Blog Paid Content
Wow. The folks in this presentation are really naive in their perception of paid blogging. A major concern is that bloggers would take money to support a product that they might not otherwise say good things about. Or maybe they'd take money for advertising that would "junk up" their blogs. The weird thing is the double-standard they have about when you can take money.
If you're a small site with no traffic, whether it's because you haven't been discovered or haven't said anything that people want to read, it's apparently ok to advertise on your piece of crap blog. But as soon as you start getting noticed, you are supposed to have "integrity", and therefore you should be taking money for writing, not money for advertising.
Well, where the heck do they think the money comes from for those bigger sites? Sure, you can do sponsorship, but not everybody can, and aren't those bloggers beholden (in at least the same way the complainers would complain about) to their sponsors? Seems a bit hypocritical to me. But there's more to the seminar than this.
What I'm really interested in is the "paid commenting" part of this seminar, and I haven't heard anything about it.
But finally, a good idea. One of the crowd brought up the topic of a media kit. Everyplace that is trying to shop their publication (TV, newspaper, whatever) to advertisers assembles a media kit that provides specific details. Basically for a blog, these kits would include details about the blog's visitors -- whether they were male/female, their zip code, and age group. Add to that demographic data, the type of content that your blog publishes along with your analytic information -- Number of uniques, page views, and the more recently valuable metric time spent per page/visitor.
Put that information into a PDF and publish it from your blog. Point to it when trying to advertisers, or print it out and send it. Have it professionally produced or at least graphically designed well. This will go a long way to having your advertisers take you seriously and stick with you because of the specific niche you provide them access to.
It wasn't spoken of, but is it possible that a network of small, directed blogs could court the attention of advertisers as well as a single large blog? Of course, the share would not be as big as if it was your site alone serving the ads, but you might get some income from it that you wouldn't have access to otherwise.
If you're selling your own links or ads on your site, you need to figure how much your blog is worth. There were some good points about valuing your blog or site. On one hand, you are the producer of value for the site. So if the buying offer isn't worth the effort that you're putting into it, then you're obviously not getting enough money from it.
An interesting example of the converse of this idea was illustrated from the buyer's side. A certain blogger who had made a good name for his political site wanted to sell his whole site and the content for $100,000 to a local media agency. For the price and traffic that it generated, it seemed to them like a good deal, but upon consultation they revealed that the author of the blog was going to move on. Since the value of the site was mostly tied to his ability to produce content that people trusted (and read, and cause visitor to happen), the consultant suggested that they instead spend $30,000 on a new site and dedicate one of their political reporters to the task of creating a new brand. This worked much better than buying out the site, and cost less.
The lesson is that you need to value your site not only on what it is worth but also by what you as a blogger bring to the table when you're blogging. To be more succinct, don't sell ads on PageRank alone.
Someone suggested using a paid content model. I think this is the option for payment with the least moral issues, and yet probably the least palatable to readers. His idea was to allow bloggers to push content to their visitor's cell phones for about $3 per publication. Seems a tad expensive, especially when things are so duplicated on the net that you could likely get the same information for free via RSS. But I still like the payment model for unique information that you can't get elsewhere. Trusted reviews of specific niche products will likely have more value and be able to command that kind of payment. A good example is Pyramid Magazine, which is an inexpensive online-only magazine with content that is unique enough to merit payment.
After you get all of the money rolling in, there are interesting issues to consider of a legal nature. What responsibility do you have to your advertisers? What if your computer explodes or something else happens that makes it difficult to continue blogging? What does your community think of your selling ads from your home?
The suggestion was that if you are selling ads on your site, you should at least know a lawyer you can call if things go wrong. The way things work these days - and you know how it is - you could say something controversial, and some company's ad shows up from Google that day, and their CEO just happened by your site somehow and asked his team of lawyers, "Why does our name appear on that site?" The next thing you know you're paying fees to Cousin Vinnie.
Another thing to think about (and I should do this) is that if you are blogging from home (and we wouldn't be blogging from work, would we?) and essentially you're making money from doing so, then your community may require that you get a business privilege license to do that. It's a pretty crazy thought, but if you're pulling in a few hundred or a few thousand dollars in a month, then you are already subject to taxes on that money (yeah, you had better start filing those with your other income) and so the government is aware that you are running a "business" from your house. Don't incur the fines when the paperwork is pretty cheap and easy. Just saying.
There were a few good nuggets to get out of this seminar. It would have been nice if we would have spent more time on the actual money making rather than the supposed and sketchy ethics of links and paid posts, but still informative.