Sat 12 Jan - Request for assistance

Good morning,

This is off topic, hence can wait until a Saturday.

I want to develop this Blog in 2013, since it's clearly popular, but it's taking up an increasing amount of my time for very little reward (under £100 per month income from the Google ads).

Also, I would like to merge this site with my investing website SmallCapValue.co.uk to make it look better on WordPress, add new features, and put all my stuff in one place, so it's easier to administer.

Finally, I'd like to recruit some guest writers, so that we can cover more companies each day in more depth, with a handful of other experienced investors writing pieces, and me acting as Editor, reviewing & publishing (or rejecting!) such articles. Clearly I'd have to pay people to do this.

Therefore I either need to move to a subscription model (which I don't think will work, as people expect to read things free), and would be counter-productive since it would decimate my reader numbers - and what's the point in writing stuff if hardly anyone reads it?

So the solution I'm looking at is finding out how to maximise advertising revenues from this site, but it's an area I have little experience in, and very little interest in.

So am looking for help from any readers who are knowledgeable in the area of online advertising for websites, and who can help me maximise my income from the site, which would allow me to spend some money recruiting the guest writers that I'd like to bring on board.

Given that the readership here are all investors, hence are all by definition more than averagely affluent, I would have thought the revenue potential from ads should be fairly good, if I knew how to unlock it. But it's not a good use of my time spending a lot of time managing advertising, so ideally some sort of time-effective method would be best.

Finally, if anyone likes the idea of becoming a guest writer here, then get in touch. What I'm looking for is people with a proven track record (ideally from TMF bulletin boards) of analysing & interpreting shares intelligently, and who can express that in a readable form, and above all who is a canny & successful value investor.

What I envisage is having a small team of writers (5 or less), including me, who liaise at 7am, and each pick 2 or 3 company results/trading statements to write about. Each author then writes their pieces, puts them on the website in draft form for me to review (probably with a paragraph comment from me added at the bottom), and then published. So that by say 9am, we'll have a series of articles covering hopefully all of the non-resource sector, >£10m mkt cap, UK companies reporting on that day.

I think that will build into a really valuable resource, as over time it will become an online encyclopedia of small cap shares, where you can quickly search for incisive comment on any company.

Please let me know if you can help, and have the necessary expertise in either advertising or guest writer area.

Many thanks & enjoy the weekend!

Regards, Paul.