ($37 isn’t a huge amount after all) to monetise their site.

To a degree I understand why, since they feel that they won’t make any direct sales. My next task therefore is to show them that there is a lot more to it than direct sales. The real aim of OIOpublisher is to build a blogging social network that also covers monetisation, using the following strategy:

1.) Bloggers signup, and are able to use the marketplace, network through their user profiles, and form blogging groups through the conversation system.

2.) Working together, they can then start to produce more quality content through the conversation system, which in turn can start to draw more traffic into bloggers within that group, because of the fact that the reader is led through the conversation, from blog to blog (and can also get a synopsis from OIO itself).

3.) Now they are in a position to combine other social networking techniques with my own, to take things up another notch. For example, stumbling a conversation topic, should lead to a surge of traffic, which is more likely to be picked up along the way than if it was a single post.

4.) Finally, now there is increased traffic and (hopefully) readership, the task of monetising the content becomes easier for all concerned. Not only that, but the aim of building an “overflow” ad network around the plugin would ensure that inventories were filled even if not all spots had been sold. They would most likely work on a CPC basis, meaning the traffic would come in handy on 2 levels.

Now, when you look at OIOpublisher again, remember that it was never, and shall never be, just a plugin. It has the potential to be so much more, and is quite frankly a league apart from anything else out there. All I have to do now is convince people of that!

PS. all this has meant I haven’t even been able to finish off my first blogging theme yet! Let’s hope I can find some time in the near future.