Learning at Wordcamp

August 5th, 2006

I think the Monetizing Your Blog session I helped lead at Wordcamp today went pretty well, I hope everyone in the audience enjoyed it. I know I did as I also got some good suggestionsi from people in the audience about additional ways to monetize blogs. Specifically:

Kevin Burton of Tailrank suggested adding code that places obvious ads front and center on your blog to visitors who come from search engines. The theory is that because these aren’t your normal community of readers, you can be more aggressive trying to monetize them. And your normal readers don’t get mad at having obnoxious ads on your blog. This could work well, but it could also impede your ability to convert those search engine visitors into becoming part of your community of readers if they’re getting large ads front and center.

I learned more about Goodstorm and their plugin to allow bloggers to place products easily in a widget on their sidebar, and then get a cut of revenue. Goodstorm was started out of wanting to help small bloggers and social and political organizations in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “Capitalism Done Right” is their slogan, and they look to be holding to those ideals.
David Krug of Problogging.com suggested TicTap.com, a service that lets you put Amazon.com ads for relevant products on your site. David was very active in the discussion, obviously a guy who’s passionate about blog monetization!

After the discussion I talked to Greg Narain of SocialRoots who has plans and products in the works to help bloggers sell/monetize their individual posts in various ways.

Overall there’s a lot of people and companies interested in blog monetization, so I think the future is bright in this area.

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Entry Filed under: Ad Networks, Advertising, Blogging, Conferences, Ecommerce, Publishing, Web 2.0