SEMSunday – SEM, SEO, WebApps, etc

Monetizing Your Blog June 16, 2008

I have to admit I laughed when I got the following voicemail from my much distressed aunt.

“… there is no point… I just had my biggest day ever,125 visits, and I just read that you can’t make money advertising until you have 10,000 visits a day and even then your only looking at a couple dollars”

It’s true – monetizing a traditional blog can be difficult. Between writing content, doing research, having a “real job”, and trying to live your life, not much time is left to seek out advertisers and market your real estate to them. Easy solutions like Google Adsense and other drag n’ drop solutions provide easy but hardly sufficient income.

Here is the solution: Don’t compete with traditional advertisers! One of the sites that we advertised on (with very little success, and littler ROI) was Move.com. They built their business on this model. Get page views, sell pageviews. It doesn’t work anymore (don’t believe me, check out their stock).

Spend your time building a network of trusting readers! Give them content for free! Answer their questions and provide them with a resource / entertainment / interaction. Seth Godin said (and I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find the post) – You should be able to build a very profitable and successful business off your 1000 best customers.

That may be a bit much for the internet world – 1000 visits a month is hard to monetize past a certain point. But 10,000? I think that’s doable.

Query: If you have 10,000 subscribers, each of whom read 80% of your blog posts, how could your monetize that trust?

Joel and 37Signals built databases of their readers interested in jobs.

Seth uses his blog as a platform to sell his books, some of which are just collections of his blog posts!

SEOMoz has paid subscriptions to premium content and tools.

If the most innovative idea you have for monetizing your blog is simply signing up for Google AdSense then you probably aren’t delivering the quality content people want to read in the first place.