Why the Free model fails for bloggers
Most bloggers churn out free content day and night for very little reward. Others develop innovative strategies such as selling consulting, ebooks, forum access and even products. Which model is best?
Venture capital funded sites don’t need to make money selling advertising or ebooks. They make their money by attracting as many users as possible before selling the service to a bigger company. Essentially this is what bloggers do -they attract as many readers as possible but then they never seem to sell to a bigger company. Of course there are exceptions such as Weblogs Inc but the vast majority of blogs just keep getting bigger and bigger without ever being sold. Consider a VC company normally looks for an exit strategy within 2 to 5 years and it might be time you started thinking about either making some money from your blog or selling it.
Sites that have successful premium features are few and far between. Selling advertising on a blog isn’t worth it until you have a huge amount of traffic/readers because the going rates seem to be so low that you need to plaster your site with ads just to cover your monthly living costs.
Only the biggest blogs can make a go of selling premium features but those that do are going to be 10x more valuable in 12 months than bloggers that just keep on blogging. Imagine how much more money a site like Gizmodo could make if it had its own on-site gadget store?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Hi Patrick
This is an interesting post and got me thinking about the nature of blogging. Obviously there’s more value to blogging than just making money. The process of sharing or learning from new information has a worth all of its own. I agree that not all blogs make the most of their money-making opportunities, but that’s certainly no reason not to blog.
Blogging is fun and rewarding on many levels, and if you can make some extra cash from your efforts on the side – then all the better for it. Besides, if you offer consulting services and your blog complements this, (like I do), you can attract new clients and create good will and credibility where a static website cannot. I may be naive, but I like to think of blogging as a kind of positive self fulfilling prophecy. What goes around comes around – good will breeds more good will. Isn’t that the basis of all business networking, ever since the age of barter?
What’s with the moody referer script? The one that shows the message about “We’re writing a post about your site” or something like that. I like it, but would probably piss a few people off.
Duane.
It’s just an experiment. Not decided whether it will stay or not yet.
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