Founder of Weblogs SL at IE Business School

Entrepreneur session 1:

Julio Alonso

A calm, relaxed and an extreme humble personality Julio Alonso....he increased his interest in blogs after completing his MBA in 2004 where he found himself spending more and more time exploring and reading blogs including the blog of our professor Enrique Dans. He explained that blogs were not so wide spread in Spain at the time and the only people who really appreciated blogs were actually those who blogged themselves.  It was also during this time that he started his own blog but most importantly, this was when he recognized a great commercial opportunity in his passion.

On July 20^th2004, Juan Afonso decided to take blogging to a higher level!

Juan decided to find people who were passionate about gadgets and technology to start a blog writing about anything related to this topic. Out of the 20 people who were initially very enthusiastic, 4 remained and this was the beginning of WeblogsSL.

Today Weblogs SL has over 200 bloggers who officially work for Weblogs SL providing enriched content to around 40 different blog topics including xataka, blog de cine,  notasdefutbol, poprosa and many more... 

One thing all writers have in common however is that they are all very passionate about the topics they are blogging about. 

I guess this is the first and most important component of a successful blog!

Real passion! Now making a living from what you enjoy so deeply can only be a bonus!

Today there are 16M unique visitors on a platform that was simply a page containing nothing but information combined with excitement and passion written by Juan in his apartment here in Spain.

Julio Alonso gave up his 10 year old career in consulting to start a blog! His colleagues thought he had gone mad! His passion however kept him determined and immune against any criticism. While others saw his vision as unrealistic, he made it real!

After a successful career in consulting, the first money earned from his new passion was nothing more than 100 euros in the first month of business operation, which was generated through adscene advertising.

Nevertheless, he kept going and he started around 10 new blog topics in the years that followed. He explained his excitement about when they started a new blog about anroid and had 600.000 hits in the first month!

The most important thing he mentioned and really emphasized on was the importance of data gathering and data analysis.

The second most important issue for him was to keep a track of user behaviour in terms of ROI. His operations are worldwide and there is more than one site he needs to track. 

For this he uses a simple yet very sophisticated tool. An online preprogrammed google doc spreadsheet, which uses google analytics and plots all the information on one document in real time.

Here he can determine the ‘quality’ of the visits; Meaning the ratio, the frequency and of course the duration.

Since his business model is based on advertising, he explained some interesting concepts and illustrated some different numbers. 

Julio explained that only 7% of the visitors contribute to 79% of all the clicks.

What does this mean in terms of revenue from advertising?

This clearly illustrates that considering a CPC option must be the last option if there are any others. This view was actually shared by a professor of ours in another class who is also the founder of Busuu (a cool and fun platform to learn a language online)

In the discussion about RSS feeds, the drawback mentioned was the fact that the RSS subscribers are missing to see the advertising. My own technical knowledge with regards to RSS feeds are limited but the questions and comments are: 

1. Why can the advertising not also be fed through with the blog post?!
2. Julio mentioned that the name choice was very important and that people often misspell the xataka blog. My comment would be to obtain domain names with different types of spellings and different possibilities that people might type and simply link these to the actual site. This is what I did from the beginning when I registered my own domain name. 
3. I would be interested in knowing when would be the best time to approach companies to advertise on your site. I mean how many users would you have to illustrate in order to have a chance for a good advertising deal. And what is the best way to approach this? 
4. Would you employ a salesforce experienced in this or would you do this yourself being experienced in your business?