You know what I love? Seeing someone put a lot of time and effort into a website or blog and to do it well enough that they create a nice niche following that has them wondering what the next stage is. That gives me a lot of satisfaction. Recently I have had a friend of mine approach me and ask what the next step is.
An audience is the most valuable thing in the online world.
If you have shown you have the ability to create an audience you have achieved what thousands have tried and failed to do. It shows that you are putting something up there on the world wide web that is valuable, and it helps people. Although popularity isn’t always a measure of quality, it’s a something is working well. It is the measure of the worth of your online real estate. (Compared to offline real estate which is valuable because of what it is located near, which means you are buying a predisposed audience, online real estate is determined by the audience you create.)
Understand the value you’re creating
The notion of ‘value’ is basically the difference between what you pay and what you get in return. If you get a lot of good stuff for free, that’s great value! If you have to pay a lot of a little bit of good stuff, it’s not great value. But what is ‘good stuff’? Well that’s determined by someone else. Think of how car manufacturers have gradually stopped referring to electric windows and power steering as luxury add ons. They no longer hold the same value, it’s been commodotized.
SO for the most part, website that are considering monetization have created value. The cost to the consumer is zero, the value is in the entertainment or information you’re bringing to them. In fact, that’s all it is unless you’re an aggregation site, in which case you might even be bringing together products (think gumtree.com.au or e-bay) in a way that makes it easy for people to find what they want.
Are you creating the content/products?
This is a one-way value offering. (This will make more sense when I describe what a two-way value offering is). There is a single point of interaction between you and the audience. You create the information, articles, videos, etc and they come in to consume it all for free and hopefully tell everyone and that leads to more visitors. Great. It’s working so far.
Are you curating content/products?
This is a two-way value offering. You are creating a market place where you are trying to please suppliers and consumers. It becomes quite tricky at times to remember who is most important to you. The usual answer is that the real customers (the ones who pay the money ) are you customers. In the example of newspapers their customers are advertisers who need to be looked at. The readers are secondary. However, I see this view as fraught with danger. These are two sides of the same equation and if they don’t balance out – that is, if you don’t make sure both are being served well, then you have a problem. The difference in mindset and available options differs a lot from one-way and two-way value offerings.
So enough of the intro – let’s get onto the list of ways to monetize your blog or website.
1. Advertising
When the first wave of website moguls realised they had a valuable commodity (traffic and eyeballs) they took the lessons of the offline world into the online and set to create banner advertising. It exists, it works, there are a lot of suppliers of this and prices vary. These suppliers take care of all the bother that comes with finding advertisers, creating the banner images etc.
Google Adsense is the best place to start, but other providers of note include
Casale Media and
Tribal Fusion
Check the fine print over whether the price you are quoted is on impressions or click throughs. Obviously the latter is worth a lot more than the former. Note – you’ll need literally thousands of hits a day if you want to earn a significant income through this method. Mostly people that do this are treating it as passive income and basically aim to spend money on SEO in a way that the advertising is earning more than the SEO costs, and have a perpetually increasing pool of cash.
Of course, you could take a different approach and look for a website sponsor. That is, go and find the advertisers yourself. It takes much more effort and requires a real relationship. If you can approach companies that would greatly benefit from exposure to your audience then it could work. However, unless you can offer a few hundred click-throughs per week then you’ll struggle to hold anyone’s attention long enough to benefit from this.
2. Charge a fee for what you’ve always offered for free
Before I go too far I’ll mention that I’ve never seen it work, but I’ll include it as an option in case anyone wants to test the water and let me know how it all pans out. If you have people coming to your website in such volume that you are considering monetizing then you know you have something people like. You know they’ll pop in and consume your content if it’s free – but will adding a price completely kill your audience? (Remember, an audience is the most valuable commodity you can have).
The
Herald Sun has recently shifted to a paid subscription model, but there is not a lot of info on whether it is working for them. It has certainly created a new revenue stream, but I have yet to see a report than mentions whether or not it has cannabalised their audience. I doubt there would be a publicly available report that would state this if it were true. Also, their main competitor,
The Agelooks to be posturing towards something similar. Interestingly, the
Australian Financial Review has always sat at the top of the tree as a premium news feed for wealthy consumers and has successfully commanded a subscription fee since it first went online.
The lesson here is that if people are real familiar and ritualized with consumption of your content then you are in a position to charge a fee for existing. If there is a readily available substitute for what you offer then you will probably just lose your audience. It’s worth noting that
Facebook, since listing as a public company, has made a lot of changes to its revenue models and also appears to be preparing to create a fee structure for users. I think they’re playing with fire here. They have been steadily disenfranchising their most valuable asset (the traffic flow) for a few years, this may just be enough to push everyone over to
Google+.
3. Create premium content or a higher offering
Now we are getting onto the monetization measure I would recommend. These are things that create a new and better experience for your audience. Creating a higher level of content is great. It introduces something more, and if the people love you enough they trust you to know them well enough to make a reasonable trade offering with premium content. If you’re a blog based site you could have a members’ only section that has video interviews with you. For the two-way value offering sites you could offer suppliers some premium and sizable real estate on your website.
Those who want to continue using the site can continue to do so as they always have. Those who are passionate about the content or your platform now have an option to buy in further.
4. Additional services
One thing you’ve proven to this point is that you can build traffic to a website. That’s awesome. Now how about you put on a show for that audience? Offer some consultation services or run some offline events. You already know that people like what you have to say, now find a way to provide a more interactive service and you will easily be able to command a fee. If you regularly post to a cooking blog then run an open cooking class. If you have a news service then run events that show people how to build an audience online. If you are producing how-to videos on YouTube then put together an ebook with embedded video that you can sell for $5-$10 each.
So there it is, the four main ways to monetize a blog. Always remember that the skills of building traffic are very different to the skills required to make money off that traffic. Where possible consult an expert, or at least set up robust experiments so you test exactly what is working and what isn’t.
