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Tom Mangan works nights as a copy editor and page designer at the Mercury News. He spends a couple of his off hours each day betting on his idea of journalism's future.

That involves updating his Cat Stock Blog, a site he created last month as a one-stop digital shop for everything you'd want to know about Caterpillar Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of engines, earthmovers and mining equipment. Actually, everything that a specific audience, carefully sized by Mangan, would want to know about the company.

Tom Mangan

What sets Mangan apart from most bloggers -- from most journalists, for that matter -- is his clear focus on the business consequences of the content he's creating.

I discovered what he's doing with Cat Stock Blog via a comment he posted to a Romenesko item about another blog launched by a journalist. Mangan acknowledges the influence of what he terms the "Romenesko Effect" on his work, and provides a range of tips for colleagues who may be considering a blog as a supplement or replacement for their newsroom paycheck.

He tells the story of his own experience with Caterpillar at My Caterpillar Story, and provides more background on the Cat Stock Blog here.

Here's an edited transcript of our e-mail exchange.

Bill Mitchell: How are you growing your audience so far? 

Mangan: Right now I'm on pace to make about 8,000 page views this month. That needs to grow by a factor of about 50 to make the blog a paying proposition. The audience is out there, it's just a matter of attracting them to the site and letting Google and word-of-mouth do the rest.

If you think you want to blog for a living, you must be able to answer two questions: Where will the audience come from? And where will the money come from? Then you need to face a brutal reality: at best your blog will generate a penny per page view; you'll be lucky to get half that in the beginning.

At a penny per, you'd need 10 million page views a year to earn $100,000. But don't let that scare you off completely: It's 27,000 pages a day, and you'll probably get a  couple pages per day per visitor. That takes your theoretical audience to 13,500. If you've been in the media business all your life you can attract an audience of 13,000 people.

"It's a fan site, with the stock returns as scorecard."This is why I think my blog about Caterpillar Inc. has a chance of turning  a steady dollar: the company has 100,000 employees and tens of thousands of investors. Adding my personal voice to a steady, reliable stream of headlines, commentary and cool links related to the company, its products and its stock price will attract people with a shared interest in the company's success. It's a fan site, with the stock returns as scorecard. Over time, two-thirds of a blog's audience will come from Google searches, so if I get just 9,000 daily readers and 18,000 Googlers, there's my 10 million page views a year.

Don't get the idea it will come rapidly, or easily, however: While everyone at Caterpillar has a shared interest in my content today, they've gotten along their entire lives without it and don't realize they need it yet. It could take years for them to develop a blog habit, but develop it they will. My wife and I speak of it as our retirement project (I'm 47 years old).

"Once you've identified your audience, you have to ask: will they generate profitable clicks?Once you've identified your audience, you have to ask: Will they generate profitable clicks? This is where Google's Adsense comes in. You want to build your site around high-paying keywords. This is why I tied mine to Cat's stock; I know financial keywords pay above average in general.

As you experiment with various sources of revenue, what have you learned about Amazon and Google affiliate programs? Have you begun selling ads yourself on the blog?

Mangan: You need a giant audience to make affiliates work because most ads have a clickthrough of 1 percent, and an even smaller portion of that 1 percent will actually buy anything. With affiliate revenue you really have to be able to say "buy this," and be able to live with yourself afterward. With AdSense, you have to learn search engine optimization (SEO) and build pages that attract popular clicks. Again, you'll make money only if you have a large audience of people willing to buy things. These are the big challenges for the midcareer newsie: having enough money stashed to survive till the blog becomes profitable. Google loves original content unavailable anywhere else, so if you like scoops, you've got an edge already.

Blogging can become profitable, and everything you need to know is available online, most of it for free at sites devoted to blogging for money.

"To me the trick is to identify a niche that's completely unblogged." To me the trick is to identify a niche that's completely unblogged. This is what amazed me about Caterpillar Inc.: It's a Dow 30 company... with $40 billion in revenue and 100,000 employees worldwide. It's a very important company, and completely unblogged. Virgin territory, you might say.   

Any reaction from the company yet?

Mangan: Not a peep. But I'm guessing if I was bugging them they'd have tried to file an injunction on me or something.

What else might journalists considering something similar find helpful?

"As a blogger, you have to earn every reader yourself."The most important thing: If you've been working in print media all your lives, you've had an audience handed to you by virtue of the publication's masthead. As a blogger, you have to earn every reader yourself. That means you don't blog about what you want to tell; you blog about what they want to know. This is a hair-raising 180-degree turn for most print veterans.

A blog with no audience in mind will never get more than a few hundred visitors a day. Even one with a well-defined audience can be hard to reach. It's hard, very hard work, but it's satisfying to build something nobody has built before. That's why I do it.