"How to Make Money" BloggerCon session

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We didn’t start from scratch this morning in talking about how to make money session at BloggerCon IV, and I think the un-conference group made a lot of progress in exploring the topic. (Dave had duct tape over his mouth.) Dan Farber of ZDNet has got a rockin’ round-up of the session, complete with loads of photos. Doc has his amazing outline in real-time of what was said. And the whole thing is available in mp3 format (along with all the others).

Here’s an outline of suggestions people have made — before, during and after — for the “How to Make Money” session:

  1. Making Money By Blogging
    1. Run ads
      1. On your own site
        1. Text/images on your site (BlogAds, Adwords/Adsense)
        2. Sponsorships on site (TechCrunch, or the “Be Mike Arrington” strategy)
      2. In feeds (Feedburner)
      3. In a podcast (Chris Pirillo)
      4. In a vlog (Rocketboom)
    2. Put other thing on your blog that generate money for you
      1. Classifieds (EdgeIo “listing” tag)
      2. Other feeds (Stylefeeder feed)
      3. Affiliate program (e.g., from Amazon with books or other products)
    3. Put up a tip-jar on your blog
      1. (Some) people at BloggerCon said they’d contribute to you (IT Conversations).
      2. Lean into the micropayment movement — it might be $10/year (Dan Farber’s suggestion) or it might be much less — make both possible
    4. Get hyperlocal (Lisa Williams‘ H2OTown, Nashville is Blogging)
      1. But maybe we need a new, easier way to give pizza parlors the ability to post ads, for which they’ll pay a higher cost per click/impression/whatever than what they will through Google Ads.
    5. Join a network of blogs
      1. Federated Media: John Battelle approach
      2. Pajama’s Media, Corante, Weblogs.com
    6. Sell your feed or other content itself to publishers (will someone pay? Gather, Squidoo)
    7. Generate payment via aggregators and revenue-sharing (Feedshow)
    8. Promote a specific product or products (Manolo shoe blog)
    9. Give it to charity (Goodstorm, as retold in TechCrunch)
  2. Making Money Off of Blogging
    1. Sell software, services (whether or not you blog)
    2. Blog to brand yourself (establish trust, credibility, relationships, goodwill), then…
      1. Sell consulting
      2. The Dave Winer solution (no ads, get famous, sell a pinger or the like for millions of dollars)
      3. Host a conference (Blogher, Gnomedex, Web 2.0 Conference)
    3. Sell search etc. (Technorati, Feedster)
    4. Become a VC (make money off of other people’s work)
    5. Make money for other people, like charities, through the leverage of your blog

A Wired story about BloggerCon mentions the How to Make Money session. Frank Paynter has posted lots of good stuff in the lead up to the conference and in covering sessions like the Emotional Life of Bloggers.

Post a comment with suggestions for more examples to add to the list and I’ll try to keep the outline up-to-date.

(Disclosure: I have an interest in a few of the companies above — Stylefeeder, Edge.io — and am a part-time investor in other entities that are included by reference above.)

49 thoughts on “"How to Make Money" BloggerCon session”

  1. […] Chris Pirillo says its about branding yourself… the monetization of your life.  CPT versus CPC … adsense works but you have to tune it… take risks and hope Microsoft won’t sue… Tony says blogging should be about writing, not making money… your blog should be just one of the places where your work (”your content”) shows up. Following this outline: […]

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  2. […] John Palfrey from the Berkman Center at the Harvard Law School led a discussion about how to making money through blogging. Here is his lead in to the topic: If you are a blogger, how do you go about making some money from your work? One obvious answer is the classic approach of throwing BlogAds or Google ads or whathaveyou ads on your blog. That works for some people, but it generates more than beer money only for a select few at the left-hand side of that famous power law distribution. Some, like Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, have added premium sponsorships to the mix; then again, Mike’s plainly in the select few. Others contend that a blog is itself an advertisement. You don’t make money on the blog itself, but rather you make money on other things (as in the artist who gives away his or her content on a p2p service and makes money on other things to pay the rent). I trust that we’ll kick around these ideas, but also get into some new possibilities: shouldn’t really simple syndication allow for some new thinking around getting people to pay for the content you create? And are there ways for bloggers themselves to get on the bandwagon of making some of the money that the venture guys are planning to make? How could that work, exactly? Put another away: lots of people have spent lots of digital ink (sound and images too) on the general problem of “how do you monetize the long tail?”  […]

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  3. hmmmmmmm Nothing really Leaps out at me yet as a way to Make Money Blogging.

    one thing that does Jump out is the amount of Traffic people obviously require to make anything even close to resembling Beer $Money.

    i was intrigued about a company called JellyFish who were supposed to be demoing at Supernova2006*

    they are supposed to Launch today & i’ll be interested in learning more about what they are up to.

    it’s going to take a whole New Economic Paradigm shift to get this going!

    but if it allows Artists, Musicians, Performers, & people worldwide to do what they Love to do instead of working for the Man – i think a lot of people will jump on board. but then who is going to do the hard work & real labour that needs to be done?

    there’s a lot of issues at stake & no easy answers from what I can tell so far*

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  8. […] There are other options. The Wall Street Journal site famously puts nearly everything behind a paywall (except for its “Free Today” page). Salon makes you sit through an ad before you can read. The New York Times created “Times Select” which puts columnists and certain other supposedly premium content behind a paywall. And of course many bloggers born on the web have no print adjunct, but they are still brainstorming how to make money too. […]

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  32. bloggerCon? thanks for the link to the mp3. It’s great to have information like this for on the go listening.

    This list is pretty vague though. I’ve been trying to make money with my site, but it’s a pretty painful process, where nothing seems to attract the amount of visitors to the site that I need to become successful.

    Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out this whole affiliate marketing world. There seems to be some real potential there for some serious money making.

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  39. Yes, a good list, and from the course I took with Yaro Starak, he concours too. I think the big “aha” moment was learning that there is more to blog profits than adsense.

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  42. great post. I’d like to ad to it if you don’t mind, Twitter is also great. I use it to get traffic as well as to stay up to date with my friends, business partners and so on

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  43. A decent blog !
    But you forgot to add the free lucky ways that exist.
    There are a few ways that just need a few minutes time and a portion of luck to make money.
    Check the free lottery at linktofortune.com
    It’s a honest free lottery, worth to get added to you list.
    Do you know any non scam free lottery ? That’s why I said it is worth getting added, and that’s why I am here.

    p.s. wish me luck for the million dollar drawing 🙂

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  44. This is a kind of old post but a GREAT one.

    Chris Pirillo is a great guy, I follow his Podcast/videocast on Ustream

    …And thanks to this post, I now know more blog networks 😉

    thanks!

    Reply ↓

  47. The key is to provide relevant information, that’s the key from my point of view. Information is money, and if you give free information to your readers, then it is highly likely that a part of that money will go to you. And economy expands even more…

    Reply ↓

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