Picnics
What should be free? Who pays for it? Where does it all go? Should blogging and money be kept far apart from each other? Should blogs have ads? Are all links really paid, as the story goes? How does money impact authenticity? Who should pay for the picnic? Let’s talk about money. Monetization. Loot.
These are questions that we all have opinions about. People and companies have been vilified for their choices. The righteous burn their effigies on the front lawn of any blog that mixes free content with advertising. The very notion that commerce and information exchange be permitted to mix seems incongruous. Never mind the fact that media works that way. Never mind the fact that CHURCH works that way. There has to be a strong distance between the exchanges, or else it seems evil. You’re charging your community, etc.
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. Partly because it’s my job to understand how to mix information and money-making. The other part of it is because I like to help people figure out how to do business in the Internet age. I experiment, share the results, and experiment some more.
I also run conferences, both professionally, and for passion. Between media making, conferences, and the other ways that I work in the information-for-money business, I’ve got some ideas, and I’m going to share my perspective. I predict this post will be one of the more polarizing of my last several months. You’ll either get it and agree, or you’ll tell me why the world must all function on what’s free. I can argue both sides of the coin.
The Triangle
In the fall of 2006, I quit my day job and joined the circus. Jeff Pulver, legendary VoIP pioneer and long-time producer of the VON conference series hired me. In the waning months of 2007, I parted ways and joined Stephen Saber’s CrossTech Media. During this same time frame, I also worked with Christopher S. Penn and Whitney Hoffman on PodCamps.
In events, there’s a triangle. I learned this mostly from Jeff. If you can, the best of all worlds goes like this:
* Attract the brilliant people and make them the community.
* Charge the businesses who support this community for the event.
* Make it worth it for those businesses, so that they want to keep supporting the event.
So, if you want your “friends” to come to a conference, make the event such that it will help them do their job better. Then, don’t ask your friends for money. Ask their employers for money (ticket cost). Then, ask exhibitors and sponsors who want the friends as customers for money. Then, you have enough money to run a conference, and make a living trying to build information.
For the content, focus super hard on the people/friends. Don’t look to what the sponsors/exhibitors think the story is. They know more about the today than they do the tomorrow. Unless you make friends with tomorrow-focused companies (my favorite plan).
That’s kind of traditional conferences in a nutshell. It’s WAY not easy. But that’s the rough premise.
Unconferences, like PodCamp and BarCamp and the like, do it differently. The premise is like this: we can all get together for a minimal cost and run something that’s useful, without making it a business unto itself. We can subsist, and everyone will leave better educated.
With PodCamps, we’ve built and built on the experience, such that the ones we run in Boston cost more than a typical *.Camp, but the payload is (hopefully) much more focused. We’ve asked for more money from the community, but we’ve turned that back around into a quality event. We find sponsors who want access to our community, and then we try to matchmake that relationship a little, so that everyone understand’s each other’s potential value. BUT we do it without a lot of heavy-handedness at PodCamps. It’s more organic. That’s the whole unconference thing.
YOU can start an unconference. You don’t need anyone’s permission.
So there are two models.
Content on Websites
The web has crushed a lot of former money makers. Look at newspapers. Look at magazines. We are VERY used to getting our content for free. We love it free. And we are finding more and more ways to get top shelf, quality content for free. It’s a great and wonderful thing. How many of us would pay a few bucks for a blog? Not very many. (Well wait, aren’t Kindle users doing just that?)
So there are all kinds of people churning out quality content, and the basic premise is that they’ll get their money elsewhere. I sure do. Lots of people do. But let’s go deeper for a second.
You learn actionable things from ProBlogger, from CopyBlogger, from Seth Godin, from me, and from others. All that content is free. It’s out there for you to learn from, profit from, build business with, and hopefully succeed. Heck, if we’re not helping you succeed, then why are we doing this daily?
Often discounted in these conversations are blogs about making money online. Those fall into another whole category of the web. And yet, some of those folks, like Ted Murphy are out there just trying to come up with new ways to build better relationships between people who have something to sell and people who want to facilitate that sale. There’s a whole culture out there figuring this stuff out, and I’m getting to know more and more of them. As I do, my mindset on how blogs interact with advertising and marketing has changed a great deal.
My Current Thinking Boiled Down
- Making money isn’t evil. HOW you make money can be. Keeping the whole picture in place helps. (For instance, in my case, I sell certain services and information - like the New Marketing Summit, but then I give others away free/cheap - my blog and PodCamp).
- Disclosure is key. If you’re going to sell something on your site, disclose that you’ve got a relationship with that company/product. ( I show my disclosures on my About page).
- Maintain the triangle. I don’t want YOU to pay for my content. I want people who need my help professionally to pay for my distilled thinking.
- Keep context. My site is about educating you. If it becomes about products to market, that’s a context swap. If I decide to build a site about selling you things, I’ll make that another URL, and you can opt to visit or not.
- Someone has to pay for the picnic. There are some really great bloggers out there who are blogging a bit less lately. I won’t name them. They have jobs that require them to focus down hard on revenues right now. I try my hardest to have the things I’m paid for (like conferences) keep me out here on the blanket giving away delicious snacks. But someone always has to pay for the picnic.
Your Take
It’s your turn to weigh in. Why should everything be free? Why are ads evil? Where do you think this money should be made? If you were running the business, [chrisbrogan.com], or Scobleizer.com , or Annhandley.com , or whoever, what would you do differently? How would YOU make your money?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Photo credit, Timothy Lloyd
The Way I Wish Advertising Worked
John Chow is a smart guy. In fact, I’m regretting to death that I didn’t bend his ear when he was in Boston at the Affiliate Summit. I just didn’t know him well, and didn’t know exactly what I would’ve wanted to ask. He spends a lot of time figuring out how to make money online, which isn’t usually my beat.
Know what got me to write about him? Crabs. Watch this video:
What came to mind after watching that video was, “Oh man, I *MUST* go to that restaurant the next time I’m visiting Washington state.” I mean, hunger pains level of desire just shot into me. If you like seafood, you must agree with me. Right?
That’s better than any ad in any paper, or any banner on John’s site.
That’s the way I wish advertising worked.
How to Create Business From a Blog
This post was a request from Eric.
How to Create Business from a Blog
First, let’s agree that there are many ways to create business from a blog. I’ll cover a handful to start. You’re very welcome to share more advice and ideas in the comments section.
Straightforward Sales
Blogs are a wonderful piece of software to use as a home base for several kinds of website projects. For example, I believe Chris Pearson used a Wordpress blog to build his DIYThemes.com site. There, he’s selling a beautiful theme called Thesis for $87. That’s one way to create business from a blog: a simple sales platform.
Affiliate Marketing
Another way is through Affiliate Marketing. For example, go back and hover your mouse over the URL for the two links to Chris’s latest project. You should see this: http://diythemes.com?a_aid=t4ag3 . That part after the ? is an affiliate code. Some sites don’t really divulge that they’re doing affiliate marketing. Others make disclosure very vital. Now that you know to look for it, you might look at other blogs you read and see when they’re slipping you an affiliate tag here and there.
Want to learn more about Affiliate Marketing? I’ve been reading Revenews, and I also plan to attend (and speak at) the upcoming Affiliate Summit event in Boston in August 2008. One reason why I plan to attend is to understand this space more, because I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about the variations on the theme. Affiliate marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry, so there’s something there to consider.
Lead Generation
Blogs are a great way to establish thought leadership, and further, to encourage lead generation. For instance, a lot of what I do by writing this blog is share with the world at large what I know about social media and how it might apply to your business. My primary goal is to give you as much information as I can possibly share, so that you can likely run off and solve most things on your own.
My secondary goal is to encourage you to contact me, should you have business needs. I work with CrossTech Partners to help me fulfill larger projects (such as building Market Relationship Management platforms and the like). This blog often starts conversations with people who need next-step help. And that’s great. It’s another value, and another way to create business from a blog.
A great person who gives in abundance with her blog is Liz Strauss. She derives some amount of leads from her thoughtful and meaningful efforts, too.
Content Marketing
He could tell you this every day, but Brian Clark has been praising the value of content marketing since 2006. This is basically how the Financial Aid Podcast brought millions in revenue to Christopher S. Penn’s Student Loan Network. There’s nothing shady about it. Chris creates great podcasts and blog posts and uses the trust earned through information sharing and helping others as one way to drive sales of his primary product: student loans. He’s the only student loan guy I know who gets profiled by BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, and all kinds of other press.
See also Gary Vaynerchuk, the only wine seller I know who has a Hollywood agent. He’s that cool.
Content marketing is essentially doing great things with content but with a goal that this work leads back to a sale on top of being useful and interesting. To me, this is where it’s at right now. If I were looking to build even more business, and I might just do so, I’d blend content marketing with a mix of my own products, and perhaps some well-chosen affiliate opportunities, and start from there.
By the way, content marketing has the added benefit of helping you with organic search engine optimization, meaning it helps people searching for things find it easier.
Other Opportunities
There are lots of other ways to make money from a blog. I’m definitely not qualified to talk about search marketing, for instance, but this article by Paul J. Bruemmer looks like a useful starting point. There are also projects like Ted Murphy’s Izea, which covers pay-per-post and Social Spark. I’m not versed enough to talk about any of these, but maybe Ted will stop by and talk about his, or you can swing by the IZEA blog.
The web is an interesting place to make money these days, and there are many ways to take a swing at it. Be open about what you’re doing. Be helpful. Offer value. And maybe something will come of it for you.
**Update: I’m not sure how I forgot Darren’s and Chris’s book - ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income . (And yes, that’s an affiliate link). ;)
Your Ideas
If you have some other great ideas for creating business from a blog, let’s talk about them in the comments. Some will be promoted to the main post via updates, so please fill out your URL when you comment, so I can give you credit if I use it in the post.
What do you think?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, Rochelle, et al
YouTube is Losing Hundreds of Millions a Month
Think about this, oh followers of the Cult of Chad: where do YOU go to remember old TV clips, to find out what your favorite bands from high school and college sound like these days, the trailer for that new movie? YouTube, right? It’s easy. It’s right there. Powerful search, billions of videos, and nothing too tricky to watching one. And yet, I think they’re missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars a month. Here’s how.
Affiliate Sales
I went searching for the mashup David Usher’s Kill the Lights single mixed with the new Batman Dark Knight movie trailer. (By the way, Google threw out a Mitch Joel link before even YouTube - good Google juice, Mitch!) I wanted to watch this:
(Go on, watch it. I’ll wait.)
Now, what should come next? I’ll tell you what: YouTube should have a sidebar to that video (legality questions aside) that says, “Why not buy David Usher’s new album?” with an easy click to an Amazon store or whatever. And what else? “Why not pre-order the Batman DVD?” Why not? I’m already turned on by the song and the video. I’m already hopped up, and it’s like free marketing for two products that didn’t spend a dime to get me excited!
There are lots of ways this makes sense. It’s right there: market, interest, pre-selection.
Okay, YouTube: ready, steady, go! Go make money. I’ll be here watching more weird Batman things:
(What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea?)
