On Tuesday, Rand Fishkin announced that SEOmoz was in the final stages of raising $1.25 million. SEOmoz isn't a blog per se, but their blog raises the company's visibility and the lively comment section both builds and reflects a real community. Although the blog is not one of the SEO-related blogs in the Technorati top 100 (measured by incoming links), Rand Fishkin ("randfish") did make #44 on NxE's list of fifty most influential bloggers.

Back in February, the company updated their site and added premium content:

• information: The Illustrated Guide to Building a Search-Friendly Website, The Professional's Keyword Research Guide, The Professional's Guide to Link Building
• tools: Rank Checker, Crawl Test, Term Targeting, Keyword Difficulty, Page Strength, Juicy Link Finder
• support: ask questions, access the Link Directory

The about page still talks about "consulting, Internet marketing and search engine optimization services" but:

Right now ... we're concentrating more on growing premium content, so we're not accepting new clients, but still working with folks like NPR, Yelp, AllBusiness, Answers, etc. (source, emphasis added)

As of August, the new business was adding about $40,000 per month (my estimate based on membership of $399/year):

In the 6 months since launch, we've had approximately 1800 people sign up for our premium membership, of which ~1200 are members today (looking at our subscriber details, it appears that many folks will sign up for one month, cancel, then sign up again 3-4 months later). (source)

But perhaps not as profitable as one might expect:

Salaries are our biggest expense, but server hardware isn't insignificant either. That, combined with travel expenses (to help promote all this stuff) will probably make it so at the end of the year, we'll be looking at around 850K in revenue and 100K in profit, which, while not insignificant, certainly isn't incredible. (source)

Rand is known for being very open about the company. Back in December, he posted estimated financials for 2006:

Here's my quick summary of income & expenses from their longer list (combining categories, omitting smaller items and rounding off to emphasize that they are just estimates):

Worth noting: Rand was only paid $38,000 in 2006, and $26,000 in 2005. It's pretty clear his priority was to grow the company.

That's also the main rationale for raising money:

We literally have a hundred different ideas for tools, search analytics, tracking, guides, resources and more and we're in a position to recruit help from the best and brightest the industry has to offer... but, we can't do it alone.

In addition to recruiting, they're concerned about retention:

with our staff getting competing job offers every other day, we need to make sure that we can compensate our team at market rates (we've been playing the scrimp and save game a long time)

And getting paid (something I wholeheartedly endorse!):

Gillian and I will start to take home real salaries, rather than taking pride in our positions as SEOmoz's two worst-paid employees :)

Rand is also ready to accept the end game:

One final note on the outside investment - when we decided to accept this money, we took a step in a direction that will probably end with the sale of SEOmoz (as we're most likely not a target to go public). I think that this is one of the other big fears that members and commenters had - and I can completely empathize. However, I will say this - I'm in this for the long haul, and even though SEOmoz may, in 4-7 years, be part of another company, I'm going to do my damndest to make sure that all the great things about us get preserved.

The (pending) investment comes from VC firm Ignition Partners and Curious Office:

Ignition was founded by a group of former execs from Microsoft and McCaw.

Michelle [Goldberg] is a principal at Ignition, investing in enterprise and consumer software and services. ... Prior to joining Ignition Michelle worked as an independent consultant at Microsoft where she developed the initial business plans for products in the enterprise server space. Michelle was an investment banker at Olympic Capital Partners where she specialized in mid-market mergers and acquisitions.  ... Michelle earned her B.A. degree from Columbia, and an M.A. degree from Harvard University.

Curious Office [is] a new kind of "micro-venture lab".... If you are looking for seed stage or Series A financing or you just want more development, design and executive support for your own venture then there is a very good chance that we could be a good partner for you.

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An aside: I omitted a link to the SEOmoz premium content pitch. Rather than a clear, well-organized explanation of features and benefits, it strikes me as exactly the sort of long annoying sales letter that is used to hawk wares of dubious value. I suppose that approach must work with a certain audience, but I wonder if it's something that the company and larger SEOmoz community is proud of. Perhaps they just see it differently, or shrug it off as no big deal.

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I know of a few other blogs that have raised money, and several more that are growing based on internal revenue. If you've seen any that provide such a detailed window into their thinking and the numbers that drive it, please let us know!