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Blog World Expo 2008 - Making Money Online with a Blog - recap
I was planning on going to one of the other sessions after the keynote, but decided to attend this one when I saw that Darren Rowse of ProBlogger was on the panel of the Making Money Online with a Blog session. Since I have read ProBlogger for some time I really wanted to hear what he had to say. I originally overlooked this session as I have heard John Chow, Shoemoney and Zach Johnson speak before and I didn’t see how their niche would help out my partners, not many of which write content in the same area as they.
I’m glad I attended this session. Originally, Jeremy Shoemaker was not in attendance, but after moderator Jim Kukral asked every one to direct tweet “Shoemoney Sucks” to Jeremy, he ended up showing up. It was pretty entertaining when he walked in.
Overall, the information shared by each of the panelist was fantastic. No one seemed to hold back and each had substantial information to contribute. Right out of the gate, gems were shared. Jim started with a question: “What is the #1 thing you have done that made you the most money?” Chow responded that moving from network advertising to a direct sales approach made the biggest difference to him. Darren Rowse echoed these remarks. The change in income was substantial, each said. Zach Johnson said that consistently building your brand was the most important and Brian Clark stated that his biggest success was actually selling to the audience instead of advertising or marketing to them. Brian discussed the concept of understanding your audience and finding the things that they want to purchase. In his case it was starting a membership based site (www.teachingsells.com), and a site that sells Wordpress themes. There are other ways to make money online then your standard advertising model, and Brian made that clear.
There was so many other things shared, allow me to give you a list here (by no means is this list comprehensive):
- Email, Email, Email: email is a necessary way to market to your readers. Go beyond the feedshare “subscribe via email” and produce a weekly newsletter. Everyone discussed Aweber as a great tool for this.
- Launch phase of your blog is at least 2 years. Darren shared that he still considers his digital photography blog in its launch phase after 2 years. These things take time to build up, don’t become discouraged after a few months or even 18. Keep at it and build good content.
- Adsense is “webmaster welfare”.
- In order to market better to your readers, analyze your search traffic to see what they are searching for and write content, when appropriate, to those terms.
- Selling advertising directly means that you control the relevance of the ads to your content and to your readers and allows you to earn more.
- If you are looking to sell ads directly, use OIO Publisher for Wordpress.
One of the more important notes of the session came from John
Chow who said “write for people, not Google”. I’ll leave you with that.
8 Comments
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Hey Jamie,
I attended this panel as well and I thought that all had some great thoughts, with the main one being that there’s no one way to really capitalize on your blog. Some ways for for Darren and other ways work for Shoemaker. I think that it’s very dependent on who your audience is and what type of relationship you have with them on a daily basis.
I actually had the chance to interview Darren - he’s such a cool and down to Earth guy…you can take a look at it if you get some free time by heading here:
http://blog.hubpages.com/2008/09/its-all-about-the-connections-thoughts-highlights-and-lessons-learned-from-blog-world-expo-08/
p.s. I still can’t believe that I won one of the dinners that they handed out at the panel…must have been my lucky day or something?
Anyways, great thoughts and hopefully you got something out of the rest of the event, too.
Ryn
Ryan, I totally agree. That was probably the one thing I hope that others got out of it too, there are many ways to get revenue from your blog. The entire conference, barring one session, was great.
Thanks for sharing the link. Darren is a great guy, I wish I had more time with him and so many others.
Blogging for Dollars - Affiliate Tips from BlogWorld…
Well BlogWorld has come and gone and I barely even had time to notice it was on. There were a couple good panel discussions dealing with affiliate marketing, so I thought I’d gather some links to blogs that covered those 2 sessions. Dig in to fin…
Its great to get a idea after getting an idea of session regarding problogger.It is one of the easy process to making money online.
John, your comment was a little hard to understand, what was the easy process to making money online?
“Adsense is “webmaster welfare”.”
That was a hoot! I agree with it in many circumstances, but the humor in it, just by itself, overwhelmed me.
Were specific tools like Chitika, PopShops or GoldenCAN come up in the discussions of how to put up contextually relevant products? Seems like any blogger interested in product sales (or profiting of any type) should bone up on these tools.
Also wondered if many bloggers use tools like Bounce.cc where they have reader contributed content. Did that come up?
Yeah that phrase sure got the room talking. Those other tools were shared in a few different sessions. I think one thing us seasoned affiliate marketers noticed was that there was a general lack of knowledge about these programs. I think that is one of the reasons these sessions were so well attended.
Many of the basic steps taken for granted within the affiliate industry bloggers simply are not familiar with. Several times in monetization sessions bloggers asked “but how do I get started”.
Adsense may indeed be welfare but it is simple to implement and there is the added bonus of having to only deal with Google. The complexity of the affiliate space with the many networks and merchant relationships is daunting. This is especially true when marketing is not the primary expertise which is the case with most bloggers.
They want to know how to find ways to support their blog but not at the expense of that search becoming all encompassing.