Monetizing A Blog
I’ve been looking at ways to monetize Blogs in order to turn them into financially viable business model. I bring this up, partly, because more and more newspapers, as reported in the Newspaper Death Watch Blog, are in financial trouble, going out of business or, like the Seattle PI are becoming online only entities.
As this trend continues more and more journalists are teaming up to create hyper-local Blogs that give them the opportunity to continue to in their chosen profession. The challenge they face is monetizing the Blog in order to provide the means to run the Blog, while also paying themselves a salary.
Some Blogs, like the West Seattle Blog, have been able to create income through advertising. Patrick Sand, who heads the marketing team, says he researched where most businesses in west Seattle bought advertising, researched their rate cards and then came up with a rate card he thought might work.
He also said that he didn’t start marketing until his “unique visits” reached 3,000 a day. At that point there was enough traffic to justify meeting with local businesses to convince them that they would get a reasonable return on investment. (His rates range from $100 to $300 a month, depending on placement).
The lifeblood of a Blog is traffic, which can be developed in several ways:
- Creating associations with major area Blogs (like the Seattle PI), drawing on the million or so unique visitors they produce each month.
- Creating a Twitter every the Blog is updated.
- Creating an advertising account on Stumbleupon, taking advantage of its 7 million users each month. This can be expensive, but the return in traffic is well-worth it.
- Be visible at local events, trade shows, theater events, etc.
- Be a celebrity (journalists already enjoy this status to some degree) of a kind by becoming involved in trade associations, leads groups and business organizations.
The key: Treat the Blog like a business and market it constantly. This has been the real secret to business success for hundreds of years. Direct mail techniques still work well, all that has changed is the technology behind the product.
© Copyright 2009 Moody Publishing Co.
3 Dots…A New Regular Column
By Ray Littrell
I’m starting a regular column called 3 Dots. Its origins were made famous by the late Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle and the equally late Emmett Watson of the Seattle PI and the Seattle Times. Their columns were made up of little tidbits of news separated by three dots. I have no illusions about recreating the art form, but who knows…Our Australian correspondent Craig Boehman is returning to the Northwest on Tuesday. He spent three months there exploring the land down under. We’ll have some new assignments for him when he returns…We spent the day at the Capital City Public Market, yesterday, in Boise. We went there after our Saturday TalkShoe Podcast and, like my friend Everett, munched my way from one end of the market to the other…Speaking of the Podcast, we did it roving reporter style. I was in my home studio and Everett was “on the ground”, so to speak. I had forgotten how much fun it is to do radio-style remotes. Gotta do more of those…
© Copyright 2009 Moody Publishing Co
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day
By Ray Littrell –
Happy Saint Patricks Day! B’gosh and B’gorra (does anyone know what that really means)?
In other interesting developments, the Seattle PI has printed its final edition. As of today, the PI is an online only newspaper. It is the largest daily newspaper to go online only and according to Executive Producer Michelle Nicolosi it will be a new adventure in journalism.
In some ways I will miss the print edition, but in today’s fast paced world of information readers want their information immediately and don’t want to wait for the morning or afternoon edition. If a story is breaking they want to know about it – my gosh, we’re almost back to the heady days of the 1920′s and 30′s when editors would yell “stop the presses!” for a newsworthy scoop.
I really don’t think it will go that far, but I do anticipate getting the latest email updates and news flashes on my Blackberry. We are entering a new world of journalism. It will be interesting to see how many advertisers follow this new trend – if memory serves, the Seattle PI website gets over a million unique hits a month, out stripping its print cousin, which only had a daily circulation of around 200,000 (give or take).
Copyright © 2009 Moody Publishing Co., LLC
Seattle PI Going Away?
By Ray Littrell
Yep. That's still me.
I grew up getting the Seattle PI delivered to my house almost every day. I especially loved the Sunday edition with all the comics. There was something comforting about sitting back and reading about the news of the day. I still have some old, yellowed editions about the significant events in my life – the Kennedy assassination, and the first man on the moon.
Now, its entirely possible that the print edition may be going away (along with the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle). I understand why. Its no longer economical to print a newspaper and distribute it. The average cost to print a single copy is about $10. The daily circulation for the PI hovers around 127,000 a day, which means it costs about $1,270,000 just to print a single daily edition. Add in staff salaries, distribution costs and overhead and, you know the old saying – a million here and a million there and pretty soon you run into real money.
The Seattle PI may yet survive, but as an online only entity with a reduced staff. The days of the hard driving, hard drinking, crusty journalists are long gone. Is this better? I don’t really know. I just know that reading the Sunday comics by the light of my Blackberry just doesn’t give me the same warm, fuzzy feeling.
I do wonder, however, if there is a hard driving, hard drinking crusty blogger out there somewhere trying to carry on the tradition.
SIDE NOTE: I had a bet with one of those hard driving, hard drinking, crusty journalists that I could out write him. I had a state of the art IBM Selectric and could pound out about 80 words a minute using all my fingers. He insisted on using a 1912 Royal typewriter – the kind where you almost had to slam the keys with a hammer to make them work. He also used the two-finger hunt and peck method. I lost by about 20 words a minute.
Copyright © 2009 Moody Publishing Co., LLC
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