If you support a cause that goes beyond the mere reporting of news in your areas of interest, why not consider asking your readers for support?
People like to take a stand for the people whom they think can make a difference, so why not use this strategy to finance some of your effective communication campaigns? PayPal Donations, Amazon's Honor System and BitPass all offer a simple way to add a snippet of code to your site to make it easy for people to donate.
Depending on the system adopted, you may opt to receive money in euros, U.S. dollars, Japanese yen, pounds sterling and other currencies.
If all of the above fails:
a) Join a publishing network
If you are just starting up with your blog or small news site — and need either more traffic, exposure or experience before you feel you can do any of the above on your own — then joining a group blog may work for you.
Metafilter, Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome Channels, Blogcritics, WikiNews, Blogit or any of these group blogs, if not at my own MasterNewMedia, MasterViews and Kolabora.com, where I am always looking for additional contributors.
Working in a group blog can ease the pressure of having to post on a daily basis, gives you greater exposure in less time and exposes you and your ideas to an existing community of interested readers and other writers.
In some cases, like at Weblogs Inc., Creative Weblogging, Squidoo and elsewhere, contributing bloggers are also paid a share of the advertising revenue their blog generates.
Another great alternative is to look into the creation of local news sites and Get Local News has a smart idea ready to be picked up.
b) Blog your best without worrying about making money in any direct way. Money comes as a consequence of your extra exposure and visibility. Blogging creates extra income by allowing you to enter in close contact with relevant people in your areas of interest, and by facilitating exchange and contact with prospective customers through your online presence.
Simply blogging with no strings attached increases your credibility and authority in the field and earns you extra income when you are called to give advice. Having a blog to showcase your ability to review, explore or analyze issues and products is the best way to market yourself and to provide a living showcase of your talents and abilities.
Listen:
Making Money - session from Bloggercon III
Doc Searls leads the Making Money session at Bloggercon III. Audio from IT Conversations. [runtime: 01:24:31, 38.7Mb, recorded 2004-11-06]
True Voice: The Business of Blogging
Session hosted by Stowe Boyd at the Blog Business Summit in Seattle on January 24, 2005, with Robert Scoble and Get Real contributor Greg Narian.
Read:
Make Money off Your Blog
The Washington Post - January 30, 2005
The Blogs' Long Tail: Blogs And RSS Profit Potential
All of the above are non-exclusive strategies that can be used in parallel with other activities to create multiple income streams for bloggers, news sites and other content-focused online resources.
A few guiding principles have stood out from my own experience in the search for creating multiple income streams for an independent online publisher, blogger or small news site:
- Relevance, Value
People want to see relevant information. Related to the main subject. If they like what they find, what better opportunity to give them more of what they want? Make your readers kings and queens at your site! The products and services a publisher selects should fit the editorial line of the blog/site as much as possible; this ensures a true continuum between articles and promotional messages. - Complementary
The additional ad or sponsorship information has to bring in value to the overall content. Selling prestigious and prominent content space for money without considering the relevance of the sponsoring firm to the sponsored content is a wasted opportunity for both sides. Given that no one enjoys being distracted by brand x or product z when trying to find something unrelated — why not leverage this natural and reasonable defense mechanism and match sponsors to relevant events and content spaces? Why not allow sponsors to provide extra value to the content/event offered by providing access/integration to premium-quality complementary resources? - Visual unobtrusiveness - Non-interruptiveness
Sponsorships, text-based ads, promotional messages don't have to scream for visual attention. If they complement and enrich what is already out there, they only need to be properly and intelligently juxtaposed, formatted and legible, scannable and printable, just like any other content on their hosting page. A site's web developer should have full control over the layout and positioning of these items by using CSS. - Publisher Control
The publisher must be king (or queen)
This is what I think. It is the publisher and not the advertising agency or some obscure algorithm that should control which ads show up on my web pages. It should be the publisher who takes the role of information director in full; not just in respect to what is written, but also about what is promoted. Separation of editorial and marketing offices is not an advantage in the type of new-media universe I envision.Services like Blogads and the text-link clearinghouses facilitate this by allowing publishers to maintain full control of who are going to be their advertisers.
Google AdSense provides some control of which ads are displayed by letting publishers filter out up to 200 advertisers that may not complement their content. Ideally, as I have advocated, a publisher should be able to select from a large inventory of relevant and complementary advertisers in the ads he wants to carry.
- Endorsement
A publisher should also in some way endorse the products she advertises as a way to provide value to her readers with such "recommendations." I have repeatedly refused to be a well-paid affiliate reseller or advertiser for products that I didn't believe in, while many times I have offered my space for free to companies and products which I thought deserved my readers' attention (proof is available, if needed). A sense of personal ethics and editorial coherence is all it takes.
Which monetization strategy to use?
Diversify income streams
Don't bet all your money on one horse and think like a coffee shop where money is made with many small transactions across a good variety of (generally low-cost) related offerings.
What I am learning is that you can make money by creating and cultivating multiple, small, income streams. Relying on one big source of income is always dangerous. If that resource disappears, so does your ability to survive.
