This guest post was written by Mark Pollard of MarkPollard.net.
Let's face it, how you make money from blogging is in serious flux right now. The thing is, flux brings opportunity. If you're thinking differently enough to everybody else, chances are you can stand out. That's what this article is about. How to get you standing out in front of brands and agencies, and find new ways to make money from your blogging pedigree along the way.
Old models are struggling
It's not just “heritage media” that's trying to work it all out right now. Bloggers everywhere need to rethink their approaches:
- display advertising needs reinvention: who's it working for?
- Google just downgraded content farms
- guest posting is the new content marketing
- selling ebooks is a hit-and-miss affair for most
- affiliate marketing: how do you pick a product and make it worthwhile?
Establishing an audience and then releasing a book as your monetisation tactic is challenging when such a small percentage of books are actually profitable. So, do you make an app? Do you go Kindle? Do you put on a conference? Should your revenue come from the very content that you pour your soul into or from something else, like a better salary, fees for speaking at events or a new business venture?
Just where will the money come from?
As a blogger, you need to make some serious strategic calls on where to put your focus because content-making is heavy going.
Why listen to me?
I work in advertising. It took me a long time to be able to say that. It's not something I identify with—”advertising,” that is. I'm in it to disrupt it for the better. I've been publishing content online since around 1997, since the days of Angelfire, Tripod, and Geocities; since the client request of "Can we have an animated .gif on our homepage?" To which one would reply: "I'm not sure the modems...
