April 19th, 2006
Good Blogging = Good Publishing = Good Business
Can’t we lay to rest the endlessly inane debate about whether blogging can succeed as a business? (The latest miss-the-point round is between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler.)
Since everyone seems to be having so much trouble with this, let’s make it really simple:
- Blogging is just a form of publishing
- If you publish useful or entertaining information, people will read it
- If the people reading it are a coherent group that companies want to sell to, those companies will pay to advertise
- The better the blog, the bigger the audience, the better the business
- If you string a bunch blogs together, you’ll have a bigger audience
(This is drugs, this is your brain on drugs.)
This is media 101. It’s NOTHING NEW.
Will all 36 million blogs make a lot of money? Of course not. The vast majority will make none — at least not through advertising, which you’d think was the only source of revenue in the universe.
But as Hugh MacLeod points out: “The other major way to make money with the blogging platform is to use it to market your Global Microbrand, like Thomas did with English Cut. That to me is far more useful to far more people, yet it gets no mention in the Journal article.”
Blogging is a form of self-promotion, as the Boston Globe pointed out the other day.
In many ways blogging is the new novel/screen play writing. At some point, everybody will be doing it, but only a handful of people will be any good at it and achieve any kind of lasting success by doing it.
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[...] Can Bloggers Make Money? Sure: Indirectly Today’s bill: an elder statesman of media goes mano-a-mano against a spry alpha geek. To wit: The Wall Street Journal has an article up that features an email exchange between Weblogs, Inc. founder Jason Calacanis and Jupitermedia Major Domo Alan Meckler. The long and short of it: Jason thinks individual bloggers can earn serious coin, while Alan relegates them to the earnings boondocks. Of course, they’re both right. Like Scott Karp says, blogs are just another form of publishing. You publish good stuff, the people come. You publish good stuff alongside more good stuff, more (good?) people will come. Of course, there are caveats, most of which Alan pointed out: Most bloggers are amateurs, the field of content battle is way crowded, and it takes serious effort to make serious coin. I’m surprised neither Alan nor Jason, who were wrapped up in the WSJ’s hard dollar moneyism, didn’t mention the indirect benefits of blogging, which are several. Take, for instance, the lessons mentioned in yesterday’s Boston Globe article: blogging is good for your career. In a world where digital information is rapidly becoming the only information, blogging helps you take ownership of your name. It is the first step in managing the other side of attention data, that is, who notices you. Blogging, and blogging well, is like an old-fashioned sweepstakes. Enter your name into the pot enough times, and its bound to get picked eventually. (For my favorite example of this, please see the Val Kilmer classic, Real Genius.) Related: New York Magazine’s take on A-List bloggers and the money game. Also Related: today’s article in the Guardian which says ignore bloggers at your peril. And Jesus, I must be on memeorandum wippets today, because the site also points me James’ Robertson’s post on Smalltalk Tidbits, where he points out rightly that afro-sportin’ white boy wunderkind Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the power of influencers (such as bloggers) years ago. [...]
[...] My favorite curmudgeon Scott Karp says that blogging is simply publishing and basic media economics 101. He says that if you generate the numbers, you will make money. “The better the blog, the bigger the audience, the better the business,” Karp writes. [...]
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[...] Blogging for Fame….and Maybe Fortune by Mark Evans on Wed 19 Apr 2006 07:44 AM EDT | Permanent Link | Cosmos To blog or not to blog, that is the question…but can you make money doingit? The Wall St. Journal takes a stab at answering the question with a Q&A between Internet entrepreneur Alan Meckler and blogging entreprenuer Jason Calacanis, who sold his Weblogs blog network to AOL for $25-million. The bottom line: if you have a blog (or a blog network) with a lot of traffic and good content, you can make money. As Scott Karp points out this makes blogging no different than any other media property. "In many ways, blogging is the new novel/screen play writing," Karp said. "At some point, everyone will be doing it, but only a handful of people will be any good at it and achieve any kind of lasting success by doing it." The problem with "Can you making money from blogging?" - is it’s the probably the wrong question, albeit one many people have been raising. A more appropriate question is: "Why do you blog?". I suspect making money would be way down the list after things like: the opportunity to create a mini-global brand, the ability to easily communicate and share new ideas, a enjoyable hobby, etc. For a small handful of people and blog networks, there will be money to be made but if blogging was all about money, there wouldn’t be 35.4 million blogs around. Personally, I make about a $1 a day from AdSense but what I make in other ways in invaluable, which sounds a lot like those Mastercard Priceless ads!For more insight into blogging for fame and fortune, check out Thomas Hawk, Gaping Void (a.k.a. Huge Macleod, who makes money from selling ultra-funny business cards), Stowe Boyd and Duncan Riley. For a previous post, I did on blogging for money, click here.Update: Just thought I’d mention (shameless plug) that the mesh conference will get into the significant and impact of blogs beyond making money from them. [...]
from PR. But indirectly? Bloggers, their organizations and PR firms Clients, without question. That’s the way to look at it, I think. Dave Winer comments here, mesh speaker Paul Kedrosky here, and mesh speaker Scott Karphere. Mark thinks aloud here, Mathew has some great points here. Certainly food for discussion in the marketing and PR streams at mesh. Technorati tags: blogging, wsj, web2.0, mesh06links [IMG Ads by AdGenta.com]
A good blog is the unvarnished views of the person writing it. If you’re doing it to make money, it will corrupt what you write. Of course, if you happen to make money while doing it, that’s great too, as long as it’s not the main point.
Three Cheers for the Global Mini Brand!
Other discussion and links: Technorati, Memeorandum Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection;Alan Meckler vs. Jason Calacanis, Can Blogs Make Money? Mark Evans:Blogging for Fame….and Maybe Fortune; Publishing 2.0:Good Blogging = Good Publishing = Good Business; IP Democracy: Do Blogs Follow the Traditional Publishing Model?; duncanriley.com: Alan Meckler vs J-Cal at the WSJ; Bloggers Blog: How Much Can Bloggers Make Per Month?; Digital Inspiration: Do Blogs translate into profits ?
’s another James Farmer out there who’s also far more significant than me as the creator of SpamPal. And he isn’t that well. So best wishes James, hope you’re back to fighting spam again soon!Publishing 2.0 » Good Blogging = Good Publishing = Good Business “This is media 101. It’s NOTHING NEW.” Telegraph Blogs The first major online newspaper to integrate with Digg, del.icio.us, Blinklist, Reddit, Newsvine& Ma.gnolia (via journalism.co.uk) - now I wonder how they
Excellent topic and you covered it nicely. Adsense is indeed a huge player in the online advertising world and I believe any tips and guides are appreciated. Of course, while millions of publishers are running Adsense, only a handful are making serious money off it. As far as I’m concerned, the best way to make money with Adsense is to develop a website on a niche topic that should also be something you are interested in. Hobby-related sites have the best chances of keeping you, as their webmaster, happy and involved, and this will soon show in the number of visitors and the amounts of money you make.
Another vital thing to consider is ad style and placement. I prefer to use a similar structure for all my websites – one that was proven to work. I will share this with you as I believe in reciprocal help through free advice – I also learned A LOT from browsing blogs such as this and other webmaster resources on Adsense. Ok, so getting back to ad placement: I love the idea of placing a 120×90 or 160×90 adlink box on the left side menu of my sites, in the top left corner, just below the banner. Have a look at my website, Web2earn.com and look at the area below the graphic saying “Online money†– it will house a nice 160×90 adlinks box soon after my site receives enough traffic.
The second good spot to place a 250×250 or 300×250 ad box is in the article text. Loose the border and make the background of the ads the same as your web background (same is true for the adlink placement mentioned above. The final touch comes with a final ad placed at the end of each araticle. Consider the article a path that leads to the final conclusion – exactly where the ads are. You can also place a small graphic image to the left of the ads, so that they are more attractive from a visual point of view.
By using such an ad placement most of my sites get CTRs of 10%-15% all the time
Give it a try and let me know if this sort of ad placement worked in your particular cases – I am also doing a study on this which I will eventually publish on web2earn.com
Best regards,
Mihai
[...] Precisely. Readers come to your blog, get to know you. Business can then grow out of that. Advertising money might work for a few, but most of the time, the money is minor and, in my opinion, ads can clutter up a blog, detracting from the look and feel. Blogging is a form of self-promotion, as the Boston Globe pointed out the other day. [...]
Making money with a blog is hard, period. All of the advice and comments I’ve read so far on it, are either US-inspired or don’t work. That’s because the US is one vast market. Live in the EU, and the market is fragmented, due to the number of languages there.
Remains: your name as a brand. Good thinking, but again only really viable in the US. On IT-Enquirer, a blog annes web magazine on desktop publishing the AdSense income hovers around 8 to 10 USD a day. That’s nowhere near a decent income, let alone instant richess. The articles on there are non-biased, though.
What I learned from managing this site is that some organic SEO is required, just as it is on regular sites.
[...] Lots of talk today about whether money can be made from blogging, with the WSJ publishing a story on it (just the type of story to get the often-inward-looking blogosphere fired into a navel gazing frenzy. But I digress :-)).I guess it sort of depends on who and how you ask, right? I mean, if you were to ask many of the folks coming to speak at mesh, who happen to blog, whether "blogging makes money," many of them would likely say "Not directly, but indirectly? You better believe it."I mean, think of the untold millions spent on traditional advertising and PR to create just the type of profile and voice that some people have built for themselves and their businesses via blogging and social media. How can you tally the value of creating your own soapbox? In traditional media, I guess overall marketing efficiency metrics are viewed as the most important gauge of the effectveness of spend, but can one really say, categorically, that traditional PR "makes money"? It’s tough. But when put in that context? Wow, blogging "makes money" in spades.Does it do so directly? Not often. Just like only PR practicitioners, by a tight definition, are the only ones who directly "make money" from PR. But indirectly? Bloggers, their organizations and PR firms Clients, without question.That’s the way to look at it, I think.Dave Winer comments here, mesh speaker Paul Kedrosky here, and mesh speaker Scott Karp here. Mark thinks aloud here. Mathew goes deep here.Certainly food for discussion in the marketing and PR streams at mesh. [...]
Flickr: Photos tagged with blogging Video Blogging with VodeoBlog.com. Experience the new standard of blogging with VodeoBlog.com. Post text, audio, or video with http://www.vodeoblog.com. Professional BloggingPublishing 2.0 Good Blogging = Good Publishing = Good Business Can t we lay to rest the endlessly inane debate about whether blogging can succeed as a business? (The latest miss-the-point round is between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler Blogging tutorials & training