BloggerCon wiki open for business: Making blogs make money
: I just put up a wiki for the BloggerCon session on making blogs make money. Go here and PLEASE add to the lists of:
: Ways to make money
: What we need to make that happen
: The issues doing business raises
: Ways in which blogs can outdo traditional media
Please add more than subtract.
The hope is that we go into the session at Harvard with the discussion already well underway.
Also, please, continue to leave comments on the topic here and at the Bloggercon blog.
And remember: EVERYONE is active in this session — even if you can’t be in Cambridge. That’s all the more reason to add your thoughts and ideas now.
Thanks. See you at Bloggercon.
: See also the great discussion on BoingBoing’s hunt for a business model. Mark Frauenfelder’s post here. Forum discussion on the topic here. Rebecca Lieb’s good story on all this here.
: Here’s the text of the wiki so far… (click on more to see it all):
First, a list of ideas for how to make money, roughly categorized:
SELL ADVERTISING:
$ Sell ads yourself
$ Use BlogAds
$ Use Google Adsense
$ Find a sponsor (the Gonzo Marketing underwriter model)
$ Pay-per-click advertising
$ Pay-per-sale advertising (e.g., selling magazine subs)
$ Have consumers pay for an ad-free site.
$ The Salon model: watch the ad or pay
$ Create networks of similar sites for advertising (e.g., a gadget blog ad network) to get a critical mass of audience
$ Join a network (e.g., WeblogsInc.)
$ What else?
BECOME A MEDIA PROPERTY
$ Build a consumer site (e.g., Gawker, Gizmodo, Engadget)
$ Build a trade site (e.g., PaidContent.org, IWantMedia…)
$ Build a local site with local advertisers
$ Build a brand and sell out (e.g., Daily Candy)
$ What else?
SELL PRODUCTS – INDIRECTLY
$ Amazon affiliate deals, for example
$ What else?
SELL PRODUCTS – DIRECTLY
$ Sell books you’ve written (e.g., Lileks)
$ Sell albums you’ve made (e.g., Ken Layne)
$ Sell art (e.g., Hugh MacLeod at Gaping Void)
$ Sell T-shirts et al (e.g., BoingBoing)
$ Create a book from your blog and sell it (e.g., Tony Pierce)
$ What else?
BLOG FOR HIRE
$ Blog for a blogging company (e.g., Gawker Media, WeblogsInc.)
$ Blog for a company
$ Blog for a publication (e.g., CalPundit)
$ Blog for a product (see Hugh MacLeod on a movie blog)
$ Blog for a politician (see Dean and all who followed)
$ Blog for an organization (charity, political party, etc.)
$ Blog for a trade association
$ What else?
BLOG TO BENEFIT YOUR CORE BUSINESS
$ Use your blog to promote your consulting (e.g., Rick Bruner)
$ Use your blog to promote your service (e.g., Denise Howell and a law firm)
$ Use your blog to get freelance writing gigs (e.g., Tim Blair)
$ Use your blog to get a book contract (e.g., Claire Berlinski and the Julia Child blog)
$ Use your blog to get hired at a publication (e.g., Elizabeth Spiers)
$ Use your blog to smoke out what’s happening in your world and make contacts (e.g., Fred Wilson at AVC)
$ Use your blog to start a lecture tour
$ What else?
SELL SERVICES
$ Consulting about anything
$ Consulting about blogging
$ Translation
$ What else?
ASK FOR CONTRIBUTIONS FROM READERS
$ See Andrew Sullivan
$ Hold an online rent party (from the BoingBoing forum discussion)
$ Hold charity eBay auctions for your blog (people donate things instead of money; sales go to support your blog)
$ Other examples?
ASK FOR CONTRIBUTIONS FROM RICH PEOPLE
$ Foundation grants?
$ What about starting a blog foundation to support worthy blogs?
$ Other possibilities?
SELL YOUR CONTENT
$ Sell to your readers
$ Syndicate your blog content to other sites (e.g., IWant Media)
$ What else?
SELL PREMIUM MEMBERSHIPS
$ Members get newsletters
$ Members get to post comments
$ Members get content early
$ What else?
BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER
$ Use the blog to seed a strade show (see Werblog)
$ Run MeetUps
$ Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match….
$ Other ideas?
ODD IDEAS
$ Establish the blog credit card: for every one you sell and every dollar spend, you or a network of bloggers gets a cut.
$ Please, please, come up with crazy and creative ideas!
Second, a starting lists of needs — things that will enable blog business:
$ Advertisers will demand statistics on blog audience and usaage: total audience size; size for individual blogs and networks of blogs; traffic; demographics; behavior…. What else?
$ More sophisticated targeting: by content, by audience demographic, by author demographic, by geography… What else?
$ Network creation: How do we aggregate a network of, say, gadget blogs to get serious gadget advertising?
$ Payment structure: The elusive micropayment.
$ Payment structure: A way for blogs to take credit cards and not just PayPal. Our Yahoo Store.
$ Performance statistics (aka ROI — advertiser return on investment): The more sophisticated, the better.
$ An infrastructure for direct sales (how do you sell the T-shirts you made?).
$ An infrastructure for membership… including, perhaps, membership across any networks of blogs.
$ Ways to save money — e.g., P2P distribution and mirroring to reduce bandwidth costs.
$ What else??????
Third, what are the issues doing business on blogs raises?
$ Maintaining credibility in the face of taking advertising: How to separate church from state when you’re just one person.
$ Libel liability, especially when you start making money.
$ Auditing business relationships: People will want to make sure you gave them what they paid for.
$ Making a financial committment: Once you start charging money, you can’t just drop the blog. It’s a matter of quality control.
$ Learning how to market your blog.
Fourth (if there’s time) let’s list the ways in which blogs can outperform traditional media businesses:
$ We can target advertising on relationships, not just on adjacency (print) or gross audience size (broadcast) or word coincidences (Google).
$ What else?
