Monetizing Blogs

There's lots of talk these days about money with blogs. Some of its information with research to back it up but some of it's just pure unobtrusively and effectively get their product placed on a blog their target audience reads.

Don't waste the blogger's time. Chances are their blog is something they do on the side and if they make any money on it it's not much at all. Wasting their time with silly requests will get you blacklisted faster than you can say "please link to my site".

The ad agencies that are able to mingle with the A-List bloggers in a specific vertical will have advertisers banging their doors down. Why? Because well respected bloggers can build trust in a single post. Trust is what gets you to purchase or keep looking when it comes to products. It's like when I read ThinkGeek. This also creates an interesting situation for ad agencies. They'll have to be much more selective with which clients they offer blog placement services to. I mean it has to be a perfect fit for the advertiser and their network of blogs and if its not then the ad agency runs the risk of losing all credibility with their A-List bloggers. Of course, paying the bloggers an exorbitant amount of money could remedy that but then the readers of the blog in question will be put off and not respect the blogger as much. Ah, the old catch 22. But if any of you remember when URLWire, that's exactly how his business began. He had contacts in the media that were in charge of web sites and knew Eric wouldn't give them any crappy press releases. Voila, a business model is born. It's just that now its happening with blogs and back when Eric started there was no such thing as a blog. I predict...

1. Ad agencies will seek out A-List bloggers who have strong relationships with other A-List bloggers to head up their blog placement departments.
2. Someone will step up and create a blog taxonomy that shows the key players in specific blog verticals. This will identify the "people to know" if you want to succeed with your blog pr campaign.
3. Large PR Firms and Ad Agencies will spin off subsidiaries dedicated to blogs to increase their relationship with bloggers and appear to be experts in blog product placement and blog pr.
4. Blogs will continue to increase their focus on specific areas whether these are niche verticals or niche subject areas.
I recently had an interesting conversation with MarketingVox and he made a statement that I can't seem to stop thinking about. He said that the ads on MarketingVox are bringing in some incredibly high conversion rates for his advertisers. More importantly, the ads on his site are reaching the point where they are becoming content. Blog Ads Becoming Content Now that's not something you hear every day so at first it might not make sense. What he meant was that because of the strong reputation MarketingVox has with ad agencies and media buyers: the ads placed on their are looked at by his audience as content. In other words, the ads are perceived almost as "this is a product you might not have known about but it's something you should know about if you're really in theknow". When any publisher can get their audience to perceive their ads as content then they've done something special. Some of Wired magazine's ads do this for technology Review magazine does it for me in the research sector. It's no different than little surfer groms getting their parents to buy an Channel Islands Quicksilver board shorts because organic dairy farmer in Vermont says about organic milk can impact the dairy industry's sales... man that's cool! Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the

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