‘How do I monetize my blog?’ Tips for making money as a blogger

A friend asked how he could make money from his blog. With the caveat that I don’t make money directly from my blog, or try to (more about that later), I have some advice to share. Bloggers can pursue multiple options to generate revenue:

Sell ads

One way is to sell ads yourself. This requires time and skill that many bloggers don’t have. You would need to figure out what to charge for ads, identify potential advertisers, make the pitch, service the account and bill the customer (or arrange for handling credit cards). Journalists who blog might also feel that selling ads would present ethical challenges, either for the blog itself or with their day jobs.

However, the advantage of selling ads yourself is that you can target specific advertisers interested in the niche audience of your blog, which might bring you a higher ad rate if you are selling ads based on how many thousand impressions you serve (a rate called CPM, short for cost per mille, or thousand). You also could seek to sell sponsorships at a flat rate.

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

Gazette ad helped sell our condo in 3 days

As one who is leaving the newspaper business for a digital startup, it pains me just a bit to write this blog post. As one who spent 38 years in the newspaper business (starting in high school, so I’m not as old as that may sound) and wishes my print colleagues nothing but the best, I am mostly quite pleased to tell this story:

Mimi and I signed a deal Thursday to sell our condo after just three days on the market. And it was an ad in Tuesday’s Gazette that brought the buyer to us.

Read Full Post »

Robert Niles says there is no new revenue model for journalism; I disagree

Robert Niles is one of the sharpest commentators about digital journalism and the business of journalism. So his tweet last night caught my eye:

Deal with it – There is no new revenue model for journalism.

He linked to his latest post at OJR: The Online Journalism Review. He makes a lot of excellent points, as I would expect, and I will review some of them later. But I believe he is wrong on his central point:

Read Full Post »

Newspapers’ Original Sin: Not failing to charge but failing to innovate

A mistaken matter-of-fact statement in an Associated Press story launched Chris O’Brien on an insightful blog post that had little to do with the original story.

In the same way, a statement in Chris’s post launched me on this post, which will start out in a different direction from his blog.

The AP story, about Microsoft, said, “If it doesn’t make the right calculation, the software maker could find itself in the same position as newspapers that gave online content away and now are struggling to replace print revenue.”

Chris, contributing to the MediaShift blog, wrote: “That second line is almost a throwaway, written with no attribution. That means that the notion has officially entered into conventional wisdom: Local newspapers screwed up by giving away for free the content everyone used to pay to consume.”

Read Full Post »

A new approach to advertising at AnnArbor.com

One of my favorites in my collection historic newspapers is the one that tells of the death of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Jan. 23, 1973.

It’s not that I celebrated LBJ’s demise, but I’m interested that the tragedy obscured the most significant news of the previous day: the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion and influenced politics and culture in the United States for the 36 years since.

In the same way, the recent news of the death of yet another newspaper, the Ann Arbor News, might have obscured the more important news of a significant web-focused community news organization, AnnArbor.com.

Read Full Post »

What if advertising doesn’t recover with the economy?

What if the cyclical part of the advertising collapse does not come back after the end of the cycle?

Lad Paul, an old friend and colleague from the Des Moines Register who recently retired as executive editor of the New York Times News Service and is now consulting, asked that question recently on my Facebook page.  I asked Lad if I could share his question and my answer on the blog (with some minor editing, mostly to remove personal remarks we exchanged, and with some elaboration because I’ve thought more about it as I’m writing this) and he agreed. He had been making his way through my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection and these questions kept nagging him:

What if advertisers have discovered that they don’t need middle men like our newspapers to find their customers? What is to stop them from taking the money that in the old world would have been their advertising budgets and spending it instead on developing fancy Web storefronts, and then letting the customers find them and their products via search?

Read Full Post »