A bunch of panelists in this session, all moderated by Scott Fox of clickmillionaires.com. Lots of ideas on how to monetize a blog in this session. Here are some highlights:
Ron Hogan, founder of beatrice.com
He gave the “Big picture”
won’t make a lot doing a bloom blog. You can make “beer money” – small amounts of money.
Thinks that most categories are already covered, and people gravitate towards established blogs
Rita Arens – senior editor of blogher.com
charge for reading time – at blogger book club, they pay for reviews. There are over 250,000 books published each year, and all those authors are looking for attention.
Have to use disclosures – say if someone sent you the book.
Thea James – co-founder of The Book Smugglers
sweat the small stuff: they use the blogads network for ads. Mostly book ads that are tailored to their content.
also use affiliate programs like Amazon Affiliates.
Sarah Pitre – founder of Forever Young Adult
build community through social media to drive visitors and page views.
started a store – tshirts, stickers – made them a decent amount of money.
Also found a company that sponsors them. They get server space and help them build a community.
Amazon Affiliates – people feel comfortable with Amazon, and have probably used them – so it’s an accepted link. An independent bookstore like Powell’s isn’t as well known, so people might not feel as comfortable clicking that link.
Other thoughts (don’t remember who said what here):
They don’t use Google Adsense for the most part
claim that you don’t have control over content
claim that you don’t have design control
me – none of those were correct … but whatever 🙂
another panelist corrected that (thanks!)
No one’s making money through syndication (no one on stage, anyway).
If you blog for someone else (i.e., Huffington Post) – you are building an audience for someone else. If you quite and start blogging somewhere else, you won’t necessarily ba able to take that audience with you.
Attracting traffic:
Stumbleupon – can work well. Try to stand out.
We’d think about it, but the Journalists in our area do not like Bloggers (especially The Ladies) being paid anything. http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=27981
Thanks for covering our panel, David.
That was a smart group of folks with lots of useful advice.
Hey, thanks for coming to the panel!Â
To make things a little less harsh than they seem above: I absolutely think there’s still room for people to succeed with a book blog. The key is that, because there are already great book blogs for so many genres and categories, if you’re going to be as successful as them, you’re going to have to bring your best game on a regular basis, and for the long haul.
(And good point that you do have SOME control over the look and feel of Adsense strips, and that you can weed out advertisers you don’t want to associate with. But that often tends to be an after-the-fact thing, where an ad pops up, and you go and say you never want that particular product or company or political party or whatever to pop up again. With other ad blocs, though, you pre-approve each ad before it appears…)
Thanks for the added info – much appreciated. Great panel!
Thanks for covering our panel! It was nice to meet everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed Book Bloggers Conference and the bit of BEA that I saw!