Bloggers, Sell Your Content – A Strategy for This Year and Beyond
Bloggers need to adjust their strategy right now, if they want to survive during recession. Those who have been adopting this new direction will not only make it, their blogs will also grow while others plummet.
Recently, PubMatic released the widely talked about AdPrice Index Report for the fourth quarter of 2008.
The takeaways didn’t surprise me at all, but still bloggers should be aware of today’s conditions and respond accordingly.
To quote one of the takeaways:
All sizes of websites (small, medium, and large) were down dramatically from Q4 2007; small, medium, and large sites dropped 52%, 23%, and 54%, respectively, from the previous year.
Does this mean you have to work twice as hard to maintain the level of your income this year?
That certainly is an option, but there should be a better way.
If you look around, everywhere you’ll see that bloggers build their business around selling ad spots. No, there is nothing wrong with that.
What’s faulty is that often it is the only model.
The Business of Selling Ad Spots
Let me get this straight upfront. Online moguls are building their fortunes online with nothing but content, eyeballs and ads.
For blogs, rarely this is a feasible model though, especially when you are still struggling to build traffic.
On average, I seldom find blogs that have more than 3-7 page views per visit. If you consider that traffic and page views are a determining factor for this business model, it is just common sense that you either have to pump up your traffic level and page views.
Generally there is not much you can do with page views per visit. Visitors just will not spend hours reading every page on your blog or site. Well, perhaps they will if your content is engaging, but let’s stick with the average for now.
Unless you run a dating site like plentyoffish.com, page views are less likely to increase tremendously. People interested in dating would like to browse as much people as possible, hence the insane amount of page views per visitor. With 70 million visitors and 1.7 billion page views, every visitor was viewing about 25 pages.
Even with that, POF is just scratching the surface. According to Inc.com, POF booked revenue of $10 million for 2008 while Match.com with one fourth the traffic earned $350 million in revenue. Obviously the business model is different (free vs. paid) but that’s exactly the point!
Suddenly ad selling model sounds like a bad idea. At least it takes a lot of hard work to grow your business this way, especially if ad prices continue to drop.
This is a simple observation but it’s enough to illustrate the point I want to convey in this post. To prove that my observation is correct, Markus of POF starts looking elsewhere for other revenue sources, including charging premium membership fees.
What Are Your Options?
I mentioned above about driving more traffic and optimizing your blog to increase page views per visitor.
That should be in every blogger’s agenda, i.e. claiming a larger share of the market. Refer to my previous article on blog promotion and blog seo for a few ideas.
You have another option though. As a blogger, you are already a content producer. Creating more content should not be too hard. This year and beyond, selling premium content will become even more important strategy.
One of the marketing principles that I consistently teach is content marketing. Instead of interrupting your prospects with salesy messages, you actually provide them with valuable and educational content to help them make the right buying decision.
You see, people already appreciate the value of information. Billions are spent every year online and offline to buy any sort of information. Just to give you an idea, e-book sales in Amazon, for instance, is going to hit $2.5 billion in 2012.
Now is the time to start expanding further into building useful media. You already do it with your blog, now that your audience wants more, what’s next?
Hint: It is also possible to repurpose your existing content. There is more than one way to do it.
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