Making Money With Blogs

Doc Searls hosts a session on Making Money at BloggerCon III.

In the beginning, it was all about ad placement, not unlike early Internet days. Clearly, we need to have conversations about opportunities well beyond advertising and what its going to take to get there - for the content provider, the blogger (and often they're the same thing) and the consumer. "I've been a writer all my life and suddenly I was a content provider," says Doc.

Like all the sessions at BloggerCon, Doc's session was participatory and interactive. He asks us a number of questions through a series of informal slides:

Do you have an audience or do they go to your blog for the ads?
Do you consider yourself a brand?
Would you stop in the middle of a conversation to deliver a commercial message?
Would you take money to talk about something you wouldn’t talk about otherwise? (or the chance that they might carry a commercial message).
Which noun best describes you? Are you a person or are you a medium?

Someone shouts out “I’m a large medium.” Standard for this crowd - ya gotta love it. This is the entertainment I sacrifice a Saturday for.

Doc continues.

When you blog, am I delivering an experience or a message?
How does blogging increase your market value outside your blog?
How much more or less Google juice do you get by running advertising on your blog?
Do you want blogging to help you make money?
Is it by exercising and enlarging your authority?
Or by taking money to deliver commercial messages?

Phil Wolff and Doc were discussing grants earlier in the day - would you blog for a grant? He throws all of these questions and this issue to the crowd.

A user asks, "are people doing this for personal gratification or is it really to make money?

Doc's response: "a lot of people I think should be a blogger have no interest because they don’t have the right attitude." The right attitude you wonder? This is what he means and those of us who love to write, have made a living from writing or have hidden in the background for too long and need to voice our opinion, understand. It's this: Writers suffer from the illusion that the world really need to hear what they have to say.

Doc asks us, "how many people are in a business they wouldn’t be in had they not been blogging or as a direct result of their blog?" WOW! 25%+ of users raise their hands.

A blog forces me to have an opinion about something every day, says a blogger whose day job is a futurist in the healthcare industry. As an early blogger, I agree. Blogging forces me pay attention to things I normally wouldn't think about, even if its the color of a wall in a cafe. Or what the waitress is wearing.

How does this relate to moving your perceived provocative and compelling thoughts to revenue? Doc asks, "is it worth it?" The futurist says in a more formal but dry and witty tone (he should be British), "absolutely, I’m having a marvelous time. I get so much satisfaction voicing my views."

Then his long term goal 'gets a voice.' "Hopefully over time, my name will build to a point where I'm perceived as a key visionary in this space." What does that mean and how does that lead to profit? He hopes to consult and be asked to speak at leading conferences.

The idea of paid subscriptions is thrown out to the group. Someone asks, "Do you pay people for providing comments because you think they provide substantial value? That’s like saying that we should pay people who submit letters to the editor?"

Someone else adds: "If the point of the blog is that it’s a conversation, then you have to point to another part of the conversation. You have to ask about the blog itself? Does it violate that purpose?"

And another user says, "we all need to be sensitive. To what extent does the traditional media cast negativity on bloggers because of the shills and paid bloggers?" Doc wants this to be fleshed out. I'm thinking the same thing frankly - let's hear examples, so we do.

A major auto manufacturer created a blog (supposedly) from ordinary consumers which outraged bloggers. This crowd feels that there's a trust and credibility issue. As people start to abuse the onsurge of blogs and leverage it more of a commercial setting, we violate basic trust that comes from the bottom up, i.e., the bloggers point of view. It's direct and honest.

David Winer jumps in, "do you ever think about starting a business with people you wouldn’t normally meet that you now have access to because your voice is out there? Does your blog create or open up a new audience for you?"

Dave says that he floats $30-40K on his blog and 'so what?' Dave says, "I use it as a way to talk about my ideas and learn how we can partner and build products together. These are the things that the Internet is really good at doing. Blogs are ways to find people to collaborate and connect with....."

Chris Nolan, who has been writing a successful political blog for nearly two years, disagrees with Winer and the room gets heated again. Chris says, "I don’t sell anything except for my ideas on my blog," and says to Dave - "you're in the software business."

Dave counters and we get a little more volume. Another reason I sacrifice a Saturday.

Dave - "I'm not in the software business."

We're confused.

Chris interjects, "I’m in the business of writing words. Blogging allows me to do that without having to go get a 'real' job."

Chris wants to see her writing turn into revenue. She feels that she has created a business and is using her blog as a tool to get business.

At least half the room claps.

Despite our primary reason for having a blog, making money drives a lot of us.

Even so, the discussion turns back to community and relationships. We're starving for that too.

“Weblogs are relationship tools and they create communities where people begin to respect each other,” comments a user.

Someone else says, "So what we're really talking about here is a new way to do networking?" Perhaps but blogs are so much more. Blogs are incredible laboratories for making tipping points happen really fast.

What I love about sessions that Doc moderates is his warm sense of humor, informal approach and interaction with the audience. And today, his to die-for funky tie die shirt that says Mediawhore.

We then talk about brands. Are all of our blogs brands? Doc doesn't think so. “Reputation is something that is human, its tangible.”

Phil Wolff raises his hand – “There are jobs on Amazon asking for blogging experience. Someone values a portion of what we do enough to list it in a job description. The problem is that its a hyper-competitive marketplace."

A young woman in the crowd raises her hand and says, “I actually get paid to blog. I’ve been promoted to the Director of Internet Outreach." Her feeling is that its not your personal blog that’s going to do it, but she also doesn't think you should 'hide' it from your employer.

The discussion ends on a Jay Rosen note, “In the world of journalism, if you got hired by a traditional news organization, i.e., the Hartford Courant, you are able to draw from the reputation of a newspaper that has been around for decades."

He continues, "As a blogger, you start from zero. Because you have to build trust and reliability, you have to earn links. Learning how to do that from the bottom up, you learn things about trust whereas at the Courant, you inherit it automatically."

"If I were a business, I would invest in the knowledge people have gained from building the blog, because these are the people who really know something about trust. These are the people who use and write blogs. They understand intellectual integrity that they have had to build in the process of building trust.”

Bottom line? Not clear given that this session was more of a brainstorm than a discussion about creating a 'blog revenue plan.' Things that seemed to matter were "building trust and leveraging the trust we have created as a community," and determining what 'perceived value' really was, i.e., Nolan's political words versus a forum for coming up with new ideas and finding people to collaborate with to develop new products.