Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

Making Money Blogging

I was unfortunately late to the Making Money Blogging session at BlogNashville. It was run by Henry Copeland of Blogads.

There was a lot of discussion on driving ads, targeting ads, complaining that RSS doesn’t allow you to demographic your audience. There was some great discussion of how Major League Baseball is drawing baseball bloggers onto their site, adding ads, and charging both the advertiser and the blogger. (Nice work if you can get it.) In the midst of all the talk of eyeballs and alignment, Cox of Cox and Forkum commented that we blog to have fun, and that what’s great about blogs is the fun and enthusiasm that they show.

I was hoping for more on ways to make money that were not ad agency driven. Jerry McClough had a great comment about the NAACP using blogs. I think that established organizations using blogs to increase the engagement of their membership is hugely important. (It doesn’t help me make money today, but…) In Democracy In America (read it at Project Gutenberg), de Tocqueville discusses the engaged nature of Americans, and how our social institutions at the time, things like the town meeting, encouraged participation. In contrast, a lot of groups today are centralized, and “membership” is a matter of a cash donation, rather than volunteering your time. But I digress.

I’d have loved to hear more about integrating blogs into a business promotion strategy, about the effectiveness of advertising for the long tail blogs. What sort of income could a blog expect at 50, 500, or 5,000 monthly readers? (To be fair, I was late, and this may have been covered.)

Robin Burk, at Winds of Change had some good things to say about pandering to your advertisers, or not, which is why their site has no ads.

Should I be charging the conferences I speak at for extra publicity? Would they pay more if I mentioned them in the lead para, instead of a side note at the end? Do I want to pander? Does anyone want an Emergent Chaos t-shirt?

More at Chasing the Dragon’s Tale, or Instapundit. I was suprised to see the insta-pandering; a great many people wanted to use Glenn Reynolds as their example. Oh, and Technorati: blognashville Update: Scared Monkeys also did a good job covering the session, but I’d closed the tab.

Originally published by adam on 8 May 2005
Last modified on 8 May 2005
Categories:   economics   Uncategorized